The effects of acculturation and uncertainty avoidance on foreign resident choice for Korean foods

This study attempts to identify dining-out patterns among foreign residents in South Korea, examining the differences in foreign residents’ attitudes toward Korean foods and behavioral intentions to patronize Korean restaurants based on their acculturation and uncertainty avoidance levels. The results show that foreign residents in South Korea dine out frequently and intend to revisit Korean restaurants. However, the high acculturation group has a more positive attitude toward, better understanding of, and more preference for Korean foods than the low acculturation group. Satisfaction, revisiting, and recommendation intentions for Korean restaurants are higher among the high acculturation group than the low. The low uncertainty avoidance group spends more money for dining out than the high uncertainty avoidance group, who perceive Korean foods as expensive. Attitudes toward, understanding of, and preference for Korean foods, do not differ significantly between the two uncertainty avoidance groups; nor do satisfaction and behavioral intentions to Korean restaurants.     

Refugees in Vermont: mobility and acculturation in a new immigrant destination

This paper explores the idea of mobility for recent refugees who have resettled in a non-traditional immigrant destination in the northeastern U.S. It is based on a multi-year qualitative study of travel behavior, preferences, and needs amongst these new arrivals in a small city in the state of Vermont. As a result of their experiences of both forced displacement from their home as well as stasis within camp settings and the refugee determination process, refugees are an example of what some have called “a dialectic of movement/moorings” (Urry, 2003: 125), both on the move and trapped in place. Their resettlement in the U.S., as this paper illustrates, may represent a further extension of this dialectic—placed by government agents in new immigrant reception areas not of their own choosing, forced to commute long distances and into unfamiliar environments for work and limited in their abilities to access healthcare, education and employment (amongst other services) due to a range of transportation barriers. I argue in this paper that refugee mobilities in a new settlement site are about more than inconvenience: barriers to movement may constitute obstacles to acculturation, integration, self-empowerment, and community building.     

Public Service Leaders as ‘Change Agents’ – for Whom?

Abstract

This article examines how far senior staff in English educational and health service organizations view themselves as leaders who are ‘change agents’ for government-driven reform and independent change agendas. The contribution of external leadership development provision to shaping these self-perceptions is explored. Special attention is paid to national leadership development bodies with different degrees of formal association with government. Whatever this relationship, such provision and other development support apparently reinforced a strong sense of personal agency (choice of action) associated with being a leader, empowering senior staff to adopt a modestly mediatory stance towards both reform and leadership development provision.     

Parent cultural control of foreign subsidiaries through organizational acculturation: a longitudinal study

Organizational acculturation refers to changes in the work values of host-country employees in foreign subsidiaries. Although many multinational corporations practise cultural control of global operations, organizational acculturation has attracted very little academic research. In the present study, the subjects are Hong Kong Chinese managers employed in subsidiaries of multinational corporations from a European country. Longitudinal research was conducted over three years among an 'acculturation' panel, a control panel and a benchmark panel. The findings showed that organizational acculturation may have occurred in some of the work values measured. Implications of these findings for international firms are discussed in detail.     

Identity salience and shifts in product preferences of Hispanic consumers: Cultural relevance of product attributes as a moderator

Culturally relevant products, services, and communications play a crucial role in the success of ethnic targeted marketing. Employing a bi-dimensional approach, two studies examine how cultural relevance of product attributes interacts with acculturation level, and situational and contextual factors to affect product attribute evaluations (PAE) of Hispanic consumers. Across both studies, cultural relevance had main effects on PAE. In Study 1, cultural relevance interacted with cultural situations to affect PAE. Hispanic consumers evaluated Hispanic (or Mainstream) relevant product attributes more favorably when exposed to a Hispanic (or Mainstream) cultural situation. In Study 2, cultural relevance interacted independently with cultural primes and acculturation level to significantly affect PAE. PAE shifted as a result of cultural primes and moved toward being typical to the activated cultural identity. Results are discussed in the context of consumer acculturation, social identity-based consumption, biculturalism, and cultural frame shifting.     

Chinese international students’ psychological adaptation process in Korea: the role of tourism experience in the host country

This study aims to shed light on the effect of international students’ lifelong learning and dining experience during the trip in a host country on their psychological adaptation, place attachment, and sharing of tourism experience. Employing responses from 247 Chinese students in South Korea, a SEM (Structural Equation Modeling) technique was used for the analysis. The study found that lifelong learning positively influences dining-out flow experience, which in turn placed positive effects on psychological adaptation, place attachment, and sharing of tourism experience, whereas place attachment mediates the relationship between flow experience and both sharing of tourism experience and psychological adaptation.     

The effects of acculturation,social distinctiveness,and social presence in a service failure situation

Going beyond the traditional East/West consumer differentiation in studying service failure, this article examined the effect of acculturation, both independently and together with social distinctiveness and social presence, on the perceptions and behavioral responses of Chinese–Australian consumers. The research employed a 3 × 2 × 2 between-subject experimental design in which data were collected from 224 Chinese–Australians. Results showed that the different acculturation levels of these consumers did not affect their perceptions and behavior in a service failure situation. Instead, where and with whom a service failure was experienced had pronounced effects on consumer behavior depending on the extent to which the consumers acculturated to the culture of their host country. Implications of these findings and directions for future research are also discussed.     

The influence of collectivism in restaurant selection: A sentence completion experiment

In a between-subjects experimental design, Korean-Americans and U.S. born non-Koreans were asked to watch a virtual tour of a restaurant and then complete the following sentence: “This restaurant is a good place to go when….” Findings indicate that the Korean-Americans were much more likely to finish the sentence with a collective phrase than the non-Koreans. Moreover, those Korean-Americans utilizing an integration pattern of acculturation were more prone to demonstrate a collective mindset in the sentence completion task than those employing an assimilation pattern of acculturation.     

The four faces of the Hispanic consumer: An acculturation-based segmentation

This article develops and tests a segmentation scheme for the U.S. Hispanic market based on the extent and nature of acculturation. Acculturation is conceptualized as driven by language preferences and two dimensions of cultural identification, Hispanic and American. Structural equation modeling develops and assesses the proposed scales, and a latent class clustering procedure (latent discriminant analysis) tests propositions on a sample of 403 U.S. Hispanics. Consistent with theory, four clusters of U.S. Hispanics emerge: retainers, biculturals, assimilators, and non-identifiers that vary according to language preference and cultural identification.