Ela Veresiu, a Schulich School of Business assistant professor of marketing, recently received the 2019 Sidney J. Levy Award at the annual Consumer Culture Theory Conference held in Montreal.
Ela Veresiu
The award is for her research paper titled “Beyond Acculturation: Multiculturalism and the Institutional Shaping of an Ethnic Consumer Subject,” which was published in the Journal of Consumer Research.
“It is a real honour for my research on multiculturalism and ethnic consumption to be recognized by the Consumer Culture Theory Consortium, as well as to join past award winners, all of whom I greatly admire,” Veresiu said.
This research project, a collaboration with her colleague Markus Giesler, an associate professor of marketing, brings to light a marketplace that turns visible minorities’ cultures into fetishized consumption objects. Following an in-depth ethnographic and institutional investigation of Canada’s multicultural marketplace, the authors find four consumer socialization strategies (envisioning, exemplifying, equipping and embodying) used by Canadian politicians, market researchers, retailers and consumers to create an ideal citizen: the ethnic consumer. Overall, the researchers find that this market-based form of multiculturalism fosters marketplace inclusion without necessarily resource redistribution.
The Sidney J. Levy Award competition is held annually in honour of one of the founding fathers of a branch of consumer research called consumer culture theory. It honours outstanding dissertations using qualitative methodologies published in top-tier academic journals.