KOREASCHOLAR

CAN BUYING FAKES MAKE YOUA BAD PERSON? THE (RE)SIGNIFICATION OF CONSUMER MORAL IDENTITY THROUGH ENGAGING IN COUNTERFIETING IN HONG KONG

Magnum Lam, Wing-sun Liu, Cliff Liu, Eric Li
  • LanguageENG
  • URLhttp://db.koreascholar.com/Article/Detail/315241
Global Marketing Conference
2016 Global Marketing Conference at Hong Kong (2016.07)
pp.1593-1596
글로벌지식마케팅경영학회 (Global Alliance of Marketing & Management Associations)
Abstract

Over the past two decades, consumer moralism, or moralism about consumption in a broad sense, has received much academic attention in answer to the growing concern for fair-trade, corporate social responsibility, environmental sustainability, and other anti-consumption initiatives and movements (McGregor, 2006; Newholm and Shaw, 2007). This theoretical trajectory not only pay attention to how everyday consumption practice is shaped by and help shape certain sorts of ethical dispositions (Clive et al., 2005), but it also extends to the understanding of the intertwined relationship between morality, consumption, and consumers’ identity narratives (Thompson, 2011). While previous research has focused on understanding moral consumption as a politically and morally motivated collective practice (Luedicke et al., 2010; Thompson, 2007), limited research has been done on revealing how personal moral identity project institutionalize and contest the socio-cultural power structure through ascribing social meanings in consumption practice to legitimatize seemingly unethical behavior in the marketplace (Brace-Govan and Binary, 2010). This research concerned the creation and negotiation of moralistic identities among a group of young consumers in Hong Kong who engaged in counterfeit consumption. We focused on how consumers strategically appropriate moralistic meanings in their everyday counterfeit consumption, in which their identity work utilized these ‘alternative’ market resources to echoed with, or even reproduce, the entrenched Chinses social relationships and marketplace ideological conditions (Giesler and Veresiu, 2014; Luedicke et al., 2010).

Author
  • Magnum Lam(Technological and Higher Education Institute of Hong Kong, HKSAR)
  • Wing-sun Liu(The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, HKSAR)
  • Cliff Liu(HKSAR)
  • Eric Li(University of British Columbia, Canada)