Cova, Dalli, & Zwick (2011) Critical perspectives on consumers' role as 'producers': broadening the debate on value co-creation in marketing processes

232 - Value co-creation is a term to describe the interaction or collaboration between businesses and consumers.

232 - Ritzer (2009) - production and consumption are two sides of the same coin

232 - Marketing now uses an approach of what Foucault (1991) refers to as government:
shifting from a top-down approach to a bottom-up one where customers are made to feel as though they have agency as "free" persons.  This is called marketing government and it constructs consumers as partners in mutually beneficial innovations and productions.  It results in exploitative labor while also reducing the risk of undesirable consumer behavior!

232-233 Co-creation must be strategic because consumers are not paid employees (thus, coercion will not work) and must feel as though they are free to create and participate in digital activities.

Question: Is labor only considered paid work that is out of necessity?  Marx definition?  Therefore, should co-creation and prosumption be considered "work" instead? (see below for further discussion)

233 - collaboration is not the central driving force, but rather unique value for consumers

In co-creation, companies offer something unique to the consumer and charge a premium for it.  However, the consumers is not compensated for their contribution to this unique value even though they offer it voluntarily and with a significant degree of enjoyment - it is still considered exploitative.

234 - Using web 2.0 as site of research, exploitation in co-creation takes place on two levels:
1. consumers are not paid while corporate interests profit from their work/contribution
2. consumers are actually charged & pay for the fruits of their labor

But is co-creation actually considered labor? Marxist political economy refers to labor as the Fordist division of labor which is out of necessity, coercion, and command.  Thus, labor is a bit misleading when applied to web 2.0 technologies.  Thus, "work" might be a better term. (authors' sentiment).

235 - co-creation relies on the bond of production and consumption

235 - authors propose a new form of capitalism: co-creative capitalism (or what Ardvisson (2008) calls an ethical economy) "characterized by a rise of unpaid labor, new forms of control and exploitation, and a shift in the economics of scarcity."  Other caveats beyond these: "we should not underestimate capital's desire to maintain control over production and consumption, as well as producers and consumers, by adapting its techniques of surveillance, legal definitions of private property, and modes of value creation and appropriation to the age or the empowered, networks, and autonomous consumer" (see also andrejevic 2011, fuchs 2008, humphreys and grayson 2008).

 235 - This is part of a continuing trend of putting consumers to work: pumping their own gas, ATMs, etc.

237 - Ardvisson makes note of an ethical response to this through CSR - corporate social responsibility.