Challenges in the Era of Globalization - iaabd

Proceedings of the 12th Annual Conference © 2011 IAABD
adopt mainstream culture models (Pires et al., 2006). So, as people tend to be heterogeneous in their
reactions to marketing stimuli when considered from their basic characteristics such as age, income,
gender, ethnicity, marital status and many other factors, it will be theoretically and managerially
beneficial to explore how Black African women in London would react to clothing in this new
environment when compared to those they were familiar with in their country of origin. This is especially
relevant as Rajagopalan and Heitmeyer’s (2005) findings in a study show that Christians were more
acculturated than those respondents who practiced Hindu. Also, based on their findings, Kwak and Sojka
(2010) argue that immigrants with a high degree of ethnic identification and high income, and are
younger in age are more likely to buy high-priced prestige brands. This emphasizes how intriguing
acculturation as a subject could be if considered from a broader perspective.
Immigrants are usually inundated with a myriad of choices on clothing in their host environment and
often resolve these consumption choices in various forms. For example, it has been suggested that
immigrants may find the purchase and consumption of prestige brands to be a way of establishing
themselves in a new culture (Kwak and Sojka, 2010). This is closely linked to the claim of Chattaraman
and Lennon (2008) that dress could visually indicate the subcultural ethnic affiliation of the user or on the
other hand integrate the person to the mainstream society. To be specific, Majima (2008) indicates that
the UK fashion market is widening and the development has led to more fashion competition among
women as they demand for differentiation and quicker change of variety. Given these views about the
diversity which exist concerning this phenomenon, it is important to acknowledge that complacency about
the existing knowledge on clothing consumption and women without considering ethnicity of such
consumers will offer very limited understanding and leave readers with several unanswered questions.
Methodology
In consistency with the objective of this study, the chosen paradigm for this research is Phenomenology,
while the strategy is qualitative, and the epistemological assumption is that the subject matter in social
sciences are dissimilar from what holds in the natural sciences, so the social world will require a different
logic of research procedure that takes the differences into consideration (Taylor and Bodgan, 1984;
Bryman, 2001). According to Collis and Hussey (2003) this approach provides for understanding human
behaviour from their own frame of reference. Since collecting data qualitative could be done through
several ways, in-depth interview was chosen for the study as it is a versatile way of collecting data
(Welman, et al., 2005), and suitable for gaining valuable insights into the logic, sentiments and emotional
reactions beneath the surface of information from the respondents(Hill and Wright, 2001). Hence, a total
of 20 in-depth interviews were conducted with Black African Women resident in London who were
recruited through the use of snowballing and purposive sampling method. The respondents aged between
20 and 50, and while four of them are single, the remaining 16 are married. The adequacy of the data
collected was determined with the theory of theoretical saturation which is the stage when no new idea
was forthcoming with the inclusion of additional interview (Glaser and Straus, 1967; Strauss and Corbin,
1998; Locke, 2001, Goulding, 2005).
As expected in a study of this nature, all necessary ethical issues were noted and adhered to during the
study. Observing the necessary ethical guidelines is a fundamental issue when studying other people,
especially when using qualitative studies (Malhotra and Peterson, 2001; Bulmer, 2003). The basic ethical
issues in research have been identified as issues of confidentiality, informed consent, right to privacy, and
protection from harm (Fontana and Frey, 1998; Ali and Kelly, 2004). Apart from explaining the objective
of the research to all the participants at the beginning of each of the interview, they were all promised
anonymity about the information provided. Also, all required efforts to keep participants save during the
interview were applied. This is consistent with the view of Easterby-Smith et al. (2010: 166) who contend
that ‘The most important thing to keep in mind is that under no circumstances should the researcher bring
harm to the people he or she is researching’.
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