Iranian immigrant consumer acculturation in Australia: a Foucauldian perspective

The growing concern over immigrants’ integration into their new hosting societies has drawn attention to the concept of ‘acculturation’. In consumer research, this attention is manifested in the immigrant consumer acculturation stream of research, which is mainly concerned with how immigrant consumers’ consumption practices and their appropriation of market resources, as well as sociocultural processes, are reflected in immigrant consumers’ identity projects. This thesis intends to address a gap in the consumer acculturation research regarding the relationship between immigrant consumer subjectivity and sociocultural acculturative processes in the formation of consumer acculturation. Through addressing this gap, this study aims to create knowledge about the nature of the interrelationship between immigrant consumer subjectivity and broader sociocultural processes in the formation of immigrant consumer acculturation. This knowledge can lead to a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of immigrant consumer acculturation, their identity projects and the role of consumption in this regard. Adopting a post-structuralist approach, and more specifically using Foucault’s ideas on power/knowledge and how they discursively circulate and come into effect in the formation of the subject has enabled this thesis to address this gap in consumer acculturation research. Accordingly, informed by a Foucauldian approach to the formation of the subject, this thesis aims to investigate how immigrant consumers’ subjectivity and the sociocultural processes are integrated in the formation of immigrant consumers’ identity projects and how immigrant consumers make sense of their experiences in the context of immigration. To this end, 20 semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted with first-generation Iranian immigrants in Australia. To facilitate triangulation and achieve a deeper understanding of the phenomenon, a netnographic study was conducted of two online forums where Iranian immigrants shared their experiences of life in Australia. A hermeneutic approach was adopted in this thesis in order to interpret the interview and netnographic data. It was found that the participants’ consumer acculturation process is patterned in relation to the discursive context in which they are situated. The findings highlight five discourses and the formation of four identity projects amongst the participants. It is found that the circulation and functioning of the power/knowledge dynamic in these discourses, and the participants’ involvement in power relations, results from these discourses, forms their identity projects and affects how they construct and ascribe meaning to their experiences. By adopting a post-structuralist approach, this thesis sheds new light on and broadens our understanding of the formation of consumer acculturation with regards to immigrants’ broader context and how it is related to their subjectivity. The findings highlight how four identity projects amongst participants are constructed as the result of their involvement within five discursive contexts and the circulation of power/knowledge in these discourses. This finding also extends the current discussion on relating macro-level contexts and micro-level contexts in the study of consumers and consumption in the consumer culture theory (CCT) tradition of research. Methodologically, this study contributes to the call to develop the epistemology of CCT beyond the use of existential phenomenology in describing consumers’ experiences as they are lived. Based on the idea of ‘where there is power, there is resistance’, the hermeneutic approach was used in order to identify discursive power relations from the resistance side of the relationship.