Xenocentrism is the preference for the products, styles, or ideas of someone else's culture rather than of one's own. One example is the romanticization of the noble savage in the 18th-century primitivism movement in European art, philosophy and ethnography. Xenocentrism is countered by ethnocentrism, the perceived superiority of one's own society to others. Both xenocentrism and ethnocentrism are a subjective take on Cultural relativism.
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Origin of the term
Xenocentrism was coined by American sociologists Donald P. Kent and Robert G. Burnight in the 1952 paper "Group Centrism in Complex Societies" published in the American Journal of Sociology. Kent and Burnight state that feelings of xenocentrism are caused by three possible factors; individuals who have familial ties to a foreign country, specifically 2nd or 3rd generation immigrants, those who oppose the political choices of their native country, an example of this being the Communist Party USA whom idealized the Soviet Union and its anti-capitalist government, and individuals who are exposed to other cultures and grow disenchanted with and rebel against their own society. The term remained obscure but considered useful and occasionally used by other sociologists. The University of Florida treats it as a key term of Sociology.
The term is opposed to ethnocentrism, as coined by 19th-century American sociologist William Graham Sumner, which describes the natural tendencies of an individual to place disproportionate worth upon the values and beliefs of one's own culture relative to others.
Consumer Xenocentrism
In his doctoral dissertation, Steven James Lawrence suggests xenocentrism may be an influential in making consumers buying decisions as they might have "favorable orientations to products from outside their membership group.
Puja Mondal cited some examples from India:
"People in India often assume that British lifestyle (dress pattern, etc.), French fashion or Japanese electronic devices (TV, tape recorders, mobile set, washing machines, etc.) and Swiss watches are superior to their own."
Grace Susetyo suggests "the idea that foreign cultures and their elements are superior to the local" causes a crisis of cultural identity among Western-educated Indonesians and is a problem that needs to be eradicated.
Lawrence uses the definition of xenocentrism, conceived by Kent and Burnight, to describe consumer behavior and propose a potential scale, CXENO, to predict trends. George Balabanis and Adamantios Diamantopoulos latered confirmed consumer xenocentrism to be a multi-dimensional construct by which to explain consumer affinities for foreign products. They define consumer xenocentrism to be rooted in two concpets, perceived inferiority of domestic goods and aggrandized perception of foreign products. Economists have have begun to include consumer xenocentrism, along with other consumer centrisms such as consumer ethnocentrism and consumer cosmopolitanism, in their analysis of consumer behavior.
The Academy of International Business is studying "out of group favoritism and in-group derogation" as a consumer effect in the Chinese consumer market.