Janeen Arnold Costa

The Mountain Man Myth: A Contemporary Consuming Fantasy

Modern mountain men form temporary consumption enclaves focused on reenacting the 1825-40 fur-trade rendezvous held in the Rocky Mountain American West. In the process, they become part of a transient consumption community predicated on invented traditions and the invocation of a mythic past to create and consume fantastic time and space. Based on ethnographic methods employed over a five-year period, we develop a historically contextualized understanding of this consumption fantasy. We analyze how modern mountain men enact fantasy experiences of a primitive alternative reality within the bounded ritual space of the modern rendezvous. We conclude that participation in this fantasy world offers a special opportunity for transformative play, while reinforcing a romanticized set of beliefs.

Paradisal discourse: A critical analysis of marketing and consuming Hawaii

The marketing of certain tourist destinations can be analyzed as discourse that conveys meaning to the consumer and to the consumed. This discourse, which I refer to hereafter as paradisal discourse, is a combination of Orientalism, travel writing, discourse of the Primitive, and diverse forms of Otherness. This paper begins with an exploration of discourse as a tool of knowledge and of power, illustrated through a detailed assessment of Saids Orientalism and other relevant works and concepts. The discourses of “Orientalism,” “primitivism” and travel writing are likened to the paradisal discourse found in the marketing of certain types of tourist destinations. The second section of the paper presents an historical and cultural analysis of the concept of paradise in Western society, summarizing the elements which, over time, have come to form this distinctive discourse. The third section of the paper assesses the way in which this discourse forms the framework by which a specific tropical paradise, Hawaii...

Marketing in a multicultural world : ethnicity, nationalism, and cultural identity

PART ONE: GENERAL ISSUES OF CULTURAL IDENTITY AND MARKETING Perspectives on Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cultural Identity - Janeen Arnold Costa and Gary J Bamossy Ethnoconsumerism - Alladi Venkatesh A New Paradigm to Study Cultural and Cross-Cultural Consumer Behavior Marketing and the Redefinition of Ethnicity - Dominique Bouchet Consumer Culture or Culture Consumed? - A Fuat Firat Interest Groups with a Noble Face - Eugeen Roosens PART TWO: CASE STUDIES AND APPLICATIONS The Cultural Past in the Present - Annamma Joy et al The Meaning of Home and Objects in the Homes of Working-Class Italian Immigrants in Montreal Ethnicity and Consumption in Romania - Russell W Belk and Magda Paun McDoner - Ayse S Caglar Doner Kebap and the Social Positioning Struggle of German Turks Blurred Borders - Thomas M Wilson Local and Global Consumer Culture in Northern Ireland Marketing Developing Society Crafts - Kunal Basu A Framework for Analysis and Change Culture and the Marketing of Culture - Janeen Arnold Costa and Gary J Bamossy The Museum Retail Context

International Tourism: An Assessment and Overview

Marketers typically hail tourism as an economic panacea. This article provides an assessment of international tourism, with specific emphasis on the Third World. The analysis is based on a variant of world-systems theory in which the relative power imbalance between the developed core countries and less-developed periphery countries of the world brings about the dependence and de facto exploitation of the latter We conclude with a summary of the positive and negative effects of tourism on host cultures and a call for more careful and balanced consideration of these aspects of tourism, in both planning by developing nations and tourism research by marketing academics.

Underdeveloped Other in country-of-origin theory and practices

Consumers and marketers employ extant sociocultural discourses to give meaning to the products they consume or sell. In this paper, we present data and analyses that illustrate the manner by which American consumers and marketers draw upon one such sociocultural discourse, development, in the context of “craft” objects. Beyond the focus on discourse, however, our intent is to apply a post-development perspective to the Otherness inherent in country-of-origin (COO) theory and practices. We critique the COO framework and see it as a ramification of, and further creator of, economic difference and hierarchy.

Empowerment and Exploitation: Gendered Production and Consumption in Rural Greece

Globalization alters socio‐cultural patterns in many developing societies. For example, men and women typically work in new ways, sometimes to fulfill changing consumption desires. Women in developing societies who bring money or valued purchases into the home may experience improved status, particularly in a globalizing economy where increased income enables the purchase of new consumer goods. However, as suggested in this video, women in developing societies often find themselves still fulfilling traditional roles in both production and consumption. Women in the Greek island village of Sami face an increasingly complex situation as they undertake expanded economic roles through tourism while simultaneously responding to societal expectations of propriety and gendered subordination. This video portrays the changing socioeconomic landscape of Greek women in the context of tourism.

Retailing Culture: Cross-Cultural Theoretical and Empirical Issues in Museum Gift Shop Practices

This research has two separate but related goals. First, a review of the retailing literature over the past decade regarding research which focuses on cross-cultural and ethnic topics will be done to establish the dominant pseudoetic perspective which is characteristic of that body of knowledge. Within this research perspective, researchers tend to choose topics and measures that have been studied, operationalized, and validated in one country, and to replicate the study in another cultural context Cross-cultural replication has its own methodological issues (Douglas and Craig, 1997; Costa and Bamossy, 1995; Douglas, Morrin and Craig, 1994; van Raaij, 1978), but the main difficulty with these studies is the presumption often made regarding the relevance or centrality of the construct or theory in another cultural context The paper then goes on to introduce the theoretical notion of ethnoconsumerism (Venkatesh, 1995) as a more appropriate and relevant perspective for carrying out cross-cultural research in consumer behavior and marketing. Ethnoconsumerism is the study of consumption from the point of view of the social group or cultural group that is the subject of study, and it advocates examining behavior on the basis of the cultural realities of that group. This notion goes beyond the emic perspective, which refers to taking the subject’s point of view in strategies of data collection. Ethnoconsumerism argues for the deeper development of knowledge constructed from the culture’s point of view with respect to all aspects of production and consumption. In terms of research, this perspective pleads for more cultural insights at the conceptualization stage of the study from the culture’s point of view, as well as in matters of sampling, methods of data collection, and interpretive issues of data analysis.