2019/02/05 by Haipeng Jin, Gianna Moscardo, Laurie Murphy
Business, Management and Accounting · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Advertising #Business #Business practice #China #Customer Service Quality and Loyalty #Destinations #Diverse Aspects of Tourism Research #Geography #Guanxi #Marketing #Political science #Psychology #Qualitative research #Religious Tourism and Spaces #Social media #Social practice #Sociology #Tourism #Unit (ring theory)
paper · doi:10.1177/0047287519826303
openalex publication_date 2019/02/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Chinese tourist shopping reflects the new consumer culture in contemporary China, but remains underexplored in the tourism literature despite its importance to many destinations. The present study applies social practice theory to tourist shopping research with the aim of exploring the key features of Chinese tourist shopping in Australia. Tourist shopping as a social practice is the basic unit of analysis, while tourists are decentralized as carriers of this practice. This study employed a qualitative methodology to analyze shopping-related posts in 40 travel blogs from two Chinese online travel communities. The findings show that tourist shopping practice consists of four interconnected elements: materials, competences, meanings, and settings—with utilitarian products purchased in large quantities and maintaining guanxi emerging as unique features of the Chinese tourist shopping practices. The article concludes with a discussion of the potential of social practice theory to enhance theoretical approaches in this area.