The Intersecting Roles of Consumer and Producer : A Critical Perspective on Co-production , Co-creation and Prosumption

The terms ‘co-creation’, ‘co-production’, and ‘prosumption’ refer to situations in which consumers collaborate with companies or with other consumers to produce things of value. These situations sometimes appear to blur the traditional roles of ‘producer’ and ‘consumer’. Building on Marx’s distinction between ‘use value’ and ‘exchange value’, we argue that, when consumers perform tasks normally handled by the company, this does not necessarily represent a fundamental change in exchange roles or economic organization. We then argue that, when individuals who are traditionally defined as ‘consumers’ produce exchange value for companies, this does represent a fundamental change. Thanks to recent advances in information technology, customers today are contributing to organizational processes in ways that would not have been possible 10 years ago. For example, at Threadless.com, customers can not only vote for the clothing designs that they would like to see produced but also submit their own designs for voting (Walker 2007). Similarly, at National Instruments, a company that makes measurement software and sensors, nearly half of the company’s research and development activity is done by an on-line community of customers who collaborate to discover how NI’s products can solve members’ problems (Seybold 2007). Another example is Proctor & Gamble’s ‘Vocalpoint’ program, an on-line community of product enthusiasts who are rewarded with coupons and samples in return for talking about products with their friends. The program has more than 500,000 members and is being used by other companies such as WD40 and the Discovery Channel to promote their products (Neff 2006). Some have argued that examples like these are symptomatic of a fundamental and dramatic shift that is occurring in relationships between organizations and their customers – a change that calls into question previously clear distinctions between consumers and producers and between customers and employees. For instance, some have suggested 2 Intersecting Roles of Consumer and Producer © 2008 The Authors Sociology Compass 2 (2008): 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2008.00112.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd that customers who help with product design or assist with product marketing are part of a ‘consumer-as-creator revolution’ (Nadeau 2006, 105) and represent a ‘new paradigm of message creation and delivery’ (McConnell and Huba 2006, 42). Others have written that ‘the gap between producers and consumers is blurring’ (Tapscott and Williams 2006, 125) and that ‘in the emerging ... paradigm, a person can seamlessly shift from consumer to contributor and creator’ (143). Still others have argued that in today’s customer-organization relationships ‘power and control are radically decentralized and heterarchical: producers and consumers coalesce’ (Pitt et al. 2006, 118). We have also recently seen a resurgence of the word ‘prosumer’, which was first coined by cultural critic Alvin Toffler in 1980, to emphasize the novelty of asking individuals to simultaneously play the role of consumer and producer (Kotler 1986; Tapscott and Williams 2006). In this article, we offer a critical analysis of the ways in which the role of the consumer may be changing and therefore also an investigation of this role in the broader capitalist system, a system in which consumers have traditionally served a central function. We argue that although consumers are increasingly performing tasks normally handled by the company, this role redefinition may be, at least in some cases, illusory. We also find that although the employee/customer distinction can be blurred on many dimensions, one dimension on which the distinction remains is between those who create use value and those who create exchange value (Marx 1867 [2001]). Increasingly, individuals who have traditionally been defined as ‘consumers’ are producing exchange value for companies, and this, we argue, is where the so-called ‘prosumer’ does indeed represent a fundamental change in economic organization. We then use the distinction between use value and exchange value to further explore the normative and ethical implications of consumer production. Consumer versus producer The consumer–producer relationship has traditionally been conceived of as an exchange relationship in which each party trades one kind of value for another (Bagozzi 1975). In this article, we focus on the exchange relationship between an end user (such as a person buying coffee beans for home use) and the organization from which this end user buys a product or service (such as a supermarket or coffee shop). Before an end user buys something, a series of transformations are usually applied to it to make the product or service usable to the end user and to therefore enhance its value. To make a cup of coffee, for example, someone must grow and harvest the coffee beans, roast and grind them, transport and package them, offer them for retail sale, and finally brew the cup of coffee. These are all steps in what Michael Porter (1985) calls the ‘value chain’, the series of transformations required to make a product for an end user.