Gift and Money at work. Customers, Companies, Communities

The frequent attempts by companies to promote, intermediate and intercept individual conversations within digital communities are today opening up new ideological debate. In this work, our aim was to ascertain whether the new social “game” is actually providing wealth for players, and examine any theoretical implications of the growing overlap between dialogue and sale, between market and society or, more simply, between money and gift. A review of recent literature is followed by discussion of logic and empirical evidence, which leads into a focus on the convergence currently taking place between the roles of customer and citizen. We develop a new theory of convergence and test it through a specially developed model of a “co-value chain”. The metrics of the Covalue Model are used to measure and clarify the roles of customers, companies and communities. The model is applied to a large number of recent case histories, providing a topical focus on implications for management