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While theories of complex service systems have advanced important insights about integrated care, less attention has been paid to social dynamics in systems with finite resources. This paper aims to uncover a paradoxical social dynamic undermining the objective of integrated care within an HIV care service system.

Grounded in a hermeneutic analysis of depth interviews with 26 people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) and drawing on Bourdieu’s (1984) theory of capital consumption to unpack dynamics of power, struggle and contestation, the authors introduce the concept of the service labyrinth.

To competently navigate the service labyrinth of HIV care, consumers adopt capital consumption practices. Paradoxically, these practices enhance empowerment at the individual level but contribute to the fragmentation of the HIV care labyrinth at the system level, ultimately undermining integrated care.

This study enhances understanding of integrated care in three ways. First, the metaphor of the service labyrinth can be used to better understand complex care-related service systems. Second, as consumers of care enact capital consumption practices, the authors demonstrate how they do not merely experience but actively shape the care system. Third, fragmentation is expectedly part of the human dynamics in complex service systems. Thus, the authors discuss its implications. Further research should investigate whether a similar paradox undermines integrated care in better resourced systems, acute care systems and systems embedded in other cultural contexts.

Contrasted to provider-centric views of service systems, this study explicates a customer-centric view from the perspective of heterosexual PLWHA.

This study conceptualizes a form of luxury consumption in which luxury brands collaborate with unconventional non-luxury partners. These unconventional luxury brand collaborations are growing in popularity among Chinese luxury consumers of the post-1990s generation. Luxury brands are exploring new branding strategies due to the growing commercial importance of Chinese luxury consumers.

An in-depth qualitative study informs this paper. Interviews with young adult luxury consumers self-identifying as Chinese reveal a growing interest for luxury brands that collaborate with odd partners in social media and online culture.

Unconventional collaborations between luxury brands and non-luxury partners catalyze shifting meanings of luxury through the following juxtapositions: ephemeral instead of timeless, trendy rather than inaccessible, and playful in contrast with traditional. First, young Chinese consumers construct luxury meanings through ephemerality, like digital possessions, social media fame and fleeting experiences. Second, luxury meanings emerge in trendiness among social media influencers and online culture rather than in the seemingly inaccessible taste regimes of the upper class. Third, younger consumers appreciate fun, rebellious and over-the-top aesthetics in luxury brands.

The study contributes to the nascent field of unconventional luxury by conceptualizing how unusual, odd and unexpected collaborations constitute new forms of luxury consumption. The shifting meanings of luxury consumption that this study conceptualizes raise new opportunities and challenges for luxury brands. One of such is the release of limited collections with non-luxury partners seemingly at the opposite spectrum of design, image and values. Moreover, the study adds nuance to the understanding of luxury consumption among young Chinese consumers.

This paper aims to explore how marketplace-enabled performances help reconstitute masculinity in the context of transnational mobility.

Grounded in consumer acculturation theory, this paper draws on theories of gender performance to inform a hermeneutic analysis of depth interviews with skilled migrant men.

To navigate experiences of emasculation, participants performed three remasculation strategies: status-based hypermasculinity, localised masculinity and flexible masculinity.

This study offers insights for the design of migrant settlement policy. Further research should investigate the remasculation strategies of low resource migrant men.

This paper makes two contributions to theories of gendered acculturation. First, while studies of acculturation as a gendered performance have shown how marketplace resources support the gendered identity projects of female migrants and the children of migrants, this paper provides the missing perspective of skilled migrant men. Beyond acting as “resistant” cultural gatekeepers of their family members’ gendered acculturation practices, first-generation migrant men emerge as creative, agentic and skilled negotiators of countervailing gender regimes. Second, transnationally dispersed families, migrant communities and country of origin networks emerge not only as acculturating agents which transmit gender regimes but also as audiences which enable the staging of remasculating performances.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the capital-based benefits which arise when acculturating immigrants perform touristic practices, and how these shape their tourism and migration experiences.

Grounded in consumer culture theory, this paper draws on theories of capital consumption to inform a hermeneutic analysis of multi-modal depth interviews with Southeast Asian skilled migrants in New Zealand.

Domestic touristic practices offer three types of capital-based benefits, enabling consumers to index economic capital, accrue social capital and index cultural capital. Additionally, the quest for capital emphasises iconic forms of tourism and supersedes concerns about commodification.

This paper demonstrates the important role of touristic practices not only in short-term mobility, but also for long-term migrants. Further research should investigate how capital shapes the touristic practices of other types of mobile consumers.

