Lisa Peñaloza

Atravesando Fronteras/Border Crossings: A Critical Ethnographic Exploration of the Consumer Acculturation of Mexican Immigrants

This article critically examines the consumption experiences of Mexican immigrants in the United States. An empirical model of Mexican immigrant consumer acculturation is derived that consists of movement, translation, and adaptation processes leading to outcomes of assimilation, maintenance, resistance, and segregation. By drawing attention to the ways in which international movements of people, companies, and products intersect within existing subcultural relations, this research provides a more satisfactory account of the complex dynamic processes through which Mexican immigrants adapt to the consumer environment in the United States. Copyright 1994 by the University of Chicago.

Further evolving the new dominant logic of marketing: from services to the social construction of markets

This work calls for a paradigmatic shift from marketing techniques and concepts to markets as a social construction. Our argument is composed of six facets: (1) revisioning the creation of value in markets to include meanings; (2) reconsidering the efficacy and limits of working from the perspective of the marketer; (3) incorporating more conscientiously consumer subjectivity and agency; (4) reformulating the nature of relationships between consumers and marketers from individuals to social beings inhabiting communities; (5) addressing more explicitly cultural differences in the form of subcultures within nations and international differences between nations in level of development; and finally, (6) exhorting the importance of marketer reflexivity. In charting these key transitions and tracing them to particular academic communities over time, we work towards a more radically transformative marketing practice that is socio-historically situated, culturally sensitive, and organic, in accounting for and adapting to contemporary global, technological, and socio-cultural developments.

The nature and processes of market co-creation in triple bottom line firms: Leveraging insights from consumer culture theory and service dominant logic

This paper contributes theoretical and practical understandings regarding market co-creation by cross-fertilizing insights from consumer culture theory (CCT) on the production of meaning with service-dominant logic (SDL) on the co-creation of value. Examining nine firms acting to achieve environmental, social, and economic sustainability, we suggest that cultural meanings are an important part of the value elaborated in SDL, and conversely that such value informs the meanings emphasized in CCT. Findings demonstrate three levels of meaning and value negotiated by multiple actors in markets: cosmological principles, norms and standards, and individual judgments and interpretations. Discussion deciphers key overlaps and distinctions between meaning and value, operand and operant resources, and economic, social and environmental domains as they converge in market co-creation. Contributions theorize asymmetries of value and meaning in the intricate interweaving of social and market domains characterizing contemporary market co-creation. We close with practical implications for consumers, firms, and public policy.

Living U.S. Capitalism: The Normalization of Credit/Debt

This research develops a theoretical account of cultural meanings as integral mechanisms in the normalization of credit/debt. Analysis derives these meanings from the credit/debt discourses and practices of 27 white middle-class consumers in the United States and tracks their negotiation in patterns and trajectories in social and market domains. Discussion elaborates the ways informants normalize credit/ debt in transposing their categories, in improvising meaning combinations, and in suturing the meaning patterns to particular subject positions in constituting themselves as consumers. Theoretical contributions (1) distinguish consumers’ collaborative production of cultural meanings with friends, family, and others in the social domain and with financial agents and institutions in the market domain and (2) document the productive capacities of these meanings in patterns and trajectories in configuring people as consuming subjects. Implications situate such cultural reproduction processes in the United States in discussing how the national legacy of abundance informs the normalization of credit/debt.

Who Are You Calling Old? Negotiating Old Age Identity in the Elderly Consumption Ensemble

As the elderly population increases, more family, friends, and paid service providers assist them with consumption activities in a group that the authors conceptualize as the elderly consumption ensemble (ECE). Interviews with members of eight ECEs demonstrate consumption in advanced age as a group phenomenon rather than an individual one, provide an account of how the practices and discourses of the ECEs division of consumption serve as a means of knowing someone is old and positioning him/her as an old subject, and detail strategies through which older consumers negotiate their age identity when it conflicts with this positioning. This research (1) illuminates ways in which consumer agency in identity construction is constrained in interpersonal interactions, (2) demonstrates old identity as implicated in consumption in relation to and distinction from physiological ability and old subject position, and (3) updates the final stages of the Family Life Cycle model.

Mapping the Play of Organizational Identity in Foreign Market Adaptation.

While organizational identity can be a powerful tool for mobilizing and directing organizational members, the authors’ findings demonstrate that it can also constrain the process of foreign market adaptation. Drawing from extensive ethnographic fieldwork in India, where they followed several multinational companies, they show how well-entrenched and enduring identities can obstruct the learning and strategic adjustments that are necessary to appeal to consumers in a new market environment. By explaining how organizational identity comes into play as a frame of reference and guiding principle, orienting managers in their efforts to preserve the character of their firm as it expands and globalizes, this research offers new insights into foreign market learning and adaptation. The authors extend this analysis to provide valuable recommendations to managers for making organizational identity a more explicit component of global marketing strategy.

The discourses of marketing and development: towards 'critical transformative marketing research'

Abstract In order to understand the connection between development, marketing and transformative consumer research (TCR), with its attendant interest in promoting human well-being, this article begins by charting the links between US ‘exceptionalism’, ‘Manifest Destiny’ and modernisation theory, demonstrating the confluence of US perspectives and experiences in articulations and understandings of the contributions of marketing practice and consumer research to society. Our narrative subsequently engages with the rise of social marketing (1960s-) and finally TCR (2006-). We move beyond calls for an appreciation of paradigm plurality to encourage TCR scholars to adopt a multiple paradigmatic approach as part of a three-pronged strategy that encompasses an initial ‘provisional moral agnosticism’. As part of this stance, we argue that scholars should value the insights provided by multiple paradigms, turning each paradigmatic lens sequentially on to the issue of the relationship between marketing, development and consumer well-being. After having scrutinised these issues using multiple perspectives, scholars can then decide whether to pursue TCR-led activism. The final strategy that we identify is termed ‘critical intolerance’.

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.

Value, values, symbols and outcomes

This essay provides an overview of the contemporary academic discourse and challenges regarding the role of values and valuations in service. Situating service within the larger socio-economic networks brings to the fore the plurality of values and the recognition that value creation is (both) a social and market activity. This raises important questions regarding the role of symbols, the nature of outcomes and the processes of valuing as they come together in markets, in organizations and in other social domains. The essay then prioritizes a number of interdisciplinary research opportunities that relate market exchange to social exchange, emphasize the collaborative nature of value creation among particular agents, and examine the impacts of such value co-creation across specific market, social and environmental domains.

Developing Markets? Understanding the Role of Markets and Development at the Intersection of Macromarketing and Transformative Consumer Research (TCR)

Situated at the intersection of markets and development, this commentary aims to promote a cross-fertilization of macromarketing and Transformative Consumer Research (TCR) that directs attention to the sociocultural context and situational embeddedness of consumer experience and well-being, while acknowledging complex, systemic interdependencies between markets, marketing, and society. Based on a critical review of the meaning of development and an interrogation of various developmental discourses, the authors develop a conceptual framework that brings together issues of development, well-being, and social inequalities. We suggest that these issues are better understood and addressed when examined via grounded investigations of the role of markets in shaping the management of resources, consumer agency, power inequalities and ethics. The use of markets as units of analysis may lead to further cross-fertilizations of TCR and macromarketing and to more comprehensive theorizing and transformational impact. Two empirical cases are provided to illustrate our framework.