Class Symbols Research Articles

Turismo chino en itinerarios culturales: El Camino de Santiago y la Ruta Antigua de Té y Caballos

This paper is a comparative study of Chinese tourists in the Camino de Santiago in Spain and the Ancient Tea Horse Road in China. First, we introduce a brief state of the arts on cultural routes as part of cultural tourism, and on the recent evolution of inbound and outbound Chinese tourism. Second, we analyze the construction / creation of the Camino de Santiago and the Ancient Tea Horse Road as tourist destinations. Finally, we compare the profile of the tourists on both routes, including their motivations, experiences and the way to access to the necessary information to travel. The cultural routes have become a symbol of distinction and class for a minority of the population and are framed in the new trend of independent and experiential tourism that is developing in China.

Investigating the Impact of Stimulus Equivalence on Children’s Food Choice and Preference

Abstract This study investigated the influence of character on food's choices. Eleven preschool children were trained to form two equivalent stimulus classes, each comprising one a cartoon character, a geometric shape, and an abstract symbol. One class had a liked character and the other a disliked character. Three preference tests were conducted where the children had to choose between two identical packages with samples of the same snack, differing only by the label. In Test 1 the labels were symbols of the same class as the liked and disliked characters; in Test 2 the choice was between the symbol of the same class as the disliked character and a new symbol; and in Test 3 children chose between the symbol of the equivalence class with the liked character and the logo of a known brand. Most children chose first, and reported to like more, the snack labeled with the symbol of the same class as the liked character. They also chose, and reported to like more, the snack labeled with a new stimulus over the symbol of the same class as the disliked character. These results confirmed that stimulus equivalence is a useful paradigm to investigate formation of preference for brands.

America’s Signal Crisis in Salman Rushdie’s Fury

This article examines how Salman Rushdie’s Fury (2001) registers a signal crisis of American hegemony through its hyperreal production of an aesthetics of excess, constituted by fragmented subjectivities, a frenetic narrative form, references to the decaying years of the Roman Empire, and irruptions of violence against women. The text’s libidinal investment of personal anguish with public discontent, or a psychopathological fury, is read through Fredric Jameson’s account of third-world allegory as a symptom of the novel’s registration of America’s hegemonic decline. The scalping of several upper-class young women in New York City by their financier boyfriends is thus further examined as an aspect of the text’s aesthetics of excess and use of allegory, which frames the violent interrelation between public discontent and private hubris. The murdered women are read as symbols of American hegemony and class under threat by turbulent financial markets, and hoarding their scalps is represented as a crude and violent attempt by their boyfriends to halt the dwindling value of America’s cultural capital and financial markets. The destabilization of class structures due to turbulent financial markets breeds a semantic confusion between real and symbolic signifiers of class status, a process facilitated by the narrator’s comparison of these women to prototypically American symbols, such as “Oscar-Barbie” statuettes and dolls. Fury’s mapping of Solanka’s cultural products, dolls and masks, from New York to the peripheral nation of Lilliput-Blefescu further actualizes the flow of American cultural and economic power to peripheral regions. This, alongside the text’s problematic characterization of gender and race, is read as evidence of Rushdie as a writer in terminal decline.

What Ages Hair?

Hair has always played an important role in the history of mankind. Egyptian hieroglyphics are testimony of the paramount importance of hair for this ancient civilization, not only because of the visual effect, but also because of the erotic symbolism connected with hair. For the ancient Romans hair was not only a question of fashion but was used as a symbol of beauty, virility, class and intellect. In modern western culture having a full head of hair is often associated with desirable qualities such as youthfulness and vitality. Most people experience changes in hair and scalp health as they age. Subsequent hair loss may cause significant distress that deeply affects people’s life causing social anxiety and interfering with their well being. Genetic and hormonal changesareimportantfactorsinhairloss, butweatheringandgrooming habits take a toll on our hair as well. A recent advisory board comprising twelve experts in hair fibers and hair loss was formed to review hair loss in relation to heredity, aging and environmental factors emphasizing measures that may slow alopecia. The following information is a summary of their discussions on these topics.

