Samuel K. Bonsu

Putting Consumers to Work `Co-creation` and new marketing govern-mentality

Co-creation is a new paradigm that has captured the imagination of marketing and management professionals and scholars. Drawing on Foucaults notion of government and neo-Marxist theories of labor and value, we critically interrogate the cultural, social, and economic politics of this new management technique. We suggest that co-creation represents a political form of power aimed at generating particular forms of consumer life at once free and controllable, creative and docile. We argue that the discourse of value co-creation stands for a notion of modern corporate power that is no longer aimed at disciplining consumers and shaping actions according to a given norm, but at working with and through the freedom of the consumer. In short, administering consumption in ways that allow for the continuous emergence and exploitation of creative and valuable forms of consumer labor is the true meaning of the concept of co-creation.

Do Not Go Cheaply into that Good Night: Death Ritual Consumption in Asante, Ghana

Theory on identity negotiations posits that a persons identity-construction project ceases upon death. We tested this proposition using death-ritual consumption experiences of consumers in Asante, Ghana, West Africa. We found that bereaved Asante consumers engage in conspicuous ritual consumption in pursuit of newer social identities for their deceased and themselves and that funerals involve a reciprocal and continuing relationship between the living and the dead. In addition, we found that terror-management theory is limited in its relevance for non-Western contexts. We also detected limits to the ability to transform global capital into local capital. Copyright 2003 by the University of Chicago.

Co-creating Second Life Market—Consumer Cooperation in Contemporary Economy

In this article, we draw on our participant observation in the virtual-technology context of Second Life to explore cocreations prepossessing claim of consumer empowerment and its connections to contemporary forms of social organization. We conclude that while consumers are genuinely empowered by co-creation practices, this empowerment that frees the consumer in a diversity of ways also offers significant avenues for entrapping the consumer into producing for the firm. In the end, co-creation is a veneer of consumer empowerment in a world where market power, in large measure, still resides in capital. On this basis, we suggest that the seeming demise of capitalism espoused by some scholars is premature to the extent that capitalism has the uncanny ability to meld into newer social formations such as those afforded by Second Life. Thus, a more realistic vision is an interloping of the ethical and capitalist economies.

Colonial images in global times: consumer interpretations of Africa and Africans in advertising

I draw on 93 consumer interpretations of advertising images to suggest how North American consumer perceptions of Africa are linked to socio‐historical facilities that support ideological notions of inferior African “otherness.” I seek to make salient the unacknowledged denial of colonial discourses’ import into contemporary reproduction of African inferior otherness, toward revealing the durability of the racial divide rooted in colonial history and ideology. I find that discourses on Africa are attached to colonial tropes of savagery, exotica and rhetoric of benevolence. The related consumer tensions and ambiguities fund powerful ideological work that perpetuates colonialism in globalization. I conclude that although the physical instruments of brutality associated with imperialism are no longer in direct use, these colonial instruments live on in contemporary advertising and related discourses.

Governmentality at the Base-of-the-Pyramid

The Base-of-the-pyramid (BoP) corporate strategy perceives market-based solutions to the problem of global poverty. The strategy is premised on the view that people in BoP markets live in fundamental lack, which can be overcome with business intervention. The merits of this idea seem obvious, but its ideological premise within contemporary capitalism is often lost on many. The purpose of the authors in this paper is to explore the ideological premise of the BoP strategy. The authors employ Foucault’s notion of “governmentality” to suggest that corporate adoption of the BoP strategy mimics a neocolonial incursion into heretofore inaccessible markets, by constituting the poor as free, self-governing individuals—modern citizens in the Western liberal sense—toward facilitating market control and exploitation for corporate ends.

Arrested emotions in reality television

“Arrested emotions” references the capitalist firm’s conscious mobilization of prosumers’ emotions and their associated expressions as amenable input for production within corporate confines. We draw on reality TV – The Bachelor and Extreme Makeover (Home Edition) – to suggest the centrality of emotional recruitment in the contemporary economy. Reality TV is driven almost entirely by the work of audiences and those in their ranks who are recruited (or volunteer) to become performers. Our observations lead us to conclude that the corporate arrest of emotions leads to a level of consumer emotional vapidity that is inextricably fused with firm profitability. The firm therefore allows the consumer ample leverage in offering these emotions that are mobilized, packaged and sold back to the consumer.

Consuming the Dead: Identity and Community Building Practices in Death Rituals

In this article, we examine processes of identity and community building in Asante death rituals where participants metaphorically consume the dead. “Consuming the Dead” refers to how the living makes meaning of death and its associated rituals toward self identification. Our data were derived primarily from participant observations of death rituals and in-depth interviews with informants in Asante, Ghana. We identify “consuming-for-community” and “consuming-for-security” as key death-ritual consumption practices that contribute to cultural reproduction. We conclude by considering some implications of these consuming practices in the production of self, community, and culture.

Exploring Consumer Ethics in Ghana, West Africa

Consumer ethics is a growing area of research that focused almost exclusively on consumers in the United States and, to a lesser degree, Europe and Asia. In this paper, we introduce an African element to the consumer ethics discourse by drawing on survey responses from over 300 Ghanaian consumers to explore their ethical beliefs and judgements. We analysed these data using regression techniques. Our findings show that Ghanaian consumers exhibit lower levels of ethics compared with their America counterparts, especially when the unethical actions facilitate the achievement of their goals. While Ghanaian consumers recognize the value of moral rules, they are prone to suspending their ethical positions as they deem necessary in a particular context. Implications for marketing strategy and future research are discussed.