The Score is not the Music: Practices and Value in Collaborative Consumption Contexts

Abstract

Traditionally, marketing scholars and organisations have tacitly conceptualised value co-creation as a set of processes or activities where participants know how to act, or ‘know the score’ – however, this is not always the case. In this paper, we argue for a deeper appreciation of the symbiotic relationship between value experiences and value co-creation practices, particularly in collaborative consumption contexts in which meanings may be shared as much as behaviours. Practices, comprising shared understandings of what to do and say, procedures and engagements in situated contexts, embed individuals in the social world, tie us to each other, and, as a result, frame individuals’ lived, embodied experiences of value. While practices are not possessions or characteristics of individuals, individuals are carriers of various value co-creation practices, which need not be coordinated with each other. As a result, individuals represent unique embodiments of diverse levels of participation in multiple practices within a cultural or social group. We also suggest that individual sensemaking of the value experiences which emerge from value co-creation practices, while socially constructed, is intersubjectively and phenomenologically determined. Therefore, rather than solely adopting either a phenomenological or a practice based perspective to explore the contours of value co-creation, we seek to entwine them, by examining individual value experiences which emerge from individuals’ concurrent participation in multiple value co-creation practices in collaborative consumption contexts.