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Introduction
The marketing literature has an ongoing focus on value, yet Galvagno and Dalli (2014) establish the need for further research into how value is contested, constructed and negotiated. Their wide-ranging analysis found multiple perspectives underpinning understandings of value co-creation; analytically, however, research often diverges between product and service perspectives, and company versus customer experience. Much research emphasises the importance of the consumer in value co-creation (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004; Gallarza et al., 2011). Following O’Shaughnessy and O’Shaughnessy (2009, 2011), we caution as to the universality of the notion that value emerges from operant resources “producing effects” through working on operand resources. This notion implies a “doing to” approach to value production, which we see as oppositional to socio-cultural understanding of value co-creation (Peñaloza and Venkatesh, 2006). Whilst Vargo and Lusch (2011, p. 1304) defend their approach to value creation in light of O’Shaughnessy and O’Shaughnessy’s (2009) criticism, by stating that their service-dominant (S-D) logic “suggests that value is idiosyncratic, experiential, contextual and meaning laden”, the focus on operant resources reflects an instrumentality which we challenge in this paper.
To unify these various approaches and more fully explore alternative views of value creation, we turn to the visual arts market which provides an interesting context in which to examine value. The criteria used by the art world in art valuation are opaque, and the line between what is considered “valuable art” and what is not is notoriously difficult to distinguish (Buck, 2004). Examining the art market reveals the subjective nature of value (as there is little utilitarian value in art) and the need for legitimising behaviour involving numerous actors to construct, negotiate and disseminate value. Whilst in the literature, co-creation of value is articulated as happening between producers and consumers, or consumers and other consumers, we demonstrate that producer/consumer boundaries prevent a full understanding of value. The art market illustrates the problem in assigning “producer” or “consumer” roles to different actors engaged in value creation. Furthermore, there are underlying power asymmetries within these co-creation relationships not recognised by the literature. This is of interest in a contemporary global economy where new value dynamics are emerging, for example the collaborative consumption processes at work in the “sharing” economy (Bardhi and Eckhardt, 2012), the increased importance...