The rise and development of markets under neoliberal consumerism represents a topical theme in marketing theory and is at the heart of emergent discussions on market system dynamics. While the nonprofit market sector represents a major part of the economy and is an important locus for alternative market discourses, prior studies tend to focus on well-represented groups of actors, such as corporations or consumers. Moving beyond the dyad of producers and consumers, the present study contributes to recent discussions on institutional work by examining and problematizing the role of nonprofit organizations (NPOs) as agents of market system dynamics. A qualitative discourse analysis of nonprofit marketing, conducted at one of Sweden’s largest NPOs, reveals the institutional work aimed at modifying the market for health and fitness according to alternative cultural values of, for instance, inclusiveness, democracy, and collectiveness. In particular, the article draws attention to ethical institutional work in markets, which enables organizations to strategically switch managerial focus between disparate institutional demands for purposes of creating and maintaining hybrid forms of legitimacy. However, ethical work also problematically entwines nonprofit with commercial values of profit maximization. The study contends that nonprofit consumerism thus works as a double-edged sword and may spur commercialization and market diffusion in society at large.

This study examines the power and potential of marketing in the proliferation of health discourses in society. More specifically, drawing on a Foucauldian bio-political framework, it undertakes a discourse analysis of a commercial weight-loss program and the service marketing managerialism it actualizes, focusing on the interactions between service workers and consumers. The study contributes to recent discussions concerning the governmentality of marketing and its effects on consumer well-being by showing how people are invested in identity work in which the body becomes a site of collective control in consumer culture. The study reveals how service marketing is infused with bio-power, which simultaneously spurs people to lose weight and constructs them as cautious consumers that embody increased levels of self-care, control, anxiety and stress. Finally, it is argued that this continuous creation of bodily distress functions as a key mechanism of the contemporary market economy under neoliberal capitalism.

Confessions are said to be important for members’ tribal experiences and they are usually ascribed religious meanings in existing research on consumer tribes. This suggests that confessions have a regulative role for tribal life. By employing the Foucauldian notion of pastoral power, the present study explores confession practices and examines how control is manifested.

The study is based on a netnographic study and analysis of tribal members’ confessions across three online consumer tribes devoted to opera (Loggionisti, who are opera aficionados of the La Scala theatre in Milan, Italy), sports (football and hockey fans of Djurgården, Sweden), and cars (Alfa Romeo owners).

We demonstrate how confessions align consumers with the common tribe ethos and how this constitutes members into various subject positions, which are fundamental social processes for reinforcing the tribe. More specifically, it demonstrates four types of subject positions: the ‘pastor’, ‘regular sheep’, ‘good sheep’ and ‘black sheep’, and how these subject positions regulate the actions of tribe members.

The present study theorizes how control is manifested and facilitated in consumer tribes. The study also explicates the confession and its role as a religious regulating practice fundamental for the life of a consumer tribe.

Community managers can recognize the different subject positions that emerge within a community and help facilitate the interactions among community members.

Previous studies are silent about how confessions reproduce control in consumer tribes. The present study highlights confession practices and the constitution of subject positions, which regulate as well as reinforce consumer tribes.

Marketing theory has conceptualised value co-creation through research on provider and consumer resource integrations. Little attention, however, has been devoted to how companies, consumers, and other stakeholders interact and co-create value in the context of multiple interactions. This study, therefore, explores co-creation by investigating the football experience, which is characterised by often-complex relations of multiple actors involved. Through a sociocultural perspective, actors’ resource integration is understood as being dependent on the shifting and contradicting interests of actors, which renders actors both enabled and also constrained in their interactive processes. This study demonstrates that actors’ contradictory resource integrations and interactions are fundamental for value to be co-created, since they give rise to new interpretations and meaning creations. In conclusion, the study reveals regulations, the media, and the collective strength of consumers to be unbalancing and yet creative mechanisms within the value co-creation process.

How producers and consumers interact in the market and integrate resources is fundamental for our understanding of how value and value creation develop in contemporary economy. Value co-creation in markets has gained renewed interest in marketing theory. The existing literature has predominantly focused on emphasizing either how co-creation processes are organized from a provider perspective or how consumers create value in their consumption practices. In taking either a service-provider or consumption perspective, previous research disregards the complexity of interactions between two or more actors, and that interactions often are characterized by tensions and conflicts. The aim of this thesis is therefore to analyze how constellations of various actors interact to co-create value, and to demonstrate possible implications for marketing theory and research on value co-creation. This is done by examining different constellations of actors’ interactions, emphasizing organization and consumption of services in sport and tourism, two fruitful contexts for investigating complex actor constellations.

In marketing theory, Service Dominant logic (S-D logic) has evolved into a key framework for conceptualizing and organizing value co-creation. The focus on the organization of value co- creation has occurred at the expense of emphasizing actors’ rich and varied competences and the contextual conditions that permeate actors’ interactions. Therefore, as another contribution, the present thesis further bridges S-D logic with socio-cultural oriented consumption theory on meaning creation, and how available recourses are made use of by organizations and consumers. Drawing on these two frameworks, and by conducting 52 interviews with respondents from actor groups, this thesis provides a systematization of interactions, demonstrating that value co-creation is dependent on the constellation of actors, their often contradicting interests and their various competences. The following types of interactions for value co-creation are suggested: converged, diverged, disjointed and fragmented.