Prosumption: as novas articulações entre trabalho e consumo na reorganização do capital

Abstract

O artigo analisa o fenômeno do prosumption a partir das ressignificações que o termo sofreu no contexto das reestruturações produtivas da década de 1980 e das novas articulações entre trabalho e consumo daí advindas. Com base em textos acadêmicos e ilustrações empíricas, e fundamentado na literatura marxiana sobre a produção do valor, o objetivo do artigo é compreender como se dá a formatação do consumidor-trabalhador e do trabalhador-consumidor, vendo a maneira contemporânea com a qual o capital tem buscado lidar com dois dos seus principais desafios: a extensão do trabalho abstrato e a superação da lacuna temporal entre produção e realização de valor. Esse processo aponta para formas inéditas e mais sutis de exploração do trabalho abstrato-do trabalhador e do consumidor-e requer um retorno a Marx para se pensar as fronteiras borradas entre produção e realização do valor nessas novas formas de trabalho e consumo.

Trabalhador-consumidor: a atração de jovens pelo employer branding na escolha profissional

“…The Internet, for example, amplifies this phenomenon and clearly begins to include the possibility of consumers co-participating in the new product creation processes of companies (ARVIDSSON, 2005(ARVIDSSON, , 2006(ARVIDSSON, , 2008. Consumer and contemporary consumption, therefore, cannot be understood separately from the world of work and production (CÓRDOVA, 2016;FONTENELLE, 2015b).…”

“…This strategy may be adopted because they believe that these same candidates and workers have great potential to publicize the company's brand as consumers and turn it into the consumption wish of many people. There are prosumer characteristics in candidates who gravitate towards job vacancies in employer brand companies, such as: these candidates doing unpaid work (TERRANOVA, 2003); consumption as an investment directed at work (FONTENELLE, 2015a(FONTENELLE, , 2015b; and the social relationship investment and emotional involvement with the brand and with the product as a precursor of the trust that is to be established (ARVIDSSON, 2005). Above all, prosumers work even though they receive no financial compensation (RITZER, DEAN and JURGENSON, 2012).…”

“…Already in the 1980s, for example, the word prosumption referred to the process by which the boundaries that separated producer from consumer became jumbled (GABRIEL and LANG, 2008). Nowadays this term has gained in strength and is increasingly associated with producing value for capitalism (ARVIDSSON, 2008;FONTENELLE, 2015b). This term is essentially " [...] hailed as a way of empowering the consumer.…”

“…The intern prosumer: the producer-consumer of the employer brand company There is involvement, a possible connection between employer branding, the desire to consume the brand and the prosumer perspective (FONTENELLE, 2014(FONTENELLE, , 2015bRITZER, DEAN and JURGENSON, 2012); in other words, the desire to consume the employer brand company involves the worker's production-consumption that goes beyond the contractual hours of his/her workday and his/her compensation. The key element of this concept -prosumer -is that the worker does not necessarily see this as a bad thing, but as something that adds to their résumé; something that updates them and keeps them in the job vacancy circuit of employer brand companies.…”

“…Studies linking work and consumption have been conducted by a number of authors who deal with: prosumption or co-creation. (CÓRDOVA, 2016;FONTENELLE, 2014FONTENELLE, , 2015aFONTENELLE, , 2015bRAMASWAMY, 2004a, 2004b;TOFFLER, 1980); the consumer as value producer (CHERKOVSKAYA and LOAKER, 2016;DALE, 2012;FONTENELLE, 2015a), especially by way of the Internet (RITZER, 2014); ethical economy (ARVIDSSON, 2010;ARVIDSSON and PEITERSEN, 2013); immaterial labor (GORZ, 2003;LAZZARATO and NEGRI, 2001) and voluntary work (PEARCE, 1993), or free labor (ANDREJEVIC, 2013;HESMONDHALGH, 2013;TERRANOVA, 2003). While there are authors who point to the countless positive aspects of these new work formats, by which the consumer is brought into the very center of value creation based on co-creation processes (BOTSMAN and ROGERS, 2011;PRAHALAD and RAMASWAMY, 2004b), there are also critical perspectives that indicate the intense exploitation of workers based on prosumption (COMOR, 2010a(COMOR, , 2010bFONTENELLE, 2014;GORZ, 2003;LAZZARATO andNEGRI, 2001, 2015a).…”