Fandom as Co-creation (Frames of Fandom)

Fans create extraordinary value. But who gets to control it?

Fans make movies, modify video games, design products, build archives, revive forgotten franchises, and create entire cultural worlds. Their creativity fuels some of the world's most successful entertainment and media properties. Yet the companies that control those properties can embrace fan contributions one day and restrict, commercialize, or shut them down the next.

What happens when the people who create cultural value are not the people who control it?

In Fandom as Co-Creation, renowned fandom scholars Henry Jenkins and Robert V. Kozinets investigate the complicated, often contentious relationships between fans, creators, corporations, and the institutions that govern contemporary popular culture.

The fifth volume in the Frames of Fandom series, this book moves beyond the familiar celebration of fan culture to examine the economic, legal, and institutional arrangements that make fan creativity possible—and sometimes place it in jeopardy.

Drawing on compelling cases from film, television, gaming, music, and fan communities, Jenkins and Kozinets explore five distinct models of fan–corporate relationships:

• The Incubator: When companies invite fans to innovate within corporate-controlled environments.

• The Workshop: When fans and firms collaborate through shared tools, resources, and productive arrangements.

• The Playground: When fans creatively inhabit commercial cultural worlds under conditions of tolerance and uncertain permission.

• Stewardship: When fans preserve, maintain, and extend cultural properties that commercial institutions have neglected or abandoned.

• The Commons: When communities create and govern their own infrastructures for sustained cultural participation.

At the heart of the book is a provocative distinction between symbiosis and parasitism. Some arrangements sustain reciprocal benefits, even when participants possess unequal resources and power. Others allow powerful institutions to capture value while undermining the communities whose creativity makes that value possible.

Through the Co-Creation Matrix, the authors reveal how corporate control, fan autonomy, and institutional security shape these relationships. They examine fan labor, intellectual property, commercialization, legal conflict, and the continuing struggle over who gets to participate, profit, and make the rules.

But this is not simply a book about exploitation. It is also about possibility.

In its concluding chapters, Fandom as Co-Creation develops seven principles of symbiotic design: a practical framework for building relationships that are more reciprocal, durable, accountable, and respectful of fan creativity and community autonomy.

Can corporations profit from fandom without exploiting it? Can fans build lasting cultural institutions within worlds they do not legally own? What would genuinely symbiotic relationships between fans and firms look like?

Combining original theoretical frameworks, vivid cultural examples, business analysis, and practical exercises, Fandom as Co-Creation offers a new perspective on some of the most consequential relationships in contemporary culture.

For scholars and students of fandom, media, marketing, and cultural studies; for entertainment executives, brand managers, and creators; and for fans who have ever wondered who really owns the worlds they help bring to life.

Fandom is not simply something people consume. It is something they create together. The bigger question is who gets to decide what happens next.