Understanding the capital-based benefits of touristic practices in acculturation informs the design of migrant settlement policy and the managerial staging of touristic experiences.

While theorists of liquid modernity have largely treated tourism as a discrete type of mobility, this paper reframes tourism as a key acculturation practice. In contrast to dominant conceptualisations of tourism as a quest for cultural authenticity, this paper reconceptualises tourism as a quest for capital. Finally, while previous studies have focused on how capital constrains acculturation outcomes, this paper explores how a consumption practice enables the expression and accumulation of capital.

The consumer acculturation literature argues that reconstituting familiar embodied practices from the culture of origin leads to a comforting sense of home for consumers who move from one cultural context to another. This paper aims to extend this thesis by examining further dimensions in migrant consumers’ experiences of home culture consumption.

This paper analyses data gathered through multi-modal depth interviews with Southeast Asian skilled migrants in New Zealand through the conceptual lens of embodiment.

Building on Dion et al.’s (2011) framework of ethnic embodiment, the analysis uncovers home culture consumption as multi-layered experiences of anchoring, de-stabilisation and estrangement, characterised by convergence and divergence between the embodied dimensions of being-in-the-world, being-in-the-world with others and remembering being-in-the-world.

This paper underscores home culture consumption in migration as an ambivalent embodied experience. Further research should investigate how other types of acculturating consumers experience and negotiate the changing meanings of home.

Marketers in migrant-receiving and migrant-sending cultural contexts should be sensitised to disjunctures in migrants’ embodied experience of consuming home and their role in heightening or mitigating these disjunctures.

This paper helps contribute to consumer acculturation theory in two ways. First, the authors show how migrants experience not only comfort and connection but also displacement, in practices of home culture consumption. Second, the authors show how migrant communities do not only encourage cultural maintenance and gatekeeping but also contribute to cultural identity de-stabilisation.

The purpose of this paper is to identify a need to incorporate Asian perspectives in theories of food consumption and marketing.

This editorial discusses the mutually recursive relationship between food and culture in Asian markets, offers an integrative summary of the special issue and develops several key themes for future research.

Food consumption plays a central role within Asian cultures and markets. Thus, understanding Asian perspectives and contexts provides an important complement and contrast to current theories of food consumption and marketing that have been primarily sited in North American and European contexts. In particular, the complex multiplicity of Asian consumer cultures creates dynamic heterogeneity within Asian food markets.

Although food consumption plays a central role in Asian consumer cultures, extant theory regarding Asian food consumption and marketing is still in its infancy. We highlight important developments in this area that suggest a path for future work.

The authors make three contributions to the literature on food consumption and marketing. First, while engaging with these questions, this issue points to the importance of Asian cultural perspectives into the marketing literature on food consumption. Second, through the articles of this special issue, we trace the relationships between food consumption practices, marketing practices and cultural multiplicity in Asian contexts. Finally, we draw the threads together to provide directions for future research in this area.

This paper aims to propose LARPnography as a more holistic method to probe the emergence of plausible futures, drawing on embodied embedded cognition literature and the emerging consumer practice of live-action role-playing (LARP). Current research methods for probing the future of markets and society rely mainly on expert judgment (i.e. Delphi), imagery or simulation of possible futures (i.e. scenario and simulation) and perspective taking (i.e. role-playing). The predominant focus on cognitive abstraction limits the insights researchers can extract from more embodied, sensorial and experiential approaches.

LARPnography is a qualitative method seeking to immerse participants within a plausible future to better understand the social and market dynamics that may unfold therein. Through careful planning, design, casting and fieldwork, researchers create the preconditions to let participants experience what the future may be and gather critical insights from naturalistic observations and post-event interviews.

Owing to its interactive nature and processual focus, LARPnography is best suited to investigate the adoption and diffusion of innovation, market emergence phenomena and radical societal changes, including the rise of alternative societies.

Different from previous foresight methods, LARPnography creates immersive and perceptually stimulating replicas of plausible futures that research participants can inhabit. The creation of a fictional yet socio-material world ensures that socially constructed meaning is enriched by phenomenological and visceral insights.

This paper aims to understand the elements of bridging practices enacted by Asian immigrant consumers and exploring how these practices constitute reverse acculturation within immigrant-receiving Western cultures.

A practice theoretical perspective was deployed in concert with a hermeneutic analysis of two-part depth interviews with 26 Southeast Asian immigrants in New Zealand. Multi-modal methods and open narrative reflexivity were deployed to improve depth and trustworthiness.

