Working consumers: the next step in marketing theory?
735 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In marketing and consumer research, consumers have been increasingly theorized as producers. However, these theorizations do not take all facets of consumers’ productive role into account. This paper mobilizes both post-Marxist economics and post-Maussian socioeconomics to develop the concept of working consumer. This concept depicts consumers who, through their immaterial labour, add cultural and affective value to market offerings. In so doing consumers increase the value of market offerings, although they usually work at the primary level of sociality (interpersonal relationships) and are therefore beyond producers’ control. However, given certain conditions, companies capture such a value when it enters the second level of sociality (the market). The concept of the working consumer summarizes and enriches extant approaches to consumer (co)production, while challenging widespread developments, such as the service-dominant (SD) logic of marketing, which try to create/construct an ethereal marketscape in which consumers and producers live in harmony.
Subfields: Business and International Management, Marketing, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e8d58e72dcb184033ce3e33e34798130bb07eb97
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In Business and International Management
In Marketing
In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management
Citations in the corpus
- Creating ‘value’ beyond the point of production: branding, financialization and market capitalization (2010, methodology): “However, in giving it this emphasis, Arvidsson’s analysis follows other studies of branding in its ‘uneconomised’ focus upon ‘the individual and social rewards’ (Cova and Dalli, 2009: 326).”
- Making sense of higher education: students as consumers and the value of the university experience (2014, background): “Service consumption entails ‘immersion in an experiential context’ (Cova and Dalli 2009 , 318), and services are, essentially, experiential and phenomenological (Vargo and Lusch 2008 ), lived and recounted, often, in emotionally labyrinthine terms.”
- Theory of value co-creation: a systematic literature review (2014, background): “Finally, involving customers in the value creation process may be seen as a form of exploitation if the “working consumers” are not adequately compensated (Cova and Dalli, 2009).”
- The digitalization of retailing: an exploratory framework (2016, neutral): “, 2008), ‘coproduction’ (e.g., Vargo and Lusch, 2004; Arvidsson, 2008), ‘prosumption’ (e.g., Toffler, 1980; Arvidsson and Colleoni, 2012; Collins, 2010; Cova and Cova, 2012), or ‘working consumers’ (Cova and Dalli, 2009; Dujarier, 2014; Cochoy, 2015).”
- An integrative framework of value (2012, background): “Within the context of Pvalue, consumers exert their active agency to transform offerings and value propositions to achieve consumers’ self, life project and goals (Arnould, 2005, 2007; Cova and Dalli, 2009).”