Browsing by Author "Belk, R. W."

Now showing 1 - 9 of 9

Open Access
Accounting for materialism in four cultures
(1999) Ger, G.; Belk, R. W.
Accounts for materialism are examined based on qualitative research in Romania, Turkey, the USA, and Western Europe. Various spontaneously offered accounts reconcile the discrepancy between the belief that materialism is bad and materialistic consumption behavior and aspirations. These accounts include justifications - passionate connoisseurship, instrumentalism, and altruism - and excuses - the compelling external forces, the ways of the modern world, and deservingness. The differences in accounts can be understood culturally and historically. In negotiating the 'bad' material world with their own consumption worlds, informants draw from various ethics prevalent in their cultures to moralize their personal materialistic consumption. Our findings suggest ways in which materialism, moralized by local accounts, is able to grow globally in spite of its condemnation.
Open Access
Consumer desire in three cultures: results from projective research
(Association for Consumer Research, 1997) Ger, G.; Belk, R. W.; Askegaard, S.
Usingcollages, story-telling, sentence completion, word associations, and other projective techniques, we investigated the nature of consumer desire among students in the United States, Turkey, and Denmark. While we detected some cultural differences, gender differences were generally stronger and tended to be similar across the three cultures. Desire is primarily interpersonal, but it's interpersonal nature differs between men and women. For both men and women however, consumer desire is an intensely passionate positive emotional experience steeped in fantasies and dreams rather than an experience involving reasoned judgments. Desires are also dangerous, both because they are often transgressive and because they threaten a loss of control. We further found a cycle of desire in which, either because desire has been rationalized or realized, it is tamed and must be revitalized through developingnew foci.
Open Access
Cross cultural differences in materialism
(Elsevier, 1996) Ger, G.; Belk, R. W.
Materialism was explored in twelve countries using qualitative data, measures of consumer desires, measures of perceived necessities, and adapted versions of the Belk (1985) materialism scales with student samples. The use of student samples and provisionary evidence for cross-cultural reliability and validity for the scales, make the quantitative results tentative, but they produced some interesting patterns that were also supported by the qualitative data. Romanians were found to be the most materialistic, followed by the U.S.A., New Zealand, Ukraine, Germany, and Turkey. These results suggest that materialism is neither unique to the West nor directly related to affluence, contrary to what has been assumed in prior treatments of the development of consumer culture.
Open Access
The development of consumer desire in marketizing and developing economies: the cases of Romania and Turkey
(Association for Consumer Research, 1993) Ger, G.; Belk, R. W.; Lascu, D.-N.
Developing and marketizing economies in Romania and Turkey are examined in the present research in an effort to understand how consumption desires change with the rapid influx of consumer goods and services into economies of scarcity. Based on observations, interviews, and questionnaires tapping a range of consumers in both countries, we found and describe rapidly escalating consumer desires, confusions, and frustrations. A case study of cigarette consumption in Romania illustrates these developments and the unique image of Western products before and after Communism.
Open Access
The fire of desire: a multisited inquiry into consumer passion
(Oxford University Press, 2003) Belk, R. W.; Ger, G.; Askegaard, S.
Desire is the motivating force behind much of contemporary consumption. Yet consumer research has devoted little specific attention to passionate and fanciful consumer desire. This article is grounded in consumers' everyday experiences of longing for and fantasizing about particular goods. Based on journals, interviews, projective data, and inquiries into daily discourses in three cultures (the United States, Turkey, and Denmark), we develop a phenomenological account of desire. We find that desire is regarded as a powerful cyclic emotion that is both discomforting and pleasurable. Desire is an embodied passion involving a quest for otherness, sociality, danger, and inaccessibility. Underlying and driving the pursuit of desire, we find self-seduction, longing, desire for desire, fear of being without desire, hopefulness, and tensions between seduction and morality. We discuss theoretical implications of these processes for consumer research.
Open Access
I'd like to buy the world a coke: consumptionscapes of the "Less Affluent World"
(Springer, 1996) Ger, G.; Belk, R. W.
The impact of globalization on the consumption patterns of the Less Affluent World are examined, drawing on examples of consumer culture contact with the More Affluent World. We find that rising consumer expectations and desires are fueled by global mass media, tourism, immigration, the export of popular culture, and the marketing activities of transnational firms. Yet rather than democratized consumption, these global consumption influences are more apt to produce social inequality, class polarizations, consumer frustrations, stress, materialism, and threats to health and the environment. Alternative reactions that reject globalization or temper its effects include return to roots, resistance, local appropriation of goods and their meanings, and especially creolization. Although there is a power imbalance that favors the greater influence of affluent Western cultures, the processes of change are not unidirectional and the consequences are not simple adoption of new Western values. Local consumptionscapes become a nexus of numerous, often contradictory, old, new and modified forces that shape unique consumption meanings and insure that the consumption patterns of the Less Affluent World will not result in Western consumer culture writ globally.
Open Access
Metaphors of consumer desire
(Association for Consumer Research, 1996) Ger, G.; Belk, R. W.; Askegaard, S.
Open Access
The missing streetcar named desire
(2000) Belk, R. W.; Ger, Güliz; Askegaar, S.; Huffman, C.; Mick, D. G.; Ratneshwar, S.
Desire has been a taboo word in consumer research. Two legacies of the economic and psychological parentage of the field of consumer research are its slowly disappearing cognitive information processing bias and its rationalization of consumer choice as a process of need fulfillment. The missing streeetcar named desire 99 homeostatic tension-reducing model of consumer motivation that underlies this orientation has occasionally been challenged by pleas to consider hedonic pleasure seeking, variety seeking, or experiential consumption. But even in these cases it is more the object of needs rather than the nature of the motivational process itself that is questioned. In order to begin to envision an alternative to the needs paradigm, consider the descriptors used to characterize states of desire. We say in English that we burn and are aflame with desire; we are pierced by or riddled with desire; we are sick or ache with desire; we are tortured, tormented, and racked by desire; we are possessed, seized, ravished, and overcome by desire; we are mad, crazy, insane, giddy, blinded, or delirious with desire; we are enraptured, enchanted, suffused, and enveloped by desire; our desire is fierce, hot, intense, passionate, incandescent, and irresistible; and we pine, languish, waste away, or die of unfulfilled desire. Try substituting need or want in any of these metaphors and the distinction becomes immediately apparent. Needs are anticipated, controlled, denied, postponed, prioritized, planned for, addressed, satisfied, fulfilled, and gratified through logical instrumental processes. Desires, on the other hand, are overpowering; something we give in to; something that takes control of us and totally dominates our thoughts, feelings, and actions. Desire awakens, seizes, teases, titillates, and arouses. We battle, resist, and struggle with, or succumb, surrender, and indulge our desires. Passionate potential consumers are consumed by desire.
Open Access
Problems of marketization in Romania and Turkey
(JAI Press, 1994) Belk, R. W.; Ger, Güliz; Shultz, C.; Belk, R. W.; Ger, Güliz