Chapter 4
Control or government?
Critical interrogations of the ground upon which a history of co-creation should be launched
Toward a history of co-creation
In Part One of the dissertation, it was described how value and its creation went from being the foundational and most important subject of political economy to becoming a largely marginalized concept within twentieth century economics. In addition to this, it was also established how the concept of value creation rose to prominence within the discipline of Strategic Management Thought, just as it was tracked how descriptions of what were depicted as the sources of value gradually changed towards a view whereby value was seen as being co-created by groups and individuals outside established organizations. This line of investigation was then set in relation to developments within social theorists’ conceptualizations of commons-based peer production as well as thought coming out of the Autonomist Marxist tradition and recent contributions within Critical Management Studies. It was proposed that discussions on what actually constitutes the contemporary sources of value creation within these otherwise diverging streams of thought tended to converge in descriptions that relied heavily on the co-creation concept and, in particular, on the components this concept was articulated in accordance with. More precisely, the central components within the co-creation vocabulary were identified as the following: value creation was increasingly being viewed as dependent upon that which comes from the outside; the processes through which value was created were depicted as having a somewhat spontaneous, self-organizing capacity that to a large extent rendered long-term planning and conventional managerial control obsolete; this new mode of value creation was furthermore characterized as being fueled by an inherent cooperative inventiveness that manifested itself in a decentralized and ongoing process of innovation; and finally, the substrate on which this value creation took place were increasingly
193
immaterialized. While scholars within Strategic Management Thought, as well as those coming out of the Autonomist tradition, embraced these conditions – either because firms could profit from them or, adversely, because they were identified as having an irreducibility to them that challenged capitalism – the critical management scholars accepted that value creation to a large extent had become dependent on something outside of the organization, while simultaneously raising concerns about the extent to which – if at all – this transformation posed any significant challenge to capitalism. Following this the dissertation claimed that the different traditions, in spite of their conflicting agendas, could be viewed as carrying out parallel problematization processes that gave rise to the formation of an experience of the outside as a source of value creation.
However, while charting the formation of this experience, the primary concerns in Part One did not allow for a treatment of the issue regarding how the components making up the co-creation vocabulary could begin to take on the importance they have come to have for conceptualizing the creation of value. In other words, while Part One made it clear how value creation was problematized and rearticulated through the utilization of a co-creation vocabulary, it did not account for the historical emergence of the components making up this vocabulary. This is exactly what Part Two investigates.
More precisely, as stated in the introduction of the dissertation, this investigation will be organized as a genealogy that traces the historical roots of the components that have come together in the experience of the outside as a source of value creation. As was also stated, this history will draw significantly on Foucault’s (2007a, 2008) history of governmentality. However, before attending to this genealogy, which will be launched in chapters five and six, the grounds upon which such a historical investigation should be cast will first have to be attended to.
Establishing this ground is the prime purpose of the present chapter and this purpose is to be achieved by carrying out two tasks. Firstly, by criticizing the foundations upon which scholars within Autonomist Marxism and Critical Management Studies have launched histories pertaining to the coming into being of co-creation. As will become evident, Deleuze’s (1995a) small text on the passage from disciplinary societies to the societies of control plays a key role here.
Secondly, by way of criticizing three central postulates within this text, a trajectory
194
will be opened up to Foucault’s thought, and to the proposition that not only have Foucault’s (2007a, 2008) lectures from 1978 and 1979 not been appreciated sufficiently within Critical Management Studies, but that also, and more importantly, these lectures contain material that is significant for a genealogy of co-creation. However, before undertaking these tasks, it is necessary to show how Deleuze’s (1995a) text has played a major role for the way in which critical accounts have sought to come to terms with co-creation.
On the influence of Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Control Societies”
We have in the last couple of chapters seen how the different components associated with co-creation have been continually expressed in accordance with changing conceptions of management. Indeed, co-creation continually comes into view as a specific kind of management problem whereby the organization of co-creation processes is inseparably tied to the question of how such processes are, or ought to be, managed. Thus, from Prahalad, Ramaswamy, and Gouillart’s engaging, dialoging, and facilitative management of the co-creative enterprise (Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2004b; Ramaswamy and Gouillart 2010a, 2010b), over to Hardt and Negri’s (2009: viii) multitude “learning the art of self-rule”, and on to Arvidsson’s (2009) account of how Linus Thorvalds’s managerial genius is of major importance to the organization of the social production processes inherent in the ethical economy of Linux, the question of how one should manage or govern co-creation continually surfaces.
The problem of co-creation, when viewed from the perspective of Critical Management Studies, unsurprisingly also turns up as a problem inseparably tied to the notion of management. Here, however, the question of management does not run along the lines of which management or government system would be appropriate and legitimate as a facilitator of co-creation. Instead, co-creation is depicted as something that is entirely, and inescapably, tied to capitalist valorization processes – only now with the addition that the value created through co-creation is subject to new forms of management that act on consumer-producers outside of the organization (Zwick et al. 2008; Böhm and Land 2009; Willmott 2010). Thus, the way in which the co-creation problematic is viewed within Critical Management Studies ties in with and extends the long-lasting trajectory within this field whereby
195
management as such, no matter which practical, beneficial or idealistic goals it is set to promote, is viewed as illegitimate, or at the very least as something that must be critically scrutinized (see for example Grey 1996, 1999; Parker 2002).
Still, what is interesting to note is that this new view of management as something that reaches beyond the boundaries of the organization and taps into the productive capacities of co-creation processes also raises the question as to whether, and to what extent, such interventions are even capable of being described within a vocabulary which is critical of management and management thought? How is it possible to exercise control over and to exploit people who are not even employed by the organizations they contribute to, but merely do what they do because they find it rewarding, interesting or fun? In other words, how is it possible to manage something that is considered to be ‘free’ (both in the sense of being unpaid and not being subjected to a direct managerial authority)?
This problem has received considerable attention within Critical Management Studies. Besides some of the contributions explicitly dealing with the co-creation problematic that we came across in the last chapter (Zwick et al. 2008; Banks and Humphreys 2008; Böhm and Land 2009; Willmott 2010), this problem has also been taken up by scholars keen on exploring how former clear-cut demarcations between organizations/institutions and their outsides have become increasingly difficult to uphold. This blurring of boundaries has happened in conjunction with the rise of post-disciplinary modes of management that have been able to utilize differences both within and outside established organizations (see for example Munro 2000; Fleming and Spicer 2004; Weiskopf and Loacker 2006; Spicer 2010;
Martinez 2010).
André Spicer (2010) has proposed here that what we are witnessing is the rise of a new mode of relating to what he calls extitutions. Extitutions are, according to Spicer (2010: 26), “a formless life”, that is, something that “exceeds, disturbs and does not fit with an institution.” As such, extitutions have always been a challenge for the functioning of institutions. Still, the way in which institutions have sought to manage extitutions has been recast recently. Whereas “disciplinary institutions”
sought to “confine and normalize extitutions (…), post-modern controlling institutions are more permissive and seek to harness extitutions” (ibid: 27). Spicer points here to how this change both implies that the borders of the institution