Exploring Chinese Students’ Adaptation to Swedish Coffee Culture: A Consumer Acculturation Perspective

Abstract

This study aims to explore the consumer acculturation process of Chinese students in Sweden, with a specific focus on the role of Swedish coffee culture as a consumer culture. As Chinese students integrate into Swedish society, engaging in coffee culture, which plays a vital role in social interactions, can help them establish connections with locals and seamlessly assimilate into Swedish society. In this consumer acculturation process, it investigates the factors influencing Chinese students’ identity positions within Swedish coffee culture and society, which refer to their acculturation outcomes in these two contexts. Additionally, it also examines how these factors affect Chinese students’ identity positions within both the coffee culture and the broader Swedish society. This study gathers the literature related to Chinese beverage culture, Swedish coffee culture and consumer acculturation theories. It adopts a qualitative approach, and uses semi-structured interviews to collect data, and analyses the data to gain the factors which could influence Chinese students’ identity positions, including age, education, language skills, ethnic identity, recency of arrival, the shift of consumption environment, social inclusiveness, sources of gaining information, competition between original beverage culture and Swedish coffee culture, and discursive elements of home/host/transnational culture. The identity position of Chinese students in Swedish coffee culture is influenced by factors such as changes in their consumption environment, the inclusiveness of Sweden, the Swedish university setting and classmates which provide information, discursive elements of host/home/transnational cultures, and a positive attitude to discursive elements of home/host culture. In the broader Swedish society, their identity position is shaped by the longer time, the discursive elements of Chinese tea culture, a positive attitude to these elements, and their integration into local social circles.