Marketing Death

1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-0-19-539407-8
Verlag: ACADEMIC

Buch, Englisch, 288 Seiten, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 622 g

This book is the first book documenting and examining the creation of a life insurance market in an Asian society, drawing on hundreds of interviews.

When the topic of death is a taboo subject to a population, how can life insurance companies create a market for their business? In Marketing Death, Cheris Shun-ching Chan examines the development of the life insurance market in China to address how culture impacts economic practice. Based on an extensive ethnographic study of various life insurance companies in China, Chan found a clear disparity in the way transnational and domestic life insurers dealt with local resistance to the
idea of insuring against early death. While the transnational insurers attempted to remove this resistance by introducing new concepts about risk management, the locally-founded insurers redefined these concepts as money management to avoid the taboo subject. The domestic players' strategies proved
to be more effective, but conflicted with the profit-oriented institutional logic of life insurance in the Chinese context. Having learned a lesson from significant losses, the domestic insurers eventually collaborated with their transnational counterparts to create a risk-management market. Nonetheless, local potential buyers, with their ingrained cultural values, continue to negotiate with insurance providers about their preferred product features. Chan argues that the life insurance business
is growing rapidly in China despite these incompatible local cultural values largely because insurance practitioners strategically mobilized the local cultural tool-kit to circumvent the resistance. In Chan's account, the interplay of two forms of culture--a shared meaning system on one hand and a
repertoire of strategies on the other--has significantly shaped the trajectory of the emergent Chinese market.

Marketing Death is the first book to offer an analysis of the emergence of a life insurance market outside of the Euro-American context. It documents the processes and politics by which local cultures shape the way a market is formed and, hence, sheds light on the dynamics through which modern capitalist enterprises diffuse to regions with different cultural traditions.

Zielgruppe

Scholars and students of economic sociology, organizations, cultural sociology, and China.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Chan

Shun-ching Chan, Cheris

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Wirtschaftssoziologie, Arbeitssoziologie, Organisationssoziologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Kultursoziologie
• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Finanzsektor & Finanzdienstleistungen Versicherungswirtschaft

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Abbreviations and Glossary
Introduction
Chapter 1 Is China an Inviting Place for Life Insurance?
Societal Conditions, the Market, and Remaining Puzzles
Chapter 2 Defining Life Insurance and Product Development:
Divergent Institutional Logics
Chapter 3 Manufacturing Sales Agents:
Cultural Capital and Management Strategies
Chapter 4 Making Transactions:
Selling Strategies and Sales Discourses
Chapter 5 Buying Life Insurance:
Multiple Motives but Consistent Preferences
Chapter 6 How Culture Matters:
Culture, Market, and Globalization
Appendix A: Methods
Appendix B: A List of Life Insurance Companies in China
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Shun-ching Chan, Cheris
Cheris Shun-ching Chan is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong.

Cheris Shun-ching Chan, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Hong Kong

Cheris Shun-ching Chan is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong