A Literature Review and Prospects of Customer-Enterprise Social Value Co-creation

Abstract

Social value co-creation refers to the management process and action of an enterprise to cooperate with its stakeholders related to its sustainable development goals, to identify value goals, and create and share social value together. It has drawn more and more attention from enterprises and been used in the design and implementation of corporate social responsibility strategy, and thus appealed to the extensive participation of the public. Customers, as an important stakeholder of enterprises and the main beneficiary of social value, although have the convenience and initiative to co-create social value with enterprises, traditional research on social value co-creation has neglected their important role in the creation of corporate social value. Therefore, based on the systematic review of existing literature on the theory and practice of stakeholders, value co-creation, corporate social responsibility and customer participation, and considering the enterprise social value co-creation practice, this article firstly shows light on the concept, dimension composition and main types of customer-enterprise social value co-creation through the literature deduction method. Then it summarizes the main driving factors of customer-enterprise social value co-creation by using the method of literature review, and analyzes the consequences of customer-enterprise social value co-creation from social value and other （customer, enterprise） value. On this basis, a preliminary theoretical analysis framework of customer-enterprise social value co-creation is constructed, and five main directions of future research are discussed. The main theoretical contributions of this paper are as follows. First, the conception of customer-enterprise social value co-creation is put forward, defined as a form of social value co-creation based on the customer participation in CSR program, and divided into three dimensions: resource commitment, interpersonal interaction, and responsible behavior. Meanwhile, based on the three aspects of co-creation approach, co-create relationships between subjects and co-creation process, the form of customer-enterprise social value co-creation is divided respectively into traditional offline co-creation, online virtual co-creation and online + offline co-creation; transactional co-creation, collaborative co-creation and gamification co-creation; design co-creation and implementation co-creation. Second, the factors that engage customers in social value co-creation concludes the motivation and cognition of customers, project implementation features and social effect features, the interaction between customers and enterprises, and the interaction between customers and the virtual customer co-creation environment. Third, the basic theoretical analysis framework of customer-enterprise social value co-creation is set up based on the analysis of antecedents and outcome variables of customer-enterprise social value co-creation, and it preliminarily clarifies the process mechanism and influence mechanism of customer-enterprise social value co-creation and provides a theoretical fundament for further research in this field.