Creating a market in the presence of cultural resistance: the case of life insurance in China

Abstract

This article brings together two different conceptions of culture-a shared meaning system on one hand and a repertoire of strategies on the other-to understand the emergence of a market. Based on ethnographic data, it examines how a Chinese life insurance market is emerging in the presence of incompatible shared values and ideas acting as cultural barriers, and how these cultural barriers shape the formation of the market. The findings reveal a burgeoning Chinese life insurance market despite local cultural logics incompatible with the profit-oriented institutional logic of life insurance. This Chinese market, however, has developed along a different trajectory from what might be expected. It first emerged as a money management, rather than a risk management, market. I argue that the very cultural barriers that compose the local resistance to a new economic practice also necessitate the mobilization of the cultural tool-kit to circumvent this resistance. These dual processes, shared ideas composing the resistance and the cultural tool-kit circumventing the resistance, shape the trajectory and characteristics of an emergent market. I propose a theoretical model specifying the mechanisms through which the two forms of culture interplay to influence the development of the life insurance. I apply this model to extend Zelizer's (1979) insights and discuss how culture matters in forging a new market in the global diffusion of capitalism.In the case of life insurance the trick was to sell futures -pessimistic futures (Zelizer 1979:153).[The Chinese] see accidents as being far removed from their lives. They've seen accidents happen, but insist that that kind of misfortune would not happen to them (A general manager of a foreign life insurer in Shanghai 2001).

Marketing and compromising for sustainability

“…Further, where Chan (2009) andGiesler (2008) show how consumers and commercial players draw on cultural resources, respectively, to resist and drive market evolution in dialectic moves, we add that in many markets, materials shape these trajectories strongly. In Giesler's case of music downloading, Digital Rights Management copyright protection mechanisms could be seen as a material compromise of sorts between the sharing and owning logics.…”

“…In our introduction, we identified three conceptual gaps in extant marketing and organisational literature on conflicts and compromises: how a market copes with logics external and irreducible to its own; the role of materiality in tests of worth; and how actors justify and compromise across competing logics pragmatically in moments of exchange. By addressing these three gaps, we build on and extend existing research on competing logics in markets, which has focused mainly on cultural (Chan, 2009;Giesler, 2008Giesler, , 2012, institutional (Ertimur and Coskuner-Balli, 2015;Murray, 2010) or discursive (Patriotta et al, 2011) processes. Ertimur and Coskuner-Balli (2015) focus on legitimacy and power struggles over the plural logics of spirituality, fitness and commerce in the US yoga market.…”

Ups and downs of art commerce: narratives of “crisis” in the contemporary art markets of Russia and India

“…It pays attention to the local rationalities of markets under consideration in order to explain the variation in configuration of markets of various goods and services (cf. Almeling 2011;Chan 2009Chan , 2012Velthuis 2005), in different places (cf. Wherry 2008), at different times (cf.…”

The strength of interconnectedness between structure and culture: market development in the presence of over-embedded social structure in the lime market of Hui Town

“…In fact, Weber (2006bWeber ( [1925) articulates a set of market ethics that regulates transactions, while North endorses the importance of ideologies that can help overcome problems of speculation and free-ridership (North 1992(North [1981) as well as those of informal constraints (North 1994(North [1990). Some empirical sociological research on markets has provided evidence that cultural factors, such as moral values, social norms, meaning systems, and traditional rules, play an indispensable role in the emergence of market institutions, the acquisition of profits, and the formation of new markets (Zelizer 1978(Zelizer , 1985Ferraro 2006;Fligstein 2008Fligstein [2002Chan 2009aChan , 2009b.…”