Consumption discourses as positioning strategies for international migrants

In today’s globalised world, everyday life becomes increasingly “liquid” - changing and fragile - as individuals continuously adapt their lifestyle and behaviour to global influences (Bauman 2000). To provide a general framework for understanding this world, Appadurai (1996) introduces five “dimensions” of global flows in his seminal work Modernity At Large: ethnoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, ideoscapes, and technoscapes. One of them, the ethnoscapes, refers to the increased mobility of individuals and peoples, impacting their cultural affiliations and social networks. The focus of this thesis lies on international, cross-border migrants, the primary representatives of these uprooted individuals. Studying migrants’ consumption behaviour provides a better understanding of the issues faced by all members of liquid life in terms of consumption behaviour, whether they are migrants or not, by referring to its most extreme cases. The present dissertation addresses migrant consumer research through an original angle. It suggests that international migrants position themselves in the global mediascapes of cosmopolitanism and transmigrant communities by activating different consumption discourses. This approach offers a solution to previous ambiguous categorisations of international migrants by relying on self-categorisation across national and cultural boundaries instead of outside-defined sociodemographic or geopolitical criteria. In addition to providing a typology based on the migrants’ strategies of positioning that explains global consumer acculturation, the results allow for a disambiguation of the notions of immigrants, globals and cosmopolitans. The contribution of the dissertation lies in its contrast to existing research, and is therefore more adapted to the liquidity of our modern world. Indeed, the field of consumer research as much as political discourse or companies tend to categorise international migrants according to socioeconomic or geopolitical criteria, such as education, duration of stay or ethnic origin. While consumer research often views low-skilled immigrants in light of specific ethnic groups (Peñaloza 1994, Oswald 1999, Üçok 2007), cross-cultural samples represent the preferred approach to highly-skilled expatriates (Thompson and Tambyah 1999). Consumer research addresses and considers these categories of migrants differently, a questionable postulation in light of global flows which render movement across nations more complex and lead to mixed and multiple cultural affiliations. The main research question to answer in the present thesis is: How do international migrants use consumption behaviour to make sense of their experience? Its broad character allows for new insights and approaches to emerge, both on the side of existing literature and on the empirical side. The dissertation initiates the answer by a first review of the literature. The review highlights gaps and contradictions which can be found in the literature centred on international migrants and their consumption behaviour. The explanation of the context of this research encompasses the definition of consumer culture as well as of globalisation. Indeed, consumption as a discourse plays a role especially in terms of the subscription to a particular group; individuals use consumption to communicate, to express their affiliation with a family, or a place, to situate their identity in their universe (Douglas and Isherwood 1979). These issues change in the global context, and therefore need review. Migration research constitutes the second chapter of the literature review. It presents on the one hand the people endeavouring migration, and on the other, illustrates the various models explaining migration as a process. Based on this review, the research question transforms, splitting it into three elements, each focusing on one element: cultural affiliations, migrant networks and consumer acculturation. The consequent empirical part aims at answering these three questions through three separate, though complementary, research phases, which rely on in-depth interviews, focus groups and observations. Each phase predominantly addressed one research question, though all three elements remain present in all phases. Different types of consumption discourses emerge; in the case of a focus on products of home and/or host culture, three locality discourses develop. Seven globality discourses integrate global and other foreign products in the equation. International migrants seem to use these locality and globality discourses to position themselves in today’s liquid world. They can consequently be compared to the twelve worlds that are presented by Rosenau (2004) as positioning strategies resulting from global “fragmegration”, that is, the difficulty of integrating fragmented and contradictory elements of global societies. The contribution of this dissertation lies in the integration of more diversity in the concepts of cultural affiliations, migrant networks and consumer acculturation. Consequently, the locality and globality discourses provide indications as to the acculturation strategies possible for its members. Doing so, this thesis integrates debates of the local and the global, immigrants versus expatriates, integration versus acculturation, a comparison of interest to both researchers and marketers. On a theoretical level, the thesis provides thus a more generalised view on international migrants, incorporating previous categories. It provides practical solutions, both on a political and on a managerial level. The provided typology enables policy-makers and managers to better understand the new tendencies and problematics inherent to international migration and to address migrants in a way taking into account their actual affiliations and networks.