“My Possessions are Mine and Your Possessions are Mine too.”
Using Hong Kong Chinese Consumers’ Narratives to Illuminate the Boundaries
between Extended Possessions and the Extended Self
Phoebe Wong, Lancaster University
Margaret K. Hogg, Lancaster University
Contact information:
Phoebe Wong
p.wong@lancaster.ac.uk
Department of Marketing
Lancaster University
LA1 4YX
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“My Possessions are Mine and Your Possessions are Mine too.”
Using Hong Kong Chinese Consumers’ Narratives to Illuminate the Boundaries
between Extended Possessions and the Extended Self
Extended Abstract
Possessions and the extended self (Belk, 1988) have received extensive attention in consumer
research. Belk (1984) has suggested that there are different cultural interpretations of the
concepts of self and possessions. Western studies have focused on objects that demonstrate
consumers’ interpersonal ties (Wallendorf and Arnould, 1988, Csikszentmihalyi and
Rochberg-Halton, 1981, Dittmar, 1989, Richins, 1994, Schultz et al., 1989). Eastern research,
in contrast, has suggested a different set of boundaries between the self and possessions
compared with Western findings i.e.: “a little of you in me and a little of me in you” (Yang
1994: 297). In this paper, we aim to address this research gap in our understanding of what
constitutes both the extended self and potentially extended possessions in Hong Kong Chinese
culture; and investigate the nature of the boundaries between the extended self and
possessions for Hong Kong Chinese consumers.
Chinese consumers tend to place more emphasis on the interdependent view of the selfconstrual that focuses on togetherness and embeddedness with significant others or in-groups
(Triandis, 1989, Markus and Kitayama, 1991). The Chinese sense of self is defined mainly by
webs of relationships (Morris, 1994) and is constructed by the connectedness to and
interpersonal relationships with significant others, family and friends (Aaker and
Maheswaran, 1997) so that an individual with the interdependent self-construal becomes “a
single thread in a richly textured fabric of relationships” (Kondo 1990:33).
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Possessions are artefacts of the self (Kleine et al., 1995). “Self-artefacts help narrate stories
of the self and reflect self-developmental tasks similar to those underlying life narratives”
(Kleine et al 1995, p. 341). People reveal different aspects of their selves by retelling stories
of their possessions. According to Schultz et al (1989) and Kleine et al (1995), possessions
involve many aspects of people’s self-development tasks, e.g. affiliation, autonomy and
temporal orientations. Affiliation possessions are related to the interdependent self where
people establish interpersonal connections with others in their culture through shared
meanings. Autonomy possessions are often associated with the independent self, where
people seek to establish autonomy from others and also to maintain a personal and unique
identity. In addition, gift-receipts are often regarded as people important possessions “as a
positive extension of self” (Belk 1988: 150). Gift-giving plays a substantial part in Chinese
culture in terms of maintaining, harmonizing and enhancing interpersonal relationships in
social systems (Wong & Ahuvia 1998, Belk and Coon 1993). As Yang (1994) noted the
importance of gift-giving in Chinese society as “primacy and binding power of personal
relationships and their importance in meeting the needs and desires of everyday life” (p. 6).
In the present study, informants were asked to share stories about their meaningful and
important possessions. Their selves and identities are embedded in their stories as
Georgakopoulou (2002) says that “if selves and identities are constituted in discourse, they
are necessarily constructed in stories” (p. 428). The snowball technique was used in
identifying twenty informants (ten males, ten females). Data analysis yielded a number of
themes that revealed how informants interpreted what constituted their important, often
extended, possessions and their extended selves.
Our findings showed that informants narrated stories not only about the gifts that they
themselves had received as being their important possessions and thus constituting part of
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their extended self; but they also described objects that they had given as gifts to close others
as part of their own possessions and these extended possessions thus constituted part of their
own extended selves. Possessions create different layers of symbolic ties to other people. We
examine informants’ stories about their personal relationships with close others in relation to
two dimensions: firstly “Gift-receipts as part of the informant’s important possessions”; and
secondly “Gifts to close others still regarded as part of the informant’s important
possessions”.
The objective of this research was to explore the boundaries between the extended self and
extended possessions i.e. what constituted ownership of what might be called extended
possessions among Chinese consumers. Against the backdrop of Chinese interdependent
culture, Hong Kong informants narrated stories about their important possessions ranging
from objects that they owned to objects that actually belonged to close others, not to the
informants themselves. Our research findings reveal that a broader interpretation of
possessions and the extended self (as seen from these Hong Kong stories) could contribute to
and enhance the existing literature on possessions and the extended self.
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