Abstract
The politics of value creation outlined in this dissertation challenges core assumptions of current value creation literature and particularly its service-dominant logic branch. Politics of value creation illustrates the weight that people individually and collectively give to an object or an issue; the social construction of meaning and valuation, its conventions and institutions; the authority afforded through these, and the struggle between different groups to maintain and change the above. This study engages current theory with an alternative conceptual framework and an unorthodox empirical setting. Sociological theories of collective action and strategic action fields are in conceptual dialogue with value-creating actors, their relationships and interaction, practices and outcomes. The collective–conflictual value creation theory developed in this study acknowledges systems of domination and skewedness of power in value creating contexts. The approach builds on the bearing that dominant ideologies are a product of a particular social order and interests that result in a conflict between incumbents and challengers, and have consequences to the wider environment. Rather than marginal and consequential, conflict is not only endemic, but causative when value-creating interactions are based on varying understandings and logics. The empirical study engaged the organised labour in Finland with critical ethnography examining societal macro-relations of the labour market institutions, meso-dynamics of the labour movement, and micro-practices in a trade union organisation. The politics of value creation is, on one hand, a critical analysis of current theory, and on the other, an exploratory study illustrating strategic collective action in value creation. With the collective–conflictual approach, value creation contexts are recast as porous arenas where various interactions, practice and outcomes constantly develop in collaboration and competition illustrating the permanence of dynamic tensions that instigate jockeying, using social skill in framing, and practicing ideologies and politics in an attempt to create and arbitrate value.