Intercultural Accommodation Research Articles

Accommodating ethnic minority consumers during service encounters: the fine line

PurposeThis paper aims to examine the effect of intercultural accommodation efforts on service quality perceptions among ethnic minority consumers. Specifically, the paper postulates that during an intercultural service encounter, the impact of the service provider’s language and ethnicity on the consumer’s service quality perceptions is moderated by the level of service involvement, consumer acculturation and perceived discrimination, which, in turn, influence purchase intent.Design/methodology/approachA 2 × 2 between-subjects experimental design with an online nationwide consumer panel of Hispanic consumers was conducted where 377 participants were randomly assigned to a series of service encounter scenarios in the banking service context to manipulate accommodation efforts (yes vs no) and the level of involvement with the service (high vs low).FindingsWhen such language and ethnicity accommodations were offered, highly acculturated minority consumers regarded the service encounter less favorably than low acculturated minority consumers. Moreover, during low-involvement service encounters, intercultural accommodations positively impacted consumer’s service quality perceptions compared to situations involving high-involvement services. Also, minority consumers with perceptions of past discrimination had less favorable evaluations of the service quality than when such perceptions were nonexistent when intercultural accommodation efforts were made by the service provider.Research limitations/implicationsThe findings add to the sparse literature that examines the effectiveness of intercultural accommodation and focuses on the combined use of service provider’s language and ethnicity as a means to enhance service quality.Practical implicationsThe study delivers cautions for service firms not to generalize the receptivity of intercultural accommodation efforts. Given the increasingly sizable segments of minority customers, this study offers insights for service providers to develop suitable recruitment strategies and training programs when devising effective ethnic targeting strategies.Originality/valueThis research is among the first to explain why the effect of target marketing is not homogenous by expanding the research on intercultural accommodations toward a new context considering service involvement levels among varied minority consumer groups.

Blood in the Borderlands: Conflict, Kinship, and the Bent Family, 1821–1920 by David C. Beyreis

Reviewed by: Blood in the Borderlands: Conflict, Kinship, and the Bent Family, 1821–1920 by David C. Beyreis William S. Kiser Blood in the Borderlands: Conflict, Kinship, and the Bent Family, 1821–1920. By David C. Beyreis. ( Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. Pp. 270. Notes, bibliography, illustrations, index.) The Bents ranked among the most well-known families in the nineteenth century American West, and this book demonstrates the many ways in which brothers William and Charles—along with their wives and biracial children—navigated the region's social and cultural systems. Using kinship as an analytical framework, David Beyreis argues that "family ties and the creation of alliance networks helped the Bents become phenomenally successful businessmen" (1). Claiming that previous books on the western frontier have placed "too much emphasis on stability and intercultural accommodation" (2), the author also aims to highlight the role of conflict and violence in shaping regional affairs. Bent family members offer a compelling case study because they participated in so many formative frontier events and processes, including the fur trade, the Santa Fe trade, Mexican land grants, Texan filibustering, the U.S. invasion of New Mexico in 1846, Indian treaty councils, U.S. Army campaigns, the 1859 Pike's Peak Gold Rush, the Sand Creek Massacre, the Dawes Act, and Indian boarding schools. Each of these themes has received extensive scholarly attention, but Beyreis ties them together in a unique way with his quasi-biographical focus on a single family. Notably, this approach allows the author to place women at the center of the narrative. Readers will come away with a clear understanding of how Hispanas like María Ignacia Jaramillo (Charles Bent's partner), Indians like Owl Woman (William Bent's wife), and their culturally mixed daughters shaped the course of events in the communities and nations to which they belonged. In addition to emphasizing female actors, the author's ethnohistorical treatment of the Southern Cheyennes and Kiowas contextualizes the central roles that Southern Plains tribes played in Bent's sophisticated but precarious trade network. "Despite the firm's general profitability," Beyreis explains, "Bent, St. Vrain and Company was never the master of its own destiny" (47) because Indigenous politics and ecological phenomena usually dictated the course of regional events. While this focus on social, cultural, and gender history demonstrates some of the complexities of doing business on the western frontier, the general absence of economic analysis leaves out a significant part of the story that also helps to explain the rise and fall of this financial empire. National economic crises in the late 1830s and late 1850s, for instance, receive little treatment in this volume, nor does the concept of merchant capitalism play meaningfully into the analytical framework. Although the Bent Family had two main branches—William was closely oriented to Cheyenne society while Charles integrated into northern New [End Page 348] Mexico's Hispano community—the book focuses more on the former than the latter. Part of this is explained by the availability of source material, but an effect of such unequal treatment is a sense that one side of the family was more historically prominent than the other. Whereas William comes across in a generally positive light, marrying a Southern Cheyenne woman and embracing certain tribal customs, Charles emerges as a deeply flawed character. A veritable misfit in Nnuevomexicano society, he cohabited with but did not marry the aforementioned Jaramillo, bribed insiders and conspired with outsiders as caprice dictated, and sometimes even spoke his racist mind. As the author points out in the conclusion, Charles Bent remains a controversial figure in New Mexico. Some still see him as a martyr, while many others believe that he got what he deserved on that fateful night in January 1847 when angry Taos residents killed and scalped him before dragging his corpse through the streets of town. The fact that one brother perished prematurely in a horrific act of corporeal mutilation while the other succumbed to natural causes two decades later speaks to the complexities and controversies surrounding outsider assimilation into these borderlands societies. Well-researched and well-written, Blood in the Borderlands is a very readable account of the Bent Family. The...

