Intercultural household food tensions: a relational dialectics analysis

Abstract

Purpose Recent global migration trends have led to an increased prevalence, and new patterning, of intercultural family configurations. This paper is about intercultural couples and how they manage tensions associated with change as they settle in their new cultural context. The focus is specifically on the role food plays in navigating these tensions and the effects on the couples’ relational cultures. Design/methodology/approach A qualitative relational–dialectic approach is taken for studying Polish–Irish intercultural couples. Engagement with relevant communities provided multiple points of access to informants. Findings Intercultural tensions arise as the couples jointly transition, and food consumption represents implicit tensions in the household’s relational culture. Such tensions are sometimes resolved, but sometimes not, leading to enduring tensions. Dialectical movement causes change, which has developmental consequences for the couples’ relational cultures. Research limitations/implications This study shows how the ways that tensions are addressed are fundamental to the formation of a relational family identity. Practical implications Recommendations emphasise the importance of understanding how the family relational culture develops in the creation of family food practices. Marketers can look at the ways of supporting the intercultural couple retain tradition, while smoothly navigating their new cultural context. Social policy analysts may reflect on the ways that the couples develop an intercultural identity rooted in each other’s culture, and the range of strategies to demonstrate they can synthesise and successfully negotiate the challenges they face. Originality/value Dealing simultaneously and separately with a variety of dialectical oppositions around food, intercultural couples weave together elements from each other’s cultures and simultaneously facilitate both relational and social change. Within the relationship, stability–change dialectic is experienced and negotiated, while at the relationship’s nexus with the couple’s social ecology, negotiating conventionality–uniqueness dialectic enables them reproduce or depart from societal conventions, and thus facilitate social change.

Shifting Arrays of a Kaleidoscope: The Orchestration of Relational Value Cocreation in Service Systems

“…From SD logic and systemic perspectives, families are characterized in terms of institutional orders or arrangements or the “socially constructed, historical patterns of cultural symbols and material practices including assumptions, values, and beliefs, by which individuals and organizations provide meaning to their daily activity, organize time and space, and reproduce their lives and experiences” (Friedland and Alford 1991, cited in Vargo and Lusch 2016, p. 13). From a relational perspective, families are seen as central relational units comprising interdependent actors in service systems (Epp and Price 2008; Rogan, Piacentini, and Hopkinson 2018). Family members form “contingent relations across time to produce an emergent whole with a collective identity” (Price and Epp 2016, p. 60) and maintain a range of individual, collective, and relational goals in relation to value cocreation (Epp and Price 2011).…”

Relational dialectics: researching change in intercultural families

“…We also provide an example of an indigenous dialectic that is peculiar to the families in our study. These insights are important, especially as the family is increasingly considered by many consumer researchers as having a unique relational culture (Rogan et al, 2018;Lindridge et al, 2016;Cross and Gilly, 2013;Epp and Price, 2008). Gross (2005) observed that family practices are embedded in culture and history; practices are also a site for family change (Byng-Hall, 1995;Samuel and Thompson, 1996) in that the myths and stories that are repeated within the family facilitate change.…”

“…Kalmijn (1998, p. 396) observed that intercultural partnerships were not just unions between two individuals but also "an intimate link between two social groups". Consumer researchers have highlighted tensions that intercultural couples have experienced in the early stages of their relationships, for example, around weddings (Nelson and Otnes, 2005;Nelson and Deshpande, 2004) and around food consumption (Rogan et al, 2018;Cross and Gilly, 2013). Baxter (1993) categorises a common set of contradictions, tensions or dialectics that must be negotiated in creating new units as internal and external.…”

“…Researchers have also focussed on different formulations of family identity and how it is negotiated across cultural settings (Edirisingha et al, 2015;Wong and Hogg, 2013). In exploring intercultural families, Rogan et al (2018), showed that intercultural consumption tensions arose as the couples jointly transition. Cross and Gilly (2013), found that the usual compromises around food consumption that all spouses face were amplified when one spouse is displaced from another country.…”

Brokering Intercultural Relations in the Rainbow Nation: Introducing Intercultural Marketing

“…Meanings aligned with values, norms and symbols characteristic of particular cultural groups reflected in targeted advertising appeals (Johnson and Grier 2011; Kipnis et al 2013), store offerings or spectacles (Regany and Emontspool 2017) and exposure to consumption practices (Luedicke 2015) can evoke delegitimizing responses from both: a) target consumer groups who may interpret these marketing actions as insincere ‘quick-fix’ attempts to gain their custom without advancing their marketplace and social inclusion (Licsandru and Cui 2018; Regany and Emontspool 2017); and b) non-target consumer groups who feel alienated and contest the legitimacy of these meanings due to concerns over the “crumbling of their [culture] authority” (Luedicke 2015, p. 109). Conversely, the availability of offerings catering to cultural diversity stimulates the legitimization of meanings and practices associated with a given culture represented in a marketplace or of new meanings and practices (for example, synthesized food practices of intercultural families - Rogan, Piacentini, and Hopkinson 2018). When integrating offerings associated with meanings significant to their background and shared cultural practices, consumers enact a context of ‘shared understanding’ (Cross and Gilly 2017).…”