Consumers' Changing Roles - From Creative Communities to Entrepreneurial Tribes

Consumers have become active, entrepreneurial participants in the marketplace. I juxtapose current views of consumer agency with an empirically informed description of the free and open source software (F/OSS) movement and show how they define their changing role in discourse. The objective of this research is to shed light on how they negotiate, resolve, and restate contradictions and tensions that arise from their common practice as successful entrepreneurs. The key findings show how they negotiate identity at the crossroads of Utopian romanticism and activism, pragmatic agency and skepticism. Discourse merges into a collective imagination of the inno-tribe as a movemental, yet decently skeptical, pragmatically acting group.

Citation:

Andrea Hemetsberger (2007) ,"Consumers' Changing Roles - From Creative Communities to Entrepreneurial Tribes", in E - European Advances in Consumer Research Volume 8, eds. Stefania Borghini, Mary Ann McGrath, and Cele Otnes, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 345-346.