Ayla Ozhan Dedeoglu

Consumer ethnicity three decades after: a TCR agenda

Abstract Research into consumer ethnicity is a vital discipline that has substantially evolved in the past three decades. This conceptual article critically reviews its immense literature and examines the extent to which it has provided extensive contributions not only for the understanding of ethnicity in the marketplace but also for personal/collective well-being. We identify two gaps accounting for scant transformative contributions. First, today social transformations and conceptual sophistications require a revised vocabulary to provide adequate interpretive lenses. Second, extant work has mostly addressed the subjective level of ethnic identity projects but left untended the meso/macro forces affecting ethnicity (de)construction and personal/collective well-being. Our contribution stems from filling both gaps and providing a theory of ethnicity (de)construction that includes migrants as well as non-migrants.

Rethinking religion in the context of ethnicity and well-being

Identifying the “religion–ethnicity–well-being” nexus as an understudied topic in marketing and consumer behavior research, we propose three main trajectories for future research: Firstly, given the politics of religions, there is a need for studying societies that suffer from and are affected by religioethnic tensions and also different types of risks that threaten people’s well-being in such contexts. Secondly, future research should investigate how and why markets may generate and mediate religioethnic prejudices and antagonism that put society’s well-being at risk. Thirdly, with the upsurge of transcultural alternative religiosities/spiritualities, researchers should examine how through the processes of religious hybridization and hybrid consumption people change their existing consumption patterns and how alternative religiosities/spiritualities influence their sense of well-being, particularly in contexts where religious shifts are contested.

Consumer Guilt: A Model of Its Antecedents and Consequences

Consumer guilt is a feeling which results from one’s recognition of having failed to achieve or violated internalized personal or social moral standards in the context of consumption. The present study aims to contribute to current knowledge of consumer guilt by offering a comprehensive structural model of consumer guilt, its antecedents and consequences. The findings reveal that regret due to action, regret due to inaction, transgression of norms, self-control failures and indulgence in hedonic desires are the antecedents that significantly explain consumer guilt. Among coping responses studied in literature, only the ones that relate to reparative action, psychological repair work and justification significantly loaded to coping responses factor. Comparison of respondents with high and low guilt scores revealed significant differences.

A Room of Their Own Oda as a Consumptionscape between Traditional and Modern

Studies of Turkish consumption reveal a unique character that rests on local interpretations of modernity and patterns of hybridization between local and global and traditional and modern. This research explores how deep-rooted cultural continuities manifest themselves in collective identity and how men from urban Urfa (a southeastern Turkish city) redefine the boundaries between public and private, and traditional and modern, through ritualistic leisure consumption within the context of the oda (room). The findings of the present socio-historically grounded analysis of urban oda communities and their consumption practices reveal that men from urban Urfa, as modern subjects, appropriated and re-contextualized traditional practices. Ritualistic consumption practices of or in urban odas reveal continuities with traditional ahi-order, selamlik and sira night practices. The findings also show that the oda, as a private and mahrem sphere, functions in accordance with the Habermasian model of the bourgeois public sphere, where politics and society meet.

Consumer Responses to Swine Flu (H1N1) Threat and Fear Arousing Communications: The Case of Turkey

The present study aims to study the effect of consumers’ perceptions of H1N1 threat and of succeeding fear emotions on their coping responses and intentions to be vaccinated in a naturalistic setting. The findings reveal that increasing levels of threat appraisal significantly increases fear emotions. Coping appraisal intervenes between fear emotions and coping responses. The results support the propositions of the Ordered Protection Motivation Model (OPMM). Information source, source credibility, rumors, public media news, reference groups’ preferences and religious attitudes have moderating influences as well.