The Systemic Creation of Value Through Circulation in Collaborative Consumer Networks

Extant research tends to adopt a community perspective when examining value creation in consumer collectives that limits the understanding of how value is created in loosely organized, dynamic, and heterogeneous networks. This study expands research on value creation by adopting a circulation-centric perspective that explains how value is created systemically in collaborative consumer networks. Inspired by anthropological theories of value creation, this study examines how circulation enables the systemic creation of value by connecting networked participants, their actions, objects, and value outcomes. Ethnographic and netnographic data were collected on the collaborative network of geocaching, in which consumers promote the circulation of objects known as travel bugs. The systemic creation of value in collaborative consumer networks is composed of four subprocesses triggered by object circulation—enactment, transvaluation, assessment, and alignment—that may happen concurrently and in multiple iterations. This process explains how geographic dispersion can coexist with the cultural situatedness of value creation and helps integrate prior research on value creation and value outcomes through the development of a systemic framework that explains value creation in terms of both individual actions and collective outcomes. Moreover, the findings motivate discussion on the affordances of physical and digital objects for value creation.