Consumption Markets & Culture is pleased to announce its Best Paper award for articles published in 2011:
Marius K. Luedicke (2011): Consumer acculturation theory: (crossing) conceptual boundaries, Consumption Markets & Culture, 14:3, 223-244
Consumer acculturation theorists have developed an insightful body of literature about the ways in which migrants adapt to foreign cultures via consumption. The present paper revisits 14 key studies from this field to highlight its most important contributions, critique its conceptual boundaries, and present cases of conceptual border crossings that indicate an emerging need for a broader conceptualization of the phenomenon. The paper closes by introducing a model that frames consumer acculturation as a complex system of recursive socio-cultural adaptation, and discusses its implications for future research.
We also awarded an Honorable Mention:
Gilles Marion and Agnes Nairn (2011) ‘“We make the shoes, you make the story” Teenage girls’ experiences of fashion: Bricolage, tactics and narrative identity’, Consumption Markets & Culture, 14: 1, 29-56
This article explores the ways that French teenage girls use fashion discourse to construct their evolving identity from their recently left childhood to their future as fully grown women. Verbatim texts of phenomenological discussions concerning clothing, accessories, make-up and fashion are interpreted using the concepts of bricolage (Lévi-Strauss), tactics (Certeau) and narrative identity (Ricoeur). The findings resonate with Thompson and Haytko’s portrayal of a dialogical relationship between consumers and a system of countervailing fashion meanings and with Murray’s exposition of a dialectical and discursive tension between sign-experimentation and sign-domination. But beyond this we elucidate the process by which teenagers also acquire, from personal social milieu, skills and tactics through which they toy with preconstrained sartorial symbolism to construct the plot line of their own lives which, in turn, reflects their past, defines their present self and presages their future.
Eric Arnould, University of Bath, UK, Giana Eckhardt, Suffolk University, USA, and Christina Goulding, Keele University, UK served as judges for this award.
These papers are available for ‘free’ download for a limited time.
See journal homepage: http://www.tandf.co.uk/
