ABSTRACT
There remain sharp contrasts between different academic disciplines in the perspectives which they hold concerning the relationship between consumer behaviour and culture. To the majority of business and marketing scientists and to many psychologists the significance of culture to the study of consumer behaviour arises from the view that it is reducible to ‘a set of learned responses’ (Engel and Blackwell 1982:73). To anthropologists and many geographers the cultural context in which retailing occurs is of interest since it underpins the plural nature of consumer behaviour. One of the most fundamental contrasts in disciplinary perspectives lies therefore in the difference between those who view ‘culture’ as a filler causing deviations from a universal model of consumer behaviour and those who seek to interpret consumer behaviour within a specific cultural setting as one manifestation of the way in which ‘human nature’ is pluralistic.
