37  2009 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc. ● Vol. 37 ● June 2010 All rights reserved. 0093-5301/2010/3701-0004$10.00. DOI: 10.1086/649759 Toward a Theory of Status Consumption in Less Industrialized Countries TUBA U ¨ STU ¨ NER DOUGLAS B. HOLT How does status consumption operate among the middle classes in less indus- trialized countries (LICs)—those classes that have the spending power to partic- ipate effectively in consumer culture? Globalization research suggests that Bour- dieu’s status consumption model, based upon Western research, does not provide an adequate explanation. And what we call the global trickle-down model, often invoked to explain LIC status consumption, is even more imprecise. We study the status consumption strategies of upper-middle-class Turkish women in order to revise three of Bourdieu’s most important concepts—cultural capital, habitus, and consumption field—to propose a theory specific to the LIC context. We demonstrate that cultural capital is organized around orthodox practice of the Western Lifestyle myth, that cultural capital is deterritorialized and so accrues through distant text- book-like learning rather than via the habitus, and that the class faction with lower cultural capital indigenizes the consumption field to sustain a national social hierarchy. U nderstanding the mechanics and social consequences of consumption used to express social class posi- tion—which, following popular convention, we term status consumption—has long been the center of a rich theoretical debate (Bourdieu 1984; Lamont 1992; Simmel 1904/1957; Veblen 1899/1970). We argue that this research stream has a crucial limitation: key empirical studies have focused on consumption patterns in Europe and the United States to formulate a nomothetic theory that is posited to be universal, including application to less industrialized countries (LICs). Consumer culture theory demonstrates that a contextual ap- proach to theory development often leads to more precise and powerful explanations (Arnould and Thompson 2005; for examples, see Arnould 1989; Holt 1998; U ¨ stu ¨ner and Holt 2007). And research on cultural globalization has alerted us to the distinctive characteristics of consumption in LICs. So it is unlikely that a Western model of status Tuba U ¨ stu ¨ner is assistant professor of marketing at Colorado State Uni- versity, Fort Collins, CO 80523 (tuba.ustuner@business.colostate.edu). Douglas B. Holt is the L’Oreal Professor of Marketing at the Said Business School at the University of Oxford, Park End Street, Oxford OX1 1HP (doug.holt@sbs.ox.ac.uk). The authors thank S ¸ erife Genis ¸, Barıs ¸ Gu ¨mu ¨s ¸- Dawes, Yıldırım S ¸ entu ¨rk, Janet Borgerson, Jonathan Schroeder, and the participants of Exeter Business School’s research day for their useful com- ments. The Cass Business School provided research funding to the first author to complete this study. David Mick served as editor and Eric Arnould served as associate editor for this article. Electronically published December 30, 2009 consumption is adequate for LICs. Thus, our aim in this study is to pursue a contextual theory of status consumption in LICs—analyzing the particular characteristics of status con- sumption that are distinctive compared to theory grounded in American and European consumption research—in order to build a more accurate and precise theory. Understanding how status consumption works in LICs is particularly consequential today given the rapid emergence of a “new consumer” class in these countries—estimated at over 1.2 billion people, bigger than the West already, and expanding much more rapidly (Myers and Kent 2004). This emergent global class has discretionary purchasing power approaching Western levels and so they are able to pursue a consumption-focused lifestyle. These new consumers have recently become the most prized target of multinational com- panies, as they seek growth opportunities beyond saturated Western markets. These new consumers also pose a crucial challenge in the global struggle to manage climate change. To the extent that the new consumers identify with and seek to emulate the carbon-intensive Western lifestyle, the chal- lenge of addressing global warming becomes that much harder. In this study, we advance a theory that is tailored to explain the particular mechanics of status consumption among this “new class” in LICs. We examine the status consumption strategies of exemplary LIC new consum- ers—upper-middle-class women in Turkey. We leverage in- sights from the cultural globalization literature to revise three key constructs in Bourdieuian status consumption the- ory—cultural capital, habitus, and social field—in order to