KOREASCHOLAR

This paper establishes the link between the “World of Barbie” and its influence in shaping the mindset of young, educated, urban Indian girls born post 1985 to belong to an albeit Transnational Imagined Community. Barbie, launched in India in 1985 by Mattel Toys India Ltd, quickly captured the mind, hearts and lives of young girls in the age 4-8years. Girls in the urban affluent Indian households became addicted to this “World of Barbie” and have enthusiastically imbibed the Barbie culture. Barbie, as Macdougall (2003) calls is a “Transnational Commodity”, has changed the way young Indian girls think of themselves belonging to a “Transnational Imagined Community”’ – be it the type of outfit they wear, how they converse with their peers, the way they define ‘glamour’ or ‘well-turned out’, or their aspired future state. The authors conducted a research amongst English speaking educated urban Indian affluent girls born between 1985 and 1998 who have internalized the “World of Barbie” which includes fashion accessories, bath sets, kitchen accessories etc. and enquired into how young girls think beyond their immediate environment , so as to delve deeper into the seminal work of Anderson(1983) on “Imagined Communities”. The present paper adopts the mix method research approach. Study 1 (Depth Interview) uses the deep understanding principle of case study research. Case study research is knowledge of “sense-making” processes created by individuals for a given stimuli (Woodside, 2010). Theory is built using case study research (CSR). “CSR method is an inquiry that focuses on describing, understanding, predicting, and/or controlling the individual” (Woodside (2010). Using CSR approach, Study 2 (focus group discussion) with Control group (girls not played with Barbie) and Research group (played with Barbie) was conducted. The authors used interpretive phenomenological analysis to infer the transcripts to understand the influence of “World of Barbie” on Transnational Imagined Community. Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) explores in detail how participants are making sense of their personal and social world; the inferences were given conceptual code as following factors viz.,i) Past memories with Barbie, ii) Possession Attachment iii) Personal Internalization, iv) Behavioral Manifestation v) Global Imagined Community. The study 3 was fixed point (Likert type) survey analysis. The questionnaire consisted of 35 questions covering above mentioned factors. The final survey was conducted with sample size of N= 315. Structural equation modeling was used to derive the results. To conclude, ‘home country culture’ into which the respondent is born is seen to be malleable if internalization of certain alien culturalartifacts are positively imbibed into early childhood. The process of internalization of this new culture should be embedded in early childhood memories to bring about this cultural transformation in adulthood. This process of reculturation in the young urban Indian girls has been facilitated through the ‘World of Barbie’ helping their mindset to migrate into a distinctly different global culture as defined in the Transnational Imagined Community.

• Isaac Jacob(K J Somaiya Institute of Management Studies & Research, India)
• Monica Khanna(K J Somaiya Institute of Management Studies & Research, India)
• Krupa Rai(K J Somaiya Institute of Management Studies & Research, India)