Productive Consumption
Description
Adam Arvidsson:
"Since the 1970s theoretical attention to the productive elements of consumer action has passed from cultural studies into marketing and what is now known as Consumer Culture Theory (CCT, Arnould& Thompson, 2005). While the phenomenon of 'productive consumption' is much older, arching back to the very origins of modern consumer society, and possibly even further (cf. Sassatelli, 2007), theoretical attention to this phenomenon as developed, in part, as a result of its real affirmation. Indeed, the last four decades, roughly coinciding with the affirmation of an ‘information society', have seen a shift in the very nature of consumer culture. To put it very bluntly, up until the 1960s, consumer gods were principally, although not exclusively used to signify and demarcate established social identities. Since the 1960s they have ever more been used, by ever broader strata of the population to create and develop such identities (Arvidsson, 2006: 17-40). This has given the circulation of consumer goods a necessarily productive dimension. On a more empirical level, this large scale shift can be said to have been driven by three interconnected tendencies.
First, the very development of consumer society has resulted in a diffusion of consumer goods that can be used productively. In particular through the diffusion of technologies for cultural production (like video and digital cameras and, later, editing software) this has greatly reduced the costs of cultural production enabling a wider range of people to take part in these activities. Second, the mediatization of consumer goods and of social relations in general has greatly enhanced the 'signifying power' of consumer goods (by being inserted in a global media circuit a branded item can condense meanings in new and highly efficient ways, cf. Lash & Lury, 2006). At the same time, the diffusion of information and communication technologies has greatly reduced the costs of association, making it easier for enthusiastic consumers to find each other and collaborate in the production of immaterial, as well as, increasingly, material wealth. Finally, higher levels of education combined with higher levels of graduate unemployment, in particular among arts and humanities graduates have combined to create a 'cognitive surplus' (Shirky, 2010)of people who have the skill and time to undertake new forms of collaborative productive activities where the line between consumption and production is blurred (like in urban creative ‘scenes’, cf Lloyd, 2006).
What consumers produce is largely limited to the immaterial or informational content of commodities (although tendencies like Open Design and Open Manufacturing point at the possibility of organizing the material production of goods in similar ways, cf. Carson, 2010). It is the informational value of commodities that changes and is elaborated as they circulate through a wide range of diverse practices, acquire different meanings and get associated with distinct lifestyles and identities. Consumer researchers have generally left the precise nature of this process of immaterial production untouched. However management and organizational theorists on the one hand, along with post-autonomist Marxists on the other, have spend quite some effort in identifying the nature of organization of the highly similar processes in which information (or knowledge) is created, or creatively elaborated as it circulates in knowledge intensive organizations (cf. Heckscher& Adler, 2006, Lazzarato, 1997). They have identified four chief characteristics of what some of them define as a new ‘informational’ mode of production particular to the ‘knowledge economy’ (Adler, 2001), or to ‘cognitive capitalism’ (Moulier-Boutang, 2002). Let us try to apply those insights to processes of productive consumption
First, such practices generally unfold beyond the direct control of markets and hierarchies. Instead they take the form of diffuse forms of collaboration that involve a wide diversity of different actors, that belong to different organizations, or as in the case of most consumers, to no organizations at all.
Second, these productive practices are based on a blurring of consumption and production in the sense that the use or enjoyment of the consumer products around which they are organized generally depends on, or is enhanced by some form of productive contribution (be this adding to the ongoing narrative of a World of Warcraft guild or suggesting innovative ways of using consumer products).
Third, these practices are generally self-organized, and participants play an important role in developing organizational forms in relation to the changing requirements of the situation at hand. As has been identified by a number of studies on collaborative networks of Open or Free software production (cf. O’Mahony& Ferraro, 2007), as well as ‘brand communities’ or ‘consumer tribes’ of various kinds (Muniz &O’Guin, 2001, Cova et al., 2007) this means that participants engage in a large amount of deliberation where goals, aims and productive organization are decided on as a matter of course. Of course, to the extent that such productive networks are initiated and maintained by corporations, this element of bottom-up deliberation clashes with and confronts top-down attempts at corporate control, contributing to perceptions, on the part of management, of these practices as evasive and uncontrollable (Fisher et al, 2011, cf. Gabriel & Land, 1995).
Fourth and finally the productive process in these collaborative networks principally deploy common resources, like the common knowledge available to members of an Open Source software network, or the common culture that has consolidated around a brand and its uses. And these processes are collaborative in the sense that even though individual consumers can add to, reinvent and re-elaborate the meaning and value of consumer goods individually, value is generally understood to have been created when such innovations are added to a pool of common resources that can, subsequently feed into the creativity and elaboration of others. It is the common pursuit of a particular goal, be this ‘creativity’ in a team of knowledge workers or the greatness of the Apple brand, which defines the value of contributions. In other words, value is related not to individual effort per se but to the comprehensive contribution that such an effort makes to the ‘circulation of the common’, to use Nick Dyer-Witheford’s phrase. (And such ‘value’ shows no linear relation to the ‘labor time’ –cf.Fuchs, 2010- that an individual user puts in. It is not the time you spend practicing on your guitar that determines whether your song will be a hit!) This also means that the concrete tangible outcome of these productive practices (lines of code, pages of fan fiction, stylistic innovation in brand use) are put back into the common domain and as such remain without any monetary value. Consequently, and this has baffled many observers, there is no discernable link between concrete productive participations and the perspective of monetary rewards (Lerner &Tirole, 2002). This has led many observers, coming form widely different perspective to suggest that such collaborative practices are the harbingers of a new altruistic mode of production where monetary rewards, and by implication traditional conceptionsofeconomic rationality no longer apply (Barbook, 1998,Benkler, 2010, Adler, 2001). I believe that this is something of a premature conclusion. It is definitely possible to reconstruct an economic rationality around participation in practices of collaborative production. But it is a different rationality than that proposed by neoclassical economics. I will suggest that it is better understood as a civic, or ethical rationality, where motives of economic gain and motives that have to do with the excellence of civic action tend to coincide, or at least approach one another. In the last section of this article I will elaborate further on how I think that is happening. But first, let me address the ways in which these practices should be conceived conceptually."
Source
- Article. Adam Arvidsson. The Potential of Consumer Publics. Ephemera.