Gokcen Coskuner-Balli

The Status Costs of Subordinate Cultural Capital: At-Home Fathers' Collective Pursuit of Cultural Legitimacy through Capitalizing Consumption Practices

Consumer researchers have primarily conceptualized cultural capital either as an endowed stock of resources that tend to reproduce socioeconomic hierarchies among consumer collectivities or as constellations of knowledge and skill that consumers acquire by making identity investments in a given consumption field. These studies, however, have given scant attention to the theoretical distinction between dominant and subordinate forms of cultural capital, with the latter affording comparatively lower conversion rates for economic, social, and symbolic capital. To redress this oversight, this article presents a multimethod investigation of middle-class men who are performing the emergent gender role of at-home fatherhood. Our analysis profiles and theoretically elaborates upon a set of capitalizing consumption practices through which at-home fathers seek to enhance the conversion rates of their acquisitions of domesticated (and subordinate) cultural capital and to build greater cultural legitimacy for their marginalized gender identity.

Navigating the Institutional Logics of Markets: Implications for Strategic Brand Management

Adopting an institutional theoretic framework, this article examines the evolution and competitive dynamics of markets composed of multiple practices, beliefs, and rule systems. The 30-year historical analysis of the U.S. yoga market illustrates the coexistence of spirituality, medical, fitness, and commercial logics. Using data gathered through archival sources, netnography, in-depth interviews, and participant observations, the authors link shifting emphases on institutional logics and their sustenance to institutional entrepreneurs’ accumulation and transmission of cultural capital, strategies to legitimize plural logics, distinct branding practices, and contestations among the pervading logics. The study offers a managerial framework for managing conflicting demands of logics, conveying brand legitimacy, and creating a coherent brand identity in plural logic markets; in addition, it develops a theoretical account of links between institutional logics, competitive dynamics, and market evolution.

Market practices of legitimization Insights from Consumer Culture Theory

This article presents a reflexive discussion as to how new academic communities can legitimize their field of work. I integrate Abbott’s theory of professionalism and the body of consumer research on brand communities, subcultures and microculture consumption practices to propose a market-based theory of legitimacy. I identify four modes of practices that allow academic communities to break through the boundaries of cultural and social legitimacy: (1) mobilizing cultural myths, (2) code switching, (3) creating market resources and (4) community building. To illustrate, I examine the rise of the subfield of Consumer Culture Theory within consumer behavior.

Legitimation of hybrid cultural products: The case of American Yoga

Cultural hybridization indicates mixing, intermingling, and fusion of cultures that the globalized world enables and produces. Adopting an institutional theoretic framework, this article examines how hybrid cultural products strive for legitimacy in the context of yoga. We conceptualize American Yoga as a hybrid cultural practice that emerged as yoga was reconfigured through dialectical exchanges between India and the West and acquired new forms and meanings in the geographical and cultural sphere of the United States. The findings reveal a series of reterritorialization strategies through which market actors seek to advance moral, cognitive, and pragmatic legitimacy for American Yoga, accompanied by identity, ownership, and authenticity centered tensions. We illustrate reterritorialization as a legitimation process mediated by strategies of market actors and identify unique outcomes in legitimation of hybrid cultural products drawing from polar perspectives on hybridization.

Performative structures, American exceptionalism, and the legitimation of free trade:

In this article, we explore how free trade is performed and maintained as a dominant market institution. Drawing from the notion of performativity in sociology of economics and rhetorical analysis in institutional research, we explore the maintenance of free trade as a state-mediated legitimation process. Our analysis of the US presidents’ speeches over the last 30 years reveal that American presidents recurrently adopted three broad rhetorical strategies to enable free trade. Through ontological strategies, they emphasized how the properties of free trade should be; through cosmological strategies, they conveyed the inevitability of globalization and integration with the global markets, and finally through value-based strategies, they linked free trade to the cultural template of American exceptionalism. Our findings extend the previous marketing literature on market creation by illustrating the rhetorical strategies to perform markets and the role of a powerful political actor in enabling and maintaining a market institution.