Résumé
A recent body of literature started to investigate marketing as a technology of government (Beckett 2012). Several studies looked at what is called the "marketing governmentality" (Cova and Cova 2009) and expose the way marketing discourse create representations, while others investigate the consequences of these representations on consumer subjectivity (Zwick and Dholakia 2004). According to Foucauldian theory (Foucault 1975), these representations are part of the government activity. Beyond consumer subjectivity, we still know little about how marketing practice organizes consumption systems of power (Thompson 2004). Moreover, research about this performative capacity of marketing government is scarce when it comes to online communities, while their management is a core business activity. Communities are often understood as fostering consumer empowerment (Labrecque et al. 2013), while Social Media Management (SMMt) aims at governing online consumers (Zwick and Denegri-Knott 2009). The scope of this activity is wide and includes different marketing activities; as a result, it concerns marketing in a broader sense. We therefore investigate empirically the SMMt practice to answer two questions: how do marketing practices create and reinforce representations of consumers? What are the consequences of these practices?