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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.

This article provides a historically grounded explanation of category emergence and change by using the gin category as an example. Formerly a standardized spirit produced by a narrow group of large England-based producers, gin has become a premium craft spirit made by thousands of big and small producers in every corner of the world – a categorical shift that commentators have dubbed the 'ginaissance'. We approach product categories as socially constructed entities and make informed use of history to explain the successive categorical dynamics. Strategic action field theory is applied to explain how internal and external category actors interact to create and change product meanings and affect categorical configurations. Our results show how the intricate, complex and historically embedded processes that the product category underwent first triggered stigmatization and then put conditions in place that led to concentration and made the current ginaissance possible. Findings drawn from this study of gin contribute to research on product categories by revealing some peculiar dynamics of concentration and partitioning, status recategorization and categorical stigma, which are summarized in an empirically grounded process model of category emergence and change.

This special issue continues the critical engagement with the popular discourses of Prahalad's value co-creation paradigm and Vargo and Lusch's service-dominant logic of marketing. The intensity of the debate among marketing scholars over these two marketing and management concepts demonstrates how much is at stake — conceptually and politically — when the roles of consumer and producer become blurred. Economic concepts of value, ownership, consumption, and production need to be redefined, and political ideas of the relationship between the social and the economic require addressing in the age of cognitive, or as we call it, collaborative capitalism. In addition to these broad theoretical challenges, the contributions in this issue zoom in on what arguably constitutes the central question for our specific field: What are the implications of a collaborative capitalism for understanding the place of marketing techniques in value creation? As with all good scholarship, the essays in this issue do not provide definitive answers but instead lead to a more elaborate set of questions. By doing so, they broaden the critical engagement with value co-creation in marketing.

Consumers participate in social media producing value through social labor. So far scholars approached social labor through a Marxist lens focusing on the economic aspects of its value and the potential risks related to consumers' exploitation. We build a sociocultural conceptualization of social labor actualizing the Aristotelian idea of virtuous action that realizes a life well lived with others. Following this approach, we identify Eudaimonia as a theoretical construct to capture the sociocultural value of social labor, and we elaborate how social labor in social media enables the achievement of a eudaimonic state of living. We support our conceptualization with empirical evidence in the social media context of amateur cooking practices that illustrates how Eudaimonia is achieved through social labor practices of cultural performativity. Our perspective extends previous theory related to three research domains of consumers' social labor: (1) Marxist and technocapitalist critique, (2) neoliberalist perspective, and (3) networked consumer collectives.