Extract

Chae Ho Lee and Jennifer D. Chandler If [we] were to look at culture, the first thing that we would think of is people: the communication of people together . . . culture is a social creation. (Franklin, Lebanon) . . . you have to keep in mind that you are probably talking to people from 30, 40 different countries. I won’t say it makes it difficult to create advertising, actually it makes it simpler. We have to find the common denominator. (Raj, India) The purpose of this chapter is to make salient how marketers negotiate transnationalism in a Muslim market. Specifically, we explore how marketers act as guardians of continuity when they negotiate transnationalism through an evolving dialectic that encompasses notions of the global and the local (Hannerz, 1996; Wilk, 1995). We focus on marketers in the city and emirate of Dubai, in the nation of the United Arab Emirates. Dubai was chosen as an example of a progressive Muslim market that has experienced phenomenal economic and social growth (Pacione, 2005). Part of this growth has stimulated increased national, ethnic, religious, and social diversity. We refer to this diversity as transnationalism because many Dubai residents affiliate with more than one nation. Transnational individuals (that is, transnationals) who live and work in Dubai may maintain strong ties with the nation of their birth, the nation within which they currently live, or the nation where their families currently reside. Their lives take them back and forth among multiple markets, forcing them to travel space, place and time...