미국 도금시대(Gilded Age) 미술에 나타난 차의 미학과 문화정치학

This article examines the tea culture-related themes represented in late 19th and early 20th century American visual images, especially in the Gilded Age. In an attempt at an in-depth interpretation, this study discusses the era s aesthetic and cultural trends and politics of representation that are imbued in these images. It analyzes a series of paintings in the contexts of femininity issues that emerged from changing social structures in America s patriarchal society as well as American women s tea culture that was widely popularized among the affluent and privileged class, and moreover, its relation to Orientalist taste, Western obsession for Asian ceramics, and Japanese tea ceremony. The Gilded Age s representative paintings depicting the subject matter of American tea culture are produced by artists primarily from the Northeastern regions of the United States, including Mary Cassatt, William Paxton, and Edmund Tarbell. American female figures portrayed in these works are mostly upper or upper-middle class women having afternoon tea or morning tea in the aesthetically and elegantly decorated women s space, or they are fashionable women posing alongside tea instruments or Asian collectables of high-quality, which appear as symbols of the leisure class and its refined taste. The unifying similarities in these paintings point to the aestheticized life-style and feminine ideal promoted by Americans of privilege and also depicted by such contemporaries as Thorstein Veblen, Henry James, and James McNeill Whistler. This study shows that complex historical issues and cultural politics intertwined with gender and class are embedded within these paintings of the Gilded Age.

Prestige Pricing Strategy as A Symbol of Social Class on Perfume Products

Determination of the appropriate pricing strategy is essential in order to maintain and win the competition. This research examined the meaning of the application of the pricing strategy, especially prestige pricing for consumers who consume the product perfume in the city of Denpasar. The method used in this research is a qualitative method, by using descriptive analysis of qualitative and interpretative. The results showed that the first, the meaning of social class, that class was connected with the premium class perfume consumed by certain groups of people. Secondly, life style that is now for people using branded perfume is part of daily activities, and become part of the lifestyle. Because it was done patterned, repetitive, and in a certain period of time in accordance with the nature of the lifestyle itself. Third, are the value & Psychological pricing, it was very specific in contrast to sales of other products in general. Producers to sellers maintain sales strategy accompanied with high price remain optimal service to attract or retain customers. Fourth, was the meaning of prestige, that the practice of buying branded perfume with an expensive price to increase or maintain the prestige of its users. Exchange of capital was very evident, buyers exchanging economic capital, social and cultural symbolic capital to achieve the sense of pride and prestige. In this research, the expected contribution is to interpret the application of prestige pricing strategy that so far only examined as part of the marketing strategy and consumer behavior.

서양 역사복식에 나타난 과장적 헤어스타일의 미적 특성 연구

This study examined a phenomenon of exaggerated hairstyle in the history of Western custom through publications related with Western costume and research papers. By adopting the criteria of Delong, M. R. to analyze visual forms shown by interaction between human body and costume worn over the body, it analyzed the formative characteristics by the interaction between hairstyle and costume. In addition, it inferred the aesthetic characteristics through content analysis of examined phenomenon focusing on socio-cultural background and costume socio-psychological precedent studies. Formative characteristics of exaggerated hairstyle applied by analysis criteria of Delong, M. R. were in pursuit of the emphasis style. This was clearly and intensively recognized by forming spaces for mostly closure style, part style, three dimensional style, determinate style, and space separation style. Regarding the interaction between hair and ornamentations, 'precedence of ornamentation' was pursued as ornamentations were recognized earlier than the hair itself. It means associative meanings of the surface effect were accompanied by emotions of 'intensiveness' and the pursuit of the attractive style. As for the interaction between hairstyle and costume, there were many cases of pursuing 'continuity' mutually and visually by connecting the hairstyle and the costume. Aesthetic characteristics of exaggerated hairstyle were inferred as 1) the expression of the sprite of the age(i.e. art, culture, politics, society, ideology, religion), 2) symbols of wealth, class, authority, and excellence, 3) pursuit of addicted desire to ornament, and 4) harmony through continuity with costume. This study verified that hairstyle was connected as a part of costume, or formed as a way to express deeper human psychology beyond just a part of a costume. It was also confirmed that hairstyle was an expressive method to express the spirit of the age, such as art, culture, society, religion, ideology.

Torn Bonnets and Stolen Silks: Fashion, Gender, Race, and Danger in the Wartime South

Torn Bonnets and Stolen SilksFashion, Gender, Race, and Danger in the Wartime South Joan E. Cashin (bio) Fashion, defined as the prevailing style of dress in a particular time or place, has often served as a means of self-expression as well as a marker of social class, political loyalty, and ethnic background. This has been especially the case for women. Since the 1980s, specialists in anthropology, sociology, folklore, museum studies, cultural studies, art history, and history have produced impressive work on the subject, with many of them exploring fashion as part of material culture or how women experienced fashion. Some writers have investigated the history of fabrics, such as the popularity of calico in eighteenth-century Britain, or certain articles of clothing, such as the mantelet, worn in the early modern period by French and Native American women. Before the advent of machine-made garments, clothing was a valuable possession. Clothes have always been highly charged with personal meaning because they adorn the human body and reflect the human life cycle.1 [End Page 338] Fashion is very sensitive to historical change, but scholars of the mid-nineteenth-century South have given it little notice. This disregard is rather strange since the entire society was preoccupied with gender and its signifiers, fashion among them. Perhaps the stereotypes of white and black women that pervade popular culture, thanks to the movie Gone with the Wind, make the topic seem banal. In Within the Plantation Household, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese devotes a few pages to dress as a symbol of class, and she argues that plantation mistresses used fashion ruthlessly to establish their elite status over other women of both races. In Mistresses and Slaves, Marli F. Weiner emphasizes the overriding importance of gender in daily life and self-perception, but she too neglects fashion. She observes in passing that slave women who put on hoop skirts “mimicked white culture.” The two historians explain in different ways the gifts of cast-off clothing from planter women to slaves: Fox-Genovese says that mistresses discarded clothes to avoid being wasteful, while Weiner believes they could have done so as a sign of personal regard.2 Historians of slave women have done more on fashion, focusing for the most part on field laborers and their efforts to beautify their attire. Scholars have written less about house workers, who typically dressed better than field slaves; the few historians of slavery who mention cast-off clothing from mistresses portray it as a form of domination. Other writers address the international context, finding elements of an African aesthetic in the bold, contrasting colors in female clothing or in the wearing of turbans, bandanas, or other headwraps. In the only book-length treatment of slave clothing, New Raiments of Self, art historian Helen Bradley Foster concludes that, with the exception of headwraps, most slave women embraced western-style clothing. Moreover, she observed that they had “binary” perceptions of whites, who committed both acts of abuse and of generosity to slaves. Despite this valuable scholarship, more can be done on the history of fashion for southern women, white and black. We [End Page 339] need to explore fully the European-inspired fashion culture of the 1850s and the significance of clothes as material objects.3 Furthermore, historians of fashion have neglected another set of actors, Civil War soldiers. White men in both armies commented extensively on female attire, which became a political issue after 1861, and many of them took articles of female clothing from civilians of both races. They did so for a host of ideological and practical reasons, as we shall see. Yet they inadvertently reminded white and black women of their gender—of the fact that they were women—with some unexpected results. The fight over women’s clothing was part of the contest over all resources, tangible and intangible, that characterized the war. This article connects the antebellum background to the wartime struggle over female attire in the Confederacy and the Border States. Four sets of actors are involved: planter women and female house slaves, because they are at the nexus of fashion in the mid-nineteenth century South, and white soldiers in both...

Creating and consuming the heartland: Symbolic boundaries in representations of femininity and rurality in U.S. Magazines

Scholars of rural studies have investigated a range of places and subcultures to identify varieties of rural masculinity—both new and old—and to understand how they shape social relations (e.g., Bell, 2004; Campbell, 2000; Hennen, 2008). Yet a similarly energetic effort to understand rural femininity and its consequences on social life is lacking. Simultaneously, while cultural studies of boundary-making processes have intensified in recent years, more work is needed to understand how “cultural narratives” shape gendered boundary-making processes (Lamont and Molnar, 2002). In this article we ask: how do representations of rural femininities vary across different media sources? And, how do symbolic boundaries in these representations work to valorize specific rural femininities? Drawing in part on the recent emergence of a hip, countryside consumerism, we analyze gender on the symbolic and cultural level, making use of images and language to understand how representations of rurality and femininity intersect. Analyzing content from two magazines in different genres, Successful Farmer and Country Living, our findings revealed that rural femininities are contextual and depend on multiple and often shifting understandings of both rurality and femininity. We specifically identified two distinct forms of rural femininity, which we refer to as productivist rural femininity and transformative country chic. Further, we found that in both magazines symbolic boundary-making relied on the gendered division of labor to construct rural femininities, but that Country Living tended to use symbols of social class to portray desirable rural femininity, more so than Successful Farming. The article concludes with a discussion of further directions for the study of rural femininities and symbolic boundaries.

