With the ever-increasing trend of deglobalization in recent years, governments and multinationals are facing significant challenges in revitalizing global business growth and constructing a positive global image. In such a new circumstance, they need to understand consumers’ psychological processes and behavioral outcomes to implement targeted marketing strategies and policy control. In fact, globalization has enabled consumers to develop global-local identity. However, different conceptualizations of this construct in the literature emphasize very different connotations, leading to confusion in understanding the relationship between global identity and local identity and inconsistency in findings that reveal its consequences. Therefore, this paper aims to clarify the primary thread of global-local identity literature and integrate previous theoretical findings through systematic interdisciplinary literature research from marketing, international business, and social psychology.

First, this paper summarizes and illustrates the major theoretical foundations for conceptualizing global-local identity. Further, based on the differences in conceptual connotation and theoretical foundation, this paper proposes a classified theoretical framework, which divides the global-local identity into three types: global-local identity from the consumer-and-culture perspective, which mainly describes consumers’ sense of belongingness to global or local consumer cultures based on the consumer culture theory and the acculturation theory; global-local identity from the citizenship-and-community perspective, which uses the social identity theory to emphasize individuals’ strong sense of empathy and psychological connection to the other citizens from global or local communities; global-local identity from the ambidextrous perspective, which covers both connotations of consumer-and-culture and citizenship-and-community, and conceptualizes global-local identity as identification with the global or local community and lifestyle.

This paper also summarizes and compares the constituent dimensions, measurement methods, and experimental manipulation of global-local identity, and points out that the existing literature pays little attention to the differences in conceptualizing perspectives. Moreover, this paper reviews the current literature from different conceptualizing perspectives and further reveals the connections and differences between these perspectives. The confusion between conceptualizing perspectives and measurement manipulation sometimes weakens the effectiveness and consistency of empirical results, which highlights the theoretical significance and practical value of distinguishing the different perspectives of defining global-local identity. Finally, based on the above discussion, this paper identifies and expounds future research opportunities and priorities to study global-local identity.