Country of Origin and Ethnocentrism: A Study of Immigrant Groups with Different Immigration Patterns

摘要

An emerging stream of research (e.g., Davies and Fitchett 2004; Penaloza 1994; Ustuner and Holt 2007) challenges the assumption of unidimensional identity normally associated with Consumer Ethnocentrism (CE) and Country of Origin (COO) literatures. This nascent literature goes beyond static depictions of self and identity and extends the notions of CE and COO to important unheeded contexts, such as ethnic, immigrant or otherwise bicultural populations. Zolfagharian and Sun (2010) and Zolfagharian, Saldivar and Sun (2014), for example, draw on first-generation immigrants and explore the multiplicity of ethnocentric tendencies (i.e., toward multiple countries) and expose situations where consumers identify with both the country of origin of the product and the country where it is sold. Notwithstanding the contributions of previous studies they do have a tendency to only examine immigrants who move from a developing to developed countries (Beaverstock 1990; Findlay and Gould 1989; Shrestha 2011). We address this limitation by drawing on multiple first-generation immigrant communities and examine immigrants that move vertically and laterally between countries in order to gain a more holistic view of the social fabric of today's multicultural society and to expose noteworthy commonalities and/or differences among various different immigrant communities.