A standard nomenclature for gene designation in the Rosaceae

The plant family Rosaceae is comprised of a highly diverse group of plants, with a wide range of ornamental and agricultural uses throughout the world. Comparative genomic analyses between rosaceous species are increasingly being used to assign putative function. With the wealth of new data, there is a need to standardize nomenclature to ensure uniformity and clarity across research groups. The Rosaceae Gene Name Standardization Committee was formed to develop a naming guideline for genes in Rosaceae family members. This manuscript details the issues involved with naming genes and proposes a common nomenclature system. The Genome Database for Rosaceae (GDR) ( www.rosaceae.org ) has developed a gene database that will support user-submitted gene names and annotations in addition to the predicted genes from whole genome sequences. GDR also hosts user-curated lists of gene class symbols. To facilitate standardization of gene names and avoid misinterpretation, the committee recommends that the GDR serve as the database of record for the names of Rosaceae genes and that gene names, gene class symbols, and gene annotation be registered in GDR prior to publication in peer reviewed journals.

Rural Putsch: Power, Class, Social Relations and Change in the English Rural Village

The paper uses ethnography to discuss a political putsch – a move from Old Guard to newcomer dominance – in an English rural village. Applying the conceptual ideas of Goffman on symbols of class status and Thrift (2012) on space and an expressive infrastructure, it responds to Shucksmith's (2012) call for research into the micro workings and consequences of class power in rural contexts. The analysis stresses the relevance of ‘sticky’ space (the residue of past social relations shaping the present, the dwindling amenities and a contemporary absence of pavements) and a contemporary blurring of rural and the urban identities (Norfolk/ London). Moreover, both Goffman's restrictive devices and class symbols (who garners support and who does not) and the temporal dimension of an expressive infrastructure (informing individual dispositions and orientations – class affect) now construct rural spaces. The paper therefore retains a flavour of sociology's obstinate interest in geographic milieu, but the stage is now one of a global countryside both influencing and influenced by local politics and elites.A global recession and the rural penalty, whereby rural residents’ experience is more acute, has meant that not all spaces or agents are equal and some are therefore better placed to adapt, accommodate or resist change ( Shucksmith 2012 ). In a climate of various rural crises (fracking in the ‘desolate’ North of England and the contentious culling of badgers), this paper uses ethnography to study the operation of rural micro-politics and by doing so highlight the value of an ethnographic approach for sociology for understanding the local in the global.

Locked in, Locked Out: Gated Communities in a Puerto Rican City by Zaire Dinzey-Flores (review)

Reviewed by: Locked in, Locked Out: Gated Communities in a Puerto Rican City by Zaire Dinzey-Flores Rima Brusi Zaire Dinzey-Flores. 2013. Locked in, Locked Out: Gated Communities in a Puerto Rican City (A volume in The City in the Twenty-First Century). University of Pennsylvania Press. 240 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8122-0820-7. Locked In, Locked Out is a timely, important and engaging ethnographic exploration of the interplay of race, class and the built environment in four gated communities in the city of Ponce, Puerto Rico. The four sites are geographically close to one another: one could in theory walk easily from one to the next. But two of them are inhabited by relatively well-off Ponce families who have erected formidable gates, complete with alarm systems and even metal knife-like contraptions reminiscent of medieval fortresses. They seek to protect themselves from the intrusion of the danger and crime assumed to threaten them from the outside. The other two communities are public housing complexes, where low-income families see their access to and from the outside world shaped and limited by an architecture of exclusion and surveillance designed not so much to protect them from crime but rather to protect others from the crime that, for many Puerto Ricans, the government, and the media, they seem to have come to represent. The topic is hardly neutral. Last summer, for example, news shows and papers reported, recorded and photographed plastic pools dotting housing projects throughout the island. The pools’ discovery led to a flurry of social media activity, a myriad tweets, Instagram, Facebook pages and even full-blown websites that denounced the ownership and use of pools inside the projects as “shameless,” a use of “dirty drug money,” and a “violation of law and order.” Columnists and commentators echoed the indignation of bloggers and facebookers in stern appeals for public housing dwellers to “understand that the law is the law and that we all need to follow it,” or internalize that “we all want nice things but they come with hard work, not just because we want them to.” The director of Public Housing in Puerto Rico held a press conference showing the memo he had sent to all residents—pools were forbidden, their filling and use punishable by a suspension of the family’s contract with the agency (read-expulsion from your home). The caseríos, in short, appear often in the local news because their image and peculiar architecture have come to represent (and serve as scapegoat for) some of Puerto Rico’s most urgent issues: Symbol of crime and dependence for some; of inequality and its discontents for others. They and their inhabitants [End Page 262] seem to be constantly exposed to the public eye in ways that other Puerto Rican places and people are not. Before the pools it was Wi-Fi. Before Wi-Fi, it was satellite dishes, cable, Christmas lights, x-boxes, bicycles and whatever other middle class symbols were spotted within the caserío landscape. Nobody pays much mind to the bigger pools of luxury or middle class apartment complexes or urbanizaciones, and if/when they do, the prompt response is something like “well, but the residents of those complexes do pay for their water.” Puerto Rico, according to those loudest and most powerful in social and traditional media, appears to contain two types of people: Those with “honest” jobs earning an “honest” salary, who can honestly buy and enjoy two cars and an urbanización house and often self-identify as “the middle class”; and those who are assumed to live from the government, remain lazily unemployed, sell/consume illegal drugs, and enjoy rent-free living in a public housing project. Like a popular, insidious version of Weber’s ideal types, the urbanización and the caserío are places but also function as tropes for “types” of people. Less explicitly (Puerto Ricans seem more comfortable talking, however inaccurately, about class than about race) these culture wars betray a racial/racist subtext: Those in the first type are “white,” those in the second “black.” Zaire Dinzey-Flores looks (and invites us to look) at place and day-to...

