The co-optation of Scottish cold-water surfing: An exemplar of how using indigenous relational power to share knowledge averts value co-destruction in western capitalist markets

Western capitalism asserts that knowledge is power, a political tool, something created by entrepreneurs, or a prize acquired and owned by the marketplace through predation. Gaining control of knowledge through cultural appropriation and co-optation enables the marketplace to commodify meaningful symbols and claim that its brands provide an authentic identity. Consequently, Marxist theories of co-optation suggest division and exacerbated imbalanced power dynamics between them versus us, which leads to value co-destruction (VCD) and the creation of parallel marketplaces by the dispossessed. The purpose of this article is to reframe the anti-logic inherent in existing formal and Marxist co-optation theories to further develop assertions of interdependent relationships, value co-creation (VCC), and authenticity in contemporary consumer culture by replacing Western concepts of extracting information with the sharing of knowledge founded on notions of Indigenous relational power. In doing so, the article argues for a paradigm shift in how brands choose to involve consumers in co-optation processes. Deeply rooted in its situation, a history of surf culture is interwoven with findings from a 20-year ethnography of cold-water surfing to explain how the cycle of boom-and-bust VCD power dynamics caused by formal and Marxist co-optation can be averted if Indigenous relational power is used to share knowledge with collective accountability for co-creating authentic representations. The significance of the relational co-optation theory introduced in this article is its capacity for the marketplace and its consumers to escape the power dynamics at play in persistent discussions of deliberate and inadvertent cultural appropriation and destructive co-optation.