Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/208855 
Year of Publication: 
2013
Series/Report no.: 
PhD Series No. 20.2013
Publisher: 
Copenhagen Business School (CBS), Frederiksberg
Abstract: 
Co-creation has emerged today as a concept which thinkers across otherwise largely opposed traditions have come to embrace. This dissertation substantiates how the concept of co-creation, from proponents of Strategic Management Thought to thinkers coming out of Autonomist Marxism and Critical Management Studies, appears as designating either: (1) a new win-win mode of value creation where businesses co-create value with various sorts of outsiders; (2) a new social, commons-based value creation autonomous from business interests; or (3) a mode of value creation intimately intertwined with new modes of management capable of harnessing and exploiting productive capacities outside established organizations. Behind these contemporary differences, the dissertation discloses a more encompassing history. Through this, the emergence of a widely shared co-creation vocabulary is brought forth. While this vocabulary is used persistently to express a whole new mode of value creation, in whatever form, the dissertation argues that the co-creation vocabulary actually undermines the very possibility of speaking about value creation in a consistent manner. At the same time, however, it is not a vocabulary which can just be dispensed with, since its emergence is intimately intertwined with an accelerated emphatic injunction; an injunction advanced by a reformulated managementality that throughout the twentieth century has tempted management ‘to go outside’. Accounting for this history, the dissertation claims that a complex experience has been born, an experience of the outside. Through this experience, the outside has emerged not merely as a source of value creation and an object of management; it has also emerged as an obligation that has to be met, an obligation which is forcefully expressed today through the co-creation vocabulary. In order to inquire into contemporary accounts of co-creation, as well as the historical trajectories through which this phenomenon has come to emerge, the dissertation develops what is designated as the historical problematization analysis, inspired by and reconstructed from the very late work of Michel Foucault. By utilizing this mode of analysis, it becomes possible to bring together otherwise separate accounts of co-creation on the same level of analysis, to inquire into central historical conditions of possibility through which the phenomenon of cocreation has come to emerge and to take stock of what difference the arrival of cocreation introduces in relation to yesterday.
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
ISBN: 
9788792977533
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by-nc-nd Logo
Document Type: 
Doctoral Thesis

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