Eudaimonia: The sociocultural value of consumers’ social labor

Abstract

Consumers participate in social media producing value through social labor. So far scholars approached social labor through a Marxist lens focusing on the economic aspects of its value and the potential risks related to consumers’ exploitation. We build a sociocultural conceptualization of social labor actualizing the Aristotelian idea of virtuous action that realizes a life well lived with others. Following this approach, we identify Eudaimonia as a theoretical construct to capture the sociocultural value of social labor, and we elaborate how social labor in social media enables the achievement of a eudaimonic state of living. We support our conceptualization with empirical evidence in the social media context of amateur cooking practices that illustrates how Eudaimonia is achieved through social labor practices of cultural performativity. Our perspective extends previous theory related to three research domains of consumers’ social labor: (1) Marxist and technocapitalist critique, (2) neoliberalist perspective, and (3) networked consumer collectives.