Ethics and value in customer co-production

This article will make one argument and one suggestion. The first part will argue that practices of customer co-production raise a serious challenge to established theories of value. The second part will suggest that these new practices, although widely disparate in nature, do move according to a common logic of value, and that this new value logic can be fruitfully organized around the concept of ‘ethics’. Let me clarify already here that I intend ‘ethics’ in the sense of the ability to create the values that ‘make a multitude into a community’ (Marazzi, 2008: 66). As I will further elaborate below, this concept of ethics is closer to the original Aristotelian sense of that term, than to the Kantian ethics that has been central to modern, enlightenment discourse. My use of ‘ethics’, in this, Aristotelian sense, is not taken out of the blue. Rather, I propose that a notion of value based on ethics is already emerging within a range of cutting-edge economic practices involving aspects of customer co-production — from corporate social responsibility (CSR) to Open Source production and brand valuation. In other words, I am not proposing a new notion of value as I would like it to be, but I am pointing at actually existing trends and developments. However, since these developments are emergent they cannot be grasped as fully formed facts. My ambition in the second part of this paper is thus limited to suggesting a theoretical framework within which these emergent tendencies can be read in a novel way; and from which a more definite shape can be discerned.