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.

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

Reviews
Cheris Shunching Chans Marketing Death offers an interesting perspective on cultural and economic sociology, with strong theoretical moorings. It also provides an entry into Chinas contemporary society and globally oriented sociology. The book is a fine and subtle contribution, therefore, to an array of sociological debates and conceptual stalemates, although it does not necessarily dwell on this. Its ethnographic research is very well done; it has just received an Honourable Mention from the ASA ... Chans book is therefore a piece of work which is in itself a significant achievement. At the same time, it has the rare property of making us think and feel like going further along the path the author has opened up to us. * Jose Mauricio Domingues, Sociology *



Book Information
ISBN 9780195394078
Author Cheris Shun-ching Chan
Format Hardback
Page Count 304
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 1g
Dimensions(mm) 165mm * 236mm * 31mm