Black Out-group Marriages and Hate Crime Rates: A Cross-sectional Analysis of U.S. Metropolitan Areas

Objectives: This study introduces an indicator of racial out-group marriage to the research on hate crime. Drawing upon a variant of group threat theory, we hypothesize that Black out-group marriage with Whites will be positively related to anti-Black hate crime rates insofar as such marriages are perceived as transgressions of cultural boundaries. Informed by Allport’s contact theory, we hypothesize that Black out-group marriage with Whites will be negatively related to anti-Black hate crime rates insofar as such marriages indicate intercultural accommodation. Methods: Using data for a sample of U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas circa 2010, we assess our hypotheses with two operationalizations of levels of hate crime—incidence rates and victimization rates. Results: Our results reveal that levels of Black out-group marriages with Whites are positively related to the Black hate crime victimization rate but not related to the incidence rate. Conclusions: Our analyses suggest that any salutary effect of intercultural accommodation associated with interracial marriage is overwhelmed by the influence of the perceived cultural threat and intensification of animus for the “at-risk” population for perpetrating anti-Black hate crimes.

Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America by Michael A. McDonnell

Reviewed by: Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America by Michael A. McDonnell Christophe Boucher Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America. By Michael A. McDonnell. New York, NY: Hill and Wang. 2015. With this monograph, Michael McDonnell joins a growing list of historians who have taken up Daniel Richter’s challenge to reinterpret American history by “facing east from Indian Country.” While the narrative unfolds along a familiar timeline stretching from the early 1600s to Removal, McDonnell gives a new spin to the story by recounting it from an unusual vantage point: that of the Anishinabe Odawa who lived around the straits of Michilimackinac. As a strategic gateway connecting Lakes Huron and Michigan, the region has long been of scholarly interest but no one, until now, had published a detailed ethno-history of its Odawa residents. Although he draws on familiar sources, McDonnell has nonetheless produced a work that is fresh, engaging, and provocative. His book is groundbreaking in that Native Americans are not just actors in a world changing to the beat of colonial drums, as is often the case in Native American History. His Odawa are [End Page 96] actually prime movers in American history and their actions “often changed the course of North American events” (327). McDonnell traces, for instance, the outbreak of the Seven Years War to an Anishinabe raid on a Pickawillany, a Miami village, two years before the Battle of Jumonville Glen in 1754. In his quest to re-assert the centrality of the Odawa in defining historical moments, one could accuse McDonnell of over-reaching by engaging, at times, in rather speculative exercises. But overall, by flipping the frame of reference around and focusing “on one people and one place over the long durée,” the author cleverly destabilizes the traditional master narrative by periodizing known events according to a new historical logic (6). As such, the French and Indian War unfolds in the broader context of the First Anglo-Indian War (1752–1758), a conflict initiated by and for Native Americans with Michili-mackinac––not Quebec City––as ground zero. Far from being peons in a larger imperial contest, the Anishinabeg and their allies only fought alongside the French––and later the English––as long as their interests converged. “The Odawa,” McDonnell remarks, “were able to exploit European imperialism when it came and they did so mostly for their own purposes” (15). Without indigenous support, imperial powers vacillated. In order to keep a foothold in the region, the French, British, and Americans had therefore to adapt their imperial designs to meet the expectations of their hosts, making the Odawa “Masters of Empire.” Interestingly, the Anishinabeg’s influence emanated from the fact that Europeans––and not Native Americans as the story usually goes––were dependent on the locals. Readers familiar with Richard White’s The Middle Ground will discover here a compelling counter-argument to his seminal work. Since its publication in 1991, White’s depiction of European-Indian relations in the Great Lakes region from 1650 to 1815 has had a profound historiographical impact. While scholars initially applied his model indiscriminately to other times and places, more recently, historians have highlighted its shortcomings. McDonnell’s study draws from these more recent works. Echoing Heidi Bohaker’s argument, for instance, the author rejects White’s claim that, after 1650, the Anishinabeg were refugees from Iroquois war parties. Nor did they live in a shattered world or owe their political cohesiveness to French diplomatic endeavors. Instead, they lived in a world “in flux… not in a state of collapse” where the extension of kinship networks, more than French mediation, played a central role to foster political integration among the region’s inhabitants, Indians and Europeans alike. In the colonial Great Lakes region, therefore, “the French could only follow, not lead” (91). This statement stands in sharp contrast to White’s argument that the middle ground, this zone of inter-cultural accommodation, was possible because French and Indians had similar power and none could dictate to the other. As McDonnell points out however, this perspective only reflects distortions in the records. By over-privileging ethno-historic...

