The DOI matches its Crossref record; 73 of the 73 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Working consumers: the next step in marketing theory?
Abstract
In marketing and consumer research, consumers have been increasingly theorized as producers. However, these theorizations do not take all facets of consumers’ productive role into account. This paper mobilizes both post-Marxist economics and post-Maussian socioeconomics to develop the concept of working consumer. This concept depicts consumers who, through their immaterial labour, add cultural and affective value to market offerings. In so doing consumers increase the value of market offerings, although they usually work at the primary level of sociality (interpersonal relationships) and are therefore beyond producers’ control. However, given certain conditions, companies capture such a value when it enters the second level of sociality (the market). The concept of the working consumer summarizes and enriches extant approaches to consumer (co)production, while challenging widespread developments, such as the service-dominant (SD) logic of marketing, which try to create/construct an ethereal marketscape in which consumers and producers live in harmony.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
(1994) · Journal of the American Dietetic Association · doi:10.1016/0002-8223(94)92216-0 · Cited by 45,910
Lead Users: A Source of Novel Product Concepts
von Hippel, E. (1986) · Management Science · doi:10.1287/mnsc.32.7.791 · Cited by 4,650
von Hippel, E. (2005) · doi:10.7551/mitpress/2333.001.0001 · Cited by 3,768
Sherry, J. F., & Sternthal, B. (1992) · Cited by 2,915
The experience economy: work is theatre & every business a stage
(1999) · Choice Reviews Online · doi:10.5860/choice.37-2254 · Cited by 2,681
Consumer Culture and Postmodernism
Featherstone, M. (1993) · SAGE Publications Ltd eBooks · doi:10.4135/9781446288399 · Cited by 2,244
Consumer Culture and Postmodernism
Featherstone, M. (2007) · SAGE Publications Ltd eBooks · doi:10.4135/9781446212424 · Cited by 2,063
A Role Theory Perspective on Dyadic Interactions: The Service Encounter
Solomon, M. R., Surprenant, C., Czepiel, J. A., & Gutman, E. G. (1985) · Journal of Marketing · doi:10.2307/1251180 · Cited by 2,004 · cited 2×
“…users’ role in the development of effective and satisfactory service encounters and experiences has been assessed in terms of personalization (Solomon et al., 1985; Surprenant and Soloman, 1987): the more the customer is involved in the process of service production and delivery, the…”
BackgroundWhy Do Brands Cause Trouble? A Dialectical Theory of Consumer Culture and Branding
Holt, D. B. (2002) · Journal of Consumer Research · doi:10.1086/339922 · Cited by 1,951
International Marketing and Purchasing of Industrial Goods: An Interaction Approach
Håkansson, H. (1982) · Medical Entomology and Zoology · Cited by 1,945
Cited by
Introducing COBRAs: Exploring motivations for brand-related social media use
Muntinga, D. G., Moorman, M., & Smit, E. G. (2011) · International Journal of Advertising · doi:10.2501/ija-30-1-013-046 · Cited by 1,468
What is co-creation? An interactional creation framework and its implications for value creation
Ramaswamy, V., & Ozcan, K. (2018) · Journal of Business Research · doi:10.1016/j.jbusres.2017.11.027 · Cited by 735
Customer dominant value formation in service
Heinonen, K., Strandvik, T., & Voima, P. (2013) · European Business Review · doi:10.1108/09555341311302639 · Cited by 353
The consumer production journey: marketing to consumers as co-producers in the sharing economy
Dellaert, B. G. C. (2019) · Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science · doi:10.1007/s11747-018-0607-4 · Cited by 224
The consumerist turn in higher education: Policy aspirations and outcomes
Naidoo, R., Shankar, A., & Veer, E. (2011) · Journal of Marketing Management · doi:10.1080/0267257x.2011.609135 · Cited by 221
Metadata
- Authors
- Cova, B., & Dalli, D.
- Venue
- Marketing Theory
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2009-09
- Volume
- 9
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 315-339
- ISSN
- 1470-5931 (ISSN-L)
- 1741-301X
- OpenAlex
- W2124243010
- Cited by
- 746
- References
- 73
- FWCI
- 92.58
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Working consumers: the next step in marketing theory? https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1177/1470593109338144
- The paper
- Cova, B., & Dalli, D. (2009). Working consumers: the next step in marketing theory? Marketing Theory. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470593109338144
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.