Consumer Creativity and Ideological Conflicts: an Investigation of the Free/Open Source Software Community

This paper examines consumer creativity in a context of a conflict-laden consumer community. Using a netnography methodology, we analyzed data collected from online archives of consumer discourses of several web sites of the Free/Open Source Software community. Drawing on Berman's view of creat...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Shi, Tiebing, Handelman, Jay
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Subjects:
Consumer behavior
Creative process
Creativity
Digital archives
Discourse analysis
Ethnography
Open source software
Public domain
Studies
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:This paper examines consumer creativity in a context of a conflict-laden consumer community. Using a netnography methodology, we analyzed data collected from online archives of consumer discourses of several web sites of the Free/Open Source Software community. Drawing on Berman's view of creativity that sees creativity as a community-based, political-cultural process, we find that ideologies and authority underlie the creative process and that consumers blend conflicting ideologies to construct their own ideologies to enhance the legitimacy of their creative process, thereby reducing the power of dominant firms in the marketplace.
ISSN:0098-9258