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Intercultural household food tensions: a relational dialectics analysis

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>2018
<mark>Journal</mark>European Journal of Marketing
Issue number12
Volume52
Number of pages23
Pages (from-to)2289-2311
Publication StatusPublished
Early online date26/09/18
<mark>Original language</mark>English

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 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 emphasize the importance of understanding how the family relational culture develops in the creation of family food practices. Marketers can look to 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 synthesize 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, a stability-change dialectic is experienced and negotiated, while at the relationship’s nexus with the couple’s social ecology, negotiating a conventionality-uniqueness dialectic enables them reproduce or depart from societal conventions, and thus facilitate social change.

Bibliographic note

This article is (c) Emerald Group Publishing and permission has been granted for this version to appear here. Emerald does not grant permission for this article to be further copied/distributed or hosted elsewhere without the express permission from Emerald Group Publishing Limited.