The Research Centre of the Faculty of Economics
cordially invites you to a research seminar
on Thursday, 5th February 2015 at 12 p.m. in room P-109 at the
Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana
Author: asist. dr. Gregor Pfajfar, FELU
Coauthors: Aviv Shoham, Anil Nihat, Ossi Pessäma, Maja Makovec Brenčič
will present the article:
"Fashion and face consciousness - evidence from a
cross-cultural study"
“Fashion and brand preferred consumption always attracted special attention of
academic researchers (e.g. Liao & Wang, 2009; Pookulangara & Shephard, 2013),
some even claiming brand consciousness to be the most influential factor on
consumption (Zhang & Kim, 2013). Although its definition may be universal
(the extent of an individual’s interest in and attention to the latest fashion trends;
Manrai et al., 2001), there are reported market differences in fashion
consciousness between developed and less developed countries (Parker,
Hermans & Schaefer, 2004). For example, consumers in Eastern Europe have
always been interested in Western style, thus their exposure to Western brands
and advertising affected consumer values to change from former collectivist to
individualistic values (Manrai et al., 2001). The key to explain these cultural
differences in behavioral sciences holds in culture-specific values, mianzi or face
in particular (Zhang, Doom & Leeflang, 2014). People in Eastern societies are
under constant pressure to live up to expectations of others in order to “save
face” (Parker, Hermans & Schaefer, 2004). As “face” refers to “a sense of
favourable social self-worth that a person wants to maintain in relational and
network contexts” (Zhang, Doom & Leeflang, 2014), people with high face
consciousness will care more about their self-image and others’ appraisal (Liao &
Wang, 2009).
A call for a good measurement instrument for the face consciousness (Bao,
Zhou & Su, 2003) led us to expand the set of proposed cultural dimensions
elaborated in the previous literature to independence, power and social
inequality as cultural-specific antecedents (these were selected as they are social
norms highly rooted in the culture) to face consciousness. We believe that
fashion is a good proxy of culture. Thus, our goal is to propose a new model,
evaluating the interconnectivity between face consciousness, interpersonal
influence, fashion consciousness and brand consciousness. We claim that
fashion is determined by our cultural orientations and is strengthened by how
we communicate through others and our brands. The results are based on multicountry data from Slovenia, Israel and Turkey. Altogether 535 consumers’
responses were included in the analysis. Structural equation modeling was used
to test the model. The data supported the model in all three countries. Face
consciousness was proven to have a significant positive relationship on fashion
consciousness to the highest extend in Turkey and on brand consciousness in
Israel. Contrary to our expectations, independence and its expected positive
relationship on face were not supported in any of the three countries. The value
of this paper is that it posits face and fashion consciousness under the loop of
different cultural communication antecedents, offering important implications
for cross-cultural research.”
You can register for the free seminar by phone (01) 58-92-490, or via e-mail:
research.seminars@ef.uni-lj.si by Wednesday, 4th February 2015.
We look forward to seeing you!