Conceptualizing Multicultural Advertising Effects in the “New” South Africa

ABSTRACT Multicultural marketing is a strategic priority area for most companies in emerging consumer markets (ECMs). We develop a new conceptual framework that demonstrates how two processes influence the effectiveness of multicultural advertising, namely similarity and corporate social responsibility processes. We draw on attribution, social influence, and intercultural accommodation theories to argue that there are strong economic imperatives—expressed in terms of customer-based brand equity—for adopting a multicultural advertising approach in ECM settings. We also offer propositions regarding key framework constructs and moderating variables. This research contributes to the growing research focus on marketing communication strategies in ECMs. Further, the present research enriches our understanding of consumer behavior through the focus on the highly multicultural and unequal South African society which mirrors changing populations in other emerging and western countries.

Theorizing Intercultural Accommodation in Consumer E-Commerce

Consumer e-commerce extends the marketplace of traditional business and brings in business opportunities in online retailing and service. As a consequence of intensive competition among online vendors, the need to capture more customers has become crucial. The consumer group is under a huge change due to demographic shift and immigration laws. Population of minorities has dramatically increased suggesting a growing buying power of ethnic groups. To effectively attract ethnic consumers into consumer e-commerce Web sites, we propose the Web-based intercultural accommodation model. Drawing upon literature in linguistic, sociology, and Web information system success, this model offers a theoretical explanation of online ethnic consumers’ behavioral intention to use e-commerce Web site. The conceptual model recognizes the potential roles of ethnicity attributes of individual consumers as well as the use of ethnic pertaining Web site designs in accommodating ethnic consumers. The theoretical model is subject to empirical validation.

Usefulness of Ethnicity in International Consumer Marketing

Internationalization is the term that can characterize the current state of the consumer market in many parts of the world. The phenomenon of an internationalized consumer market is noteworthy particularly because consumer mobility beyond their national boundaries has increased resulting in a significant growth of diverse immigrant populations in the international marketplace. The theory of intercultural accommodation suggests that consumers who have relocated beyond their national/cultural boundaries adapt to the new market environment developing new consumption patterns. At the same time international consumers do not entirely lose their original ethnic identity that had guided their socialization process. The evolving nature of ethnic identity of international consumers may pose an interesting question about the usefulness of observable ethnicity as a market segmentation basis in international consumer marketing. This study examined how consumers' ethnic identity, specifically the strength of ethnic identification of those who are experiencing intercultural accommodation, influenced consumer apparel shopping orientations and retail format preferences, using a sample of Latino and Asian consumers residing in the U.S. The results of this study showed that Latino and Asian consumers demonstrated significant differences in their retail format preferences but shared similarities in apparel shopping orientations. Some differences in market behavior relative to the strength of ethnic identification were also observed within the Asian sample. Finally, implications and future research directions are discussed.

Ethnic Consumer Reaction to Targeted Marketing: A Theory of Intercultural Accommodation

Marketers are increasingly recognizing the growing power of ethnic groups, and are responding with targeted marketing efforts. Targeted communications often draw on various references to the ethnic culture in an attempt to enhance communication with and gain the approval of the intended audience. However, research on how such accommodation efforts may be received is lacking. Drawing on a variety of disciplines, the authors develop a theory of intercultural accommodation to fill that gap. The proposed model views the consumer as having both affective and attributional responses to a targeted communication. The consequences of the response are proposed to influence the consumer's evaluation, comprehension, and recall of the message, and to influence behavioral intentions toward the communicator.

Minority language group status: A theoretical conspexus

Abstract This paper is an attempt to articulate basic questions in this fragmented field in pursuit of a more interdisciplinary framework, one which recognises the important mediating roles of individual cognitions as a complement to sociostructural analyses. As an untapped resource, there is an ever‐increasing number of, admittedly diverse, theoretical models in the sociopsychological areas of ethnolinguistic differentiation, ethnic language attitudes, second language learning, intercultural accommodation, communication breakdown, ethnic values, beliefs about talk, and so forth which are relevant for a more rounded understanding of minority language situations. These will be integrated into a framework leading to a set of predictive propositions which, it is argued, will elaborate the psychosocial climate under which different degrees of group level maintenance on the one hand, and the processing of majority‐minority encounters and the kinds of interactive strategies within them on the other, will prevai...