Gokcen Coskuner-Balli, Chapman University – Yoga Culture

Are you currently in a downward-facing-dog position? If so, you’re one of the many folks who enjoy Yoga!

Today on The Academic Minute, Dr. Gokcen Coskuner-Balli, a professor at the Economic Science Institute at Chapman University, explores the growth of Yoga culture.

Dr. Coskuner-Balli is an assistant professor at The George L. Argyros School of Business and Economics at Chapman University. She earned her PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Coskuner-Balli’s main research interest includes cultural and ideological shaping of consumer-market relationships. Her current research examines the context of emergent lifestyle segments in which new social roles, cultural identities, and brand relationships are being forged through innovative interactions with the commercial marketplace. Within this context her research explores the role of consumption in creation and legitimization of non-traditional social identities in the marketplace.  Coskuner-Balli’s work has been published in Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Culture and Association of Consumer Research.

Yoga Culture

My colleague Burcak Ertimur and I studied the evolution of the yoga market in the U.S. since the 1980s. Yoga has been increasingly gaining popularity in the U.S. Today, more than 20 million Americans practice yoga. They spend $10 billion a year on yoga classes and products; constituting an increase of 80 percent in just four years. It is also a very dense market, just in the last decade yoga enterprises rose from 14,000 to 26,000.

One key finding of our study is to quantitatively show how the meaning of yoga transformed in the past three decades. Our historical analysis of the newspaper articles in the New York Times and the Washington Post as yoga became decreasingly associated with spirituality and increasingly associated with medicine and fitness.

We identify three mechanisms that contributed to the shift in the meanings. First the changes in how yoga gurus are trained, second the ways cultural entrepreneurs institutionalize of different meanings and third, the distinct branding practices of small and big players in the market.

For example, while early gurus were mainly of Indian descent, they were later followed by their U.S. disciples who adopted the practice to the American audiences. Today the traditional one-on-one yogi training is replaced by the one-to-many teacher training programs that focus more on the medical and fitness benefits than the chanting, meditation and reading of religious texts.

Second, cultural entrepreneurs institutionalized the medical and fitness aspects. In time, in the 80s and the 90s insurance companies and employers began to recognize yoga as a treatment form, which extended its health benefits to a broader range of consumers. Corporations such as Nike, Apple and HBO began offering on-site yoga classes as a regular employee benefit. Furthermore, as yoga got adopted in the U.S. actors such as Berly Bender Birch, framed Ashtanga Yoga as “Power Yoga” to make it more appealing to American consumers by demarcating it from the more spiritually based practices of the 1970’s.

Third, in the 2000s, generalist brands emerged with the mission of making yoga accessible to mainstream audiences. As brands such as CorePower yoga develop national chains to reach to casual American who hasn’t tried yoga before they focus on the fitness and medical benefits of the practices. They also crate new hybrid classes such as yoga sculpt and yoga and ride further emphasizing the fitness aspects such as high calorie burning and toning.