This article deals with the rise of prosumer capitalism. Prosumption involves both production and consumption rather than focusing on either one (production) or the other (consumption). It is maintained that earlier forms of capitalism (producer and consumer capitalism) were themselves characterized by prosumption. Given the recent explosion of user-generated content online, we have reason to see prosumption as increasingly central. In prosumer capitalism, control and exploitation take on a different character than in the other forms of capitalism: there is a trend toward unpaid rather than paid labor and toward offering products at no cost, and the system is marked by a new abundance where scarcity once predominated. These trends suggest the possibility of a new, prosumer, capitalism.

Production, Consumption, Prosumption The nature of capitalism in the age of the digital ‘prosumer’

Co-creation is a new paradigm that has captured the imagination of marketing and management professionals and scholars. Drawing on Foucault's notion of government and neo-Marxist theories of labor and value, we critically interrogate the cultural, social, and economic politics of this new management technique. We suggest that co-creation represents a political form of power aimed at generating particular forms of consumer life at once free and controllable, creative and docile. We argue that the discourse of value co-creation stands for a notion of modern corporate power that is no longer aimed at disciplining consumers and shaping actions according to a given norm, but at working with and through the freedom of the consumer. In short, administering consumption in ways that allow for the continuous emergence and exploitation of creative and valuable forms of consumer labor is the true meaning of the concept of co-creation.

Putting Consumers to Work: `Co-creation` and new marketing govern-mentality

Higher education lacks an intellectually coherent sociology; varied research on colleges and universities is dispersed widely throughout the discipline This review initiates a critical integration of this scholarship We argue that sociologists have conceived of higher education systems as sieves for sorting and stratifying populations, incubators for the development of competent social actors, temples for the legitimation of official knowledge, and hubs connecting multiple institutional domains Bringing these lines of scholarship together facilitates new theoretical insights and research questions

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Sieve, Incubator, Temple, Hub: Empirical and Theoretical Advances in the Sociology of Higher Education

https://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/jrnl/2004/nc_2004_palmer_001.pdf

Using spatial metrics to predict scenic perception in a changing landscape: Dennis, Massachusetts

This article proposes a theoretical framework for examining recent anti-consumerist practices. It argues that such practices are important in terms not only of the political sentiments and collective concerns they mobilize, for the broader life-projects, or identity constructions they entail. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman's thesis on ‘liquid modernity’, a theory of ‘liquid consumption’ is used to argue that many anti-consumerist practices and sensibilities shape personal identities by appealing to a decommodified sociability, yet this sociability is more often the rhetorical production of anti-consumerist discourses, and hence not capable of reinforcing the identity projects they aim to consolidate. Examples of this effect are described in the discourses of Feng Shui and the Slow Food movement.

Mary Rizzo

Papers

A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America