Sartorial symbols of social class elicit class-consistent behavioral and physiological responses: a dyadic approach.

Social rank in human and nonhuman animals is signaled by a variety of behaviors and phenotypes. In this research, we examined whether a sartorial manipulation of social class would engender class-consistent behavior and physiology during dyadic interactions. Male participants donned clothing that signaled either upper-class (business-suit) or lower-class (sweatpants) rank prior to engaging in a modified negotiation task with another participant unaware of the clothing manipulation. Wearing upper-class, compared to lower-class, clothing induced dominance--measured in terms of negotiation profits and concessions, and testosterone levels--in participants. Upper-class clothing also elicited increased vigilance in perceivers of these symbols: Relative to perceiving lower-class symbols, perceiving upper-class symbols increased vagal withdrawal, reduced perceptions of social power, and catalyzed physiological contagion such that perceivers' sympathetic nervous system activation followed that of the upper-class target. Discussion focuses on the dyadic process of social class signaling within social interactions.

A Study on Royal Ceremonial Hair styles of Chosun Dynasty

This study covers the literature of theoretical backgrounds of royal ceremonial hair styles during Chosun Dynasty and demonstrates reproduction works of those hair styles reinterpreted in modern methods. As for the Chosun royal hair styles for ceremonies, there are Daesoo, Gudoomi, and Euyoumi for a royal queen, royal concubines, and royal lady attendants of Nae Myung Boo, department of general affairs of the royal court. These hair styles represents well that Chosun Dynasty kept its own class symbols through hair styles, which is valuable cultural resources of Korean traditional beauties. This study compares the new reproduction works of Daesoo, Gudoomi, and Euyoumi with existing literature pieces and related photos for clear understanding of these traditional hair styles. This study aims to activate the relevant researches into Korean traditonal hair styles, their reproduction methods and applicable usages in Modern Korea as well as useful data for them.

La quête des épices, moteur de l’histoire

Throughout history, man has been fascinated by spices. Carriers of captivating aromas and subtle flavours, symbols of luxury and class “distinction”, with benefits for the body, potent stimulators of dreams… these humble plants are as sought after as gold. Worldwide trade of these commodities started 5,000 years ago; pepper corns, cinnamon sticks, cloves and nutmeg motivated the search for distant lands, led to the opening up of new shipping routes and encouraged the discovery of a “New World”.

Incomplete Symbols in Principia Mathematica and Russell’s “Definite Proof”

Early in Principia Mathematica Russell presents an argument that “‘the author of Waverley means nothing”, an argument that he calls a “definite proof”. He generalizes it to claim that definite descriptions are incomplete symbols having meaning only in sentential context. This Principia “proof” went largely unnoticed until Russell reaffirmed a near-identical “proof” in his philosophical autobiography nearly 50 years later. The “proof” is important, not only because it grounds our understanding of incomplete symbols in the Principia programme, but also because failure to understand it fully has been a source of much unjustified criticism of Russell to the effect that he was wedded to a naïve theory of meaning and prone to carelessness and confusion in his philosophy of logic and language generally. In my paper, I (1) defend Russell’s “proof” against attacks from several sources over the last half century, (2) examine the implications of the “proof” for understanding Russell’s treatment of class symbols in Principia, and (3) see how the Principia notion of incomplete symbol was carried forward into Russell’s conception of philosophical analysis as it developed in his logical atomist period after 1910.

