Retailing Culture: Cross-Cultural Theoretical and Empirical Issues in Museum Gift Shop Practices

Abstract

This research has two separate but related goals. First, a review of the retailing literature over the past decade regarding research which focuses on cross-cultural and ethnic topics will be done to establish the dominant pseudoetic perspective which is characteristic of that body of knowledge. Within this research perspective, researchers tend to choose topics and measures that have been studied, operationalized, and validated in one country, and to replicate the study in another cultural context Cross-cultural replication has its own methodological issues (Douglas and Craig, 1997; Costa and Bamossy, 1995; Douglas, Morrin and Craig, 1994; van Raaij, 1978), but the main difficulty with these studies is the presumption often made regarding the relevance or centrality of the construct or theory in another cultural context The paper then goes on to introduce the theoretical notion of ethnoconsumerism (Venkatesh, 1995) as a more appropriate and relevant perspective for carrying out cross-cultural research in consumer behavior and marketing. Ethnoconsumerism is the study of consumption from the point of view of the social group or cultural group that is the subject of study, and it advocates examining behavior on the basis of the cultural realities of that group. This notion goes beyond the emic perspective, which refers to taking the subject’s point of view in strategies of data collection. Ethnoconsumerism argues for the deeper development of knowledge constructed from the culture’s point of view with respect to all aspects of production and consumption. In terms of research, this perspective pleads for more cultural insights at the conceptualization stage of the study from the culture’s point of view, as well as in matters of sampling, methods of data collection, and interpretive issues of data analysis.