Saving 'Face' in China: Modernization, Parental Pressure and Plastic Surgery
We argue that in a modernizing China culturally embedded values in consumption are increasingly representing an individualistic Western ideal. The extreme of this ideal is the consumption of the body through plastic surgery and the construction of an identity reflective of wider societal changes. Using an ethno-consumerist methodology and interviewing women in Shanghai, our findings indicated that participants were encouraged to undertake operations through environmental pressures and drawing upon traditional cultural hierarchies, i.e. parents. Plastic surgery was used then to construct a future biography of themselves as the embodiment of a new China: perfect, successful and wealthy.
Citation:
Andrew Lindridge and Congying Wang (2006) ,"Saving 'Face' in China: Modernization, Parental Pressure and Plastic Surgery", in AP - Asia-Pacific Advances in Consumer Research Volume 7, eds. Margaret Craig Lees, Teresa Davis, and Gary Gregory, Sydney, Australia : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: .
Authors
Andrew Lindridge, Manchester Business School, UK
Congying Wang, Manchester Business School, UK
Volume
AP - Asia-Pacific Advances in Consumer Research Volume 7 | 2006
Share Proceeding
Featured papers
See MoreFeatured
Communicate Healthiness Through Indirect Measures: The Effect of Food in Motion Figure on the Perceived Healthiness of Food
Moty Amar, Ono Academic College (OAC)
Yaniv Gvili, Ono Academic College (OAC)
Aner Tal, Ono Academic College (OAC)
Featured
N5. Mixed Feelings, Mixed Baskets: How Emotions of Pride and Guilt Drive the Relative Healthiness of Sequential Food Choices
Julia Storch, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Koert van Ittersum, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Jing Wan, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Featured
Doing Worse by Doing Good: How Corporate Social Responsibility makes Products Less Dangerous
Linda Lemarié, University of Neuchâtel
Florent Girardin, University of Neuchâtel