Incomplete Symbols in <em>Principia Mathematica</em> and Russell’s “Definite Proof”

Early in Principia Mathematica Russell presents an argument that "‘the author of Waverley’ means nothing", an argument that he calls a "definite proof". He generalizes it to claim that definite descriptions are incomplete symbols having meaning only in sentential context. This Principia "proof" went largely unnoticed until Russell reaffirmed a near-identical "proof" in his philosophical autobiography nearly 50 years later. The "proof" is important, not only because it grounds our understanding of incomplete symbols in the Principia programme, but also because failure to understand it fully has been a source of much unjustified criticism of Russell to the effect that he was wedded to a naive theory of meaning and prone to carelessness and confusion in his philosophy of logic and language generally. In my paper, I (1) defend Russell’s "proof" against attacks from several sources over the last half century, (2) examine the implications of the "proof" for understanding Russell’s treatment of class symbols in Principia, and (3) see how the Principia notion of incomplete symbol was carried forward into Russell’s conception of philosophical analysis as it developed in his logical atomist period after 1910.

Military Dress and Men's Outdoor Leisurewear: Burberry's Trench Coat in First World War Britain

This article explores the emergence of the trench coat through a range of First World War British press advertisements. The rush to khaki in 1914 drove many firms to employ the language of wartime economy in their promotions. Burberry was a case in point; the firm’s images promoted protective clothing for harsh weather conditions but were novel enough to suggest that they could create active healthy bodies for the war effort. This article explores how new tailoring thrived in wartime Britain, owing to the official demand to clothe new army officers, who were recruited from a wide range of social classes. Rather than idealize men’s bodies through the traditional symbols of class, Burberry updated the military body by combining established ideas of leisure with new concepts of war work. Their waterproof coats became synonymous with the war because the designs incorporated War Office requirements with traditional aspects of leisurewear. Nonetheless, its military features did not confine the trench coat to army use, and it became a popular garment during and after the war. Burberry resolved the contradictions of the wartime trade by offering practical, mass-produced clothing, which bore the marks of sporting leisure. The firm’s modernizing approach was represented by the image of a man in a trench coat, a figure that embodied the militarizing of the home front during wartime.

Two-parameter asymptotics in magnetic Weyl calculus

This paper is concerned with small parameter asymptotics of magnetic quantum systems. In addition to a semiclassical parameter ε, the case of small coupling λ to the magnetic vector potential naturally occurs in this context. Magnetic Weyl calculus is adapted to incorporate both parameters, at least one of which needs to be small. Of particular interest is the expansion of the Weyl product which can be used to expand the product of operators in a small parameter, a technique which is prominent to obtain perturbation expansions. Three asymptotic expansions for the magnetic Weyl product of two Hörmander class symbols are proven as (i) ε ≪ 1 and λ ≪ 1, (ii) ε ≪ 1 and λ = 1, as well as (iii) ε = 1 and λ ≪ 1. Expansions (i) and (iii) are impossible to obtain with ordinary Weyl calculus. Furthermore, I relate the results derived by ordinary Weyl calculus with those obtained with magnetic Weyl calculus by one- and two-parameter expansions. To show the power and versatility of magnetic Weyl calculus, I derive the semirelativistic Pauli equation as a scaling limit from the Dirac equation up to errors of fourth order in 1/c.

Chinese Cultural Dimensions in Perceptions of Service Quality

Retail operators in a shopping destination like Hong Kong need to understand and satisfy Mainland Chinese visitors' perceptions of service quality in order to sustain their visitation and consumption levels, especially when they form more than half of Hong Kong's tourist market. The purpose of this study is to test a culturally attuned Chinese Retail Service Quality Scale (CRSQS) for measuring such perceptions. Results from testing the scale on 218 Chinese visitors revealed that they understood the tangible dimension of store appearance as a symbol of class and quality and the intangible dimension of courtesy as “having face,” “getting respect,” and “given convenience.” However, courteous acts by service personnel—sometimes seen by the visitors as ingratiation or impression management—are not as influential on customer perceptions and repurchase intentions as previously thought. Despite some research limitations, the CRSQS has highlighted for retail managers that their service staff must be attentive to cultural considerations but, even more so, must improve their competence and the reliability of service in order to continue wowing Mainland visitors who are increasing in their sophistication and ability to discern what is true service quality.