WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY
MKT 7995 MODERNIZATION, CONSUMER VALUE TRANSFORMATIONS, AND
CULTURAL CHANGE IN EMERGING ECONOMIES
Spring/Summer 2003
PROFESSOR ATTILA YAPRAK
307 Prentis Building
E-mail: attila.yaprak@wayne.edu
Website address: http://www.cis.wayne.edu/cibs/yaprak/home.html
Tel: (313) 577-4842 or (313) 577-4525; Fax: (313) 577-5486
Office Hours: Mondays 13-18 and
Wednesdays 13-18 or by appointment
TEXTS:
Ronald Inglehart, Modernization,
Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in 43
Societies, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1997.
Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel
P. Huntington, Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress,
Basic Books, New York, NY, 2000.
COURSE MATERIALS ON THE WEB AND THE READING LIST:
Visit http://www.cis.wayne.edu/cibs/yaprak/home/.html
for course materials and handouts. The reading list for the course is attached
to this syllabus. You can also access it from my website.
COURSE OBJECTIVES AND CENTRAL THEME:
My objective in
this course is to inspire young managers in global, multinational, or
internationalizing enterprises to integrate the study of societal value
transformations into their analyses of markets, organizations, and consumers. To
achieve this objective, I will explore with you the relevant strands of the
literature in psychology, sociology, political science, and marketing to
generate a conceptual picture of societal value transformations and how they
affect consumer and organizational behavior. You will then participate actively
in research I am conducting in 10 emerging economies ranging from Brazil to
China and from Poland to Ukraine.
I have designed
the course to inspire in you a genuine appreciation for studying societal
behavior through multidisciplinary lenses. This is because in today’s
“internetized” world, global business operations are increasingly requiring
multiple proficiencies in managing core business processes. For example, product
development teams today are increasingly composes of members from sociology and
anthropology as well as managers from finance and engineering. They are also
increasingly icluding professionals from multiple national cultures, such as
German and American managers working together at Daimler Chrysler and American,
British, and German engineers working with anthropologists, sociologists and
demographers on new car projects at Ford Motor Company.
RATIONALE FOR TAKING THE COURSE
Globalization has become perhaps
the most significant driver of change in many dimensions of human activity and
has fostered profound transformations in the value systems of societies. A
growing body of evidence indicates that deep-rooted changes are taking place in
the attitudes, values, and beliefs of individuals, in political cultures and
democratic institutions, and in a wide array of variables such as life
expectancy, infant mortality, economic well being, life satisfaction,
nationalism, and human happiness. There is also evidence that there are links
among personal values, consumer expectations from the marketing system, and
product expectations. It is becoming increasingly clear that societies are
tracing a (more or less) predictable pattern in becoming consumption cultures,
manifested in their consumers’, organizations’ and markets’ purchase
behavior.
Yet, only a handful of marketing
programs currently offer curricula in the interdisciplinary study of societal
transformations, marketing, and consumer behavior in different societies. This
course is designed to fill this void in the marketing curriculum at Wayne State.
It is aimed at understanding the value currents in selected emerging societies
and how they shape marketing behavior ranging from the consumption of domestic
to imported goods, from changes in media viewing behavior to the changes in the
self-concepts of individuals, and from economic well being in a society to the
happiness levels of its citizens.
In light of this rationale, I have designed the course so that you will learn about:
§ Marketing products and services in turbulent, rapidly transforming environments,
§ Conducting cross-national and cross-cultural analyses to better understand the content and structure of a society’s values, and using your findings in formulating strategy, and
§
Coping with the unique challenges typically encountered in
emerging markets.
While in the course, you will
also:
COURSE
PEDAGOGY, RESOURCES AND GRADING:
The course is
designed to help you develop skills in understanding, and working with, value
transformations in emerging markets. To help achieve this, I will teach it in a lecture
and research discussion format. The lectures will present key concepts
in societal change, while your involvement in my research will sharpen your
skills in understanding, and operating in, emerging markets. Lectures
will be key in internalizing content knowledge, while research
discussions will be key in
developing the discovery and sensing skills so highly valued in management
practice. Critiques of recommended readings will help you question the findings
of frontier knowledge in the field, and lead you to new discoveries based on
current knowledge. Readings will
help shape your thinking about the subjects we will be discussing in
class, help you grasp these better, and increase the value you will gain from
the course. Intellectual involvement is, therefore, a key ingredient of
effective learning in the course.
Your course grade will be a
function of the following ingredients:
1. A group Research Project, to be completed by August 15, 2003. To fulfill this requirement, you will work with me, as a member of a research team, on an assigned component of my research in emerging economies. We will meet periodically throughout the summer and we will discuss your progress on your element of my research.
2. A group Research Paper, typically 20-30 pages, due on August 20, 2003. To complete this requirement, you will write, as a member of a team, a research paper describing the landscape literature on societal transformations and their impact on marketing strategy, critique that literature, and describe the findings from your part of my research.
I will discuss my expectations from each of these
elements in greater detail on the first day of class.
As always, you
will get out of the course what you put into it. Active participation in
research is as important as writing articulately. Active listening
and critical thinking during our class discussions are essential
skills. Understanding, challenging, and defending points of view lead to
better understanding of others’ ideas and their interpretations of phenomena
around us. While evaluating your contribution to class discussion, therefore, I
will be consider whether you were an active listener, a critical thinker, and
respectful of others’ viewpoints.
In sum, you
can achieve maximum learning in this course by being an active reader,
making full use of the research opportunity and the resources provided you, and
writing the very best paper you can write on your research as articulately as
possible.
COURSE OUTLINE:
1.
Globalization, Changing Values and Changing Societies (May
2003)
Globalization and “modernization”, changing values and changing
societies, individual-level and societal-level change, value systems and their
measurement, shifts from traditional to materialist and from materialist to
post-materialist values and the antecedents, processes, and outcomes of these
shifts, explaining predicted vs. observed shifts, trajectories of social change.
Inglehart: Chapters 1,2,10 and 11.
Harrison and Huntington: Readings# 19,20 and 21.
Reading List #s
1 through 5.
2. Why Cultural Transformations Matter (June 2003)
Culture and economic
and political development, the sociology and cultural typology of economic
development, cultural antecedents of democracy, moral maps in societies,
culture, institutions, gender and human values, culture, mental models, and
national prosperity, promoting progressive cultural change, culture and the
behavior of “cultural elites” and “parochial”, “cosmopolitan”,
“local” and “global” consumers, culture and modernization in 65
societies.
Inglehart:
Chapters 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Harrison
and Huntington: Readings # 1-14, 17, 18. Reading
List #s 6 through 10.
3. Value Systems, Cultural Transformations and Marketing (July
2003)
Theories of the content and structure of values, becoming a consumer society, value systems segmentation, understanding the cultural values manifest in marketing functions, cosmopolitan consumer behavior, merits of alternative methods of measuring personal values in a society, nationalist, patriotic, internationalist, ethnocentric, geocentric, and cosmopolitan value profiles, ethnic dominance vs. ethnic pluralism, affects of all of these on marketing in emerging economies.
Inglehart: Chapter 4. Harrison and Huntington: Reading List #s 15,16.
Reading
List #s 11 through 15.
4. Wrap up Research Work and Term Paper (August 2003)