Participant narratives revealed three intertwined elements of bridging practices: articulations (involving sayings and meanings), performances (involving embodied social activities and material artefacts) and contestations (involving tensions and anxieties). Bridging practices create shared social spaces and facilitate the intensification of intercultural translation.

Bridging practices provide a partial view of wider “circuits of practice” (Magaudda, 2011) which cumulatively constitute reverse acculturation. Future research is needed to show how bridging practices serve as resources for transforming the consumption practices of local consumers in Western cultures.

This study advances consumer acculturation theory in three ways. First, this study identifies a key practice of intercultural translation between Asian and Western consumer cultures. In particular, this study shows that intercultural translation occurs not only through ethnic economies but also in a diverse range of private and public sites. Second, in addition to local consumers’ practices (Sobh et al., 2012), this study highlights the role of immigrant consumers’ practices in reverse acculturation, thereby providing empirical evidence for Luedicke’s (2011) conceptual model of intercultural adaptation. Third, in addition to the influence of acculturating agents on immigrant consumers (Askegaard et al., 2005; Peñaloza, 1994), this study demonstrates how immigrant consumers themselves can act as acculturating agents.

This study aims to, with family structures in urban China becoming increasingly diverse, examine how and to what extent the characteristics of everyday family meals relate to the establishment and strengthening of a collective sense of the Chinese family. Integrating ritual and family identity theories developed through studies conducted in the West, the research explores the relationship between family identity and the major dimensions that characterize ritualistic practices through an examination of family dinners in a non-Western context.

The mixed-method approach combines a qualitative phase (focus groups and interviews) with a large-scale survey of households (n = 1,319) in four Chinese cities.

The results find a positive relationship between family identity and commitment to family meals, as well as continuity promoted through family meals, at a 99 per cent confidence level.

One important research limitation is that the sample was limited to four cities. In addition, it is difficult for quantitative measures to capture the richness of emotionally and symbolically laden constructs, such as communication, commitment, continuity and family identity.

The results provide insights into the meanings of family meals in China. With over one-third of household expenditures spent on food in Chinese cities, the formulation of brand positions and promotions can be informed through a greater understanding of the influence of family dynamics on food consumption.

The findings indicate that, within China’s dynamic environment of changing family values, strengthening the ritualistic characteristics of everyday family activities, such as family meals, can lead to an increase in a collective sense of family.

The study demonstrates under what conditions, within this rapidly changing socioeconomic environment, the family dinner provides stability and a sense of unity for Chinese families. In China, a trend toward individualization is accompanied by a deep-seeded sense of obligation toward family that exerts an important influence on meal composition and patterns.

Recent discussions of value-in-use from the perspective of service dominant logic have focused on the customer’s determination of value and control of the value creation process. The purpose of this paper is to extend these discussions by exploring the value creation process in the Japanese tea ceremony and in the kaiseki ryori style of Japanese cuisine, which is based on the Japanese tea ceremony.

A historical analysis is used to describe the history of the Japanese tea ceremony in Japan and its influence on Japanese culture. key principles underlying the Japanese tea ceremony and their relationship to Zen Buddhism are summarized and the ways in which these principles are reflected in the service provided by Japanese restaurants are explored.

The two elite restaurants examined in this analysis have designed their service experience to reflect four principles of the tea ceremony: the expression of seasonal feelings, the use of everyday items, ritualized social interactions, and the equality of host and guest. Given these principles, we argue that the tea ceremony and restaurants based on this ceremony imply a co-creation process that is different in three important ways from the process discussed in the co-creation literature. First, the tea ceremony involves dual experiential-value-creation processes. Both the master and the customer experience value-in-use during the delivery of kaiseki cuisine, and the value-in-use each receives is critically dependent on that received by the other. Second, the degree to which value-in-use is created for both parties (the customer and the master) depends on the master’s customization of the service experience based on his knowledge of the customer and that customer’s with the tea ceremony, kaiseki ryori cuisine and Japanese culture.

We hypothesize that the dual experiential-value-creation model is potentially relevant whenever the service process contains an element of artistic creation. Potential examples include concerts, recitals, theatre performances and art exhibitions, as well as more mundane situations in which the service provider derives value-in-use from aesthetic appreciations of the service provider’s art.

Recent discussions of value co-creation argue that the customer controls the value creation process and the determination of value. The authors argue that the tea ceremony can serve as a metaphor for value co-creation in service contexts where the customer’s value creation process depends on the creation of value-in-use by the service provider.