Dave Elder-Vass - Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy

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Dave Elder-Vass 2016

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For Alisa

I would like to thank the many people who have discussed the issues considered in this book with me, both face-to-face and digitally, for the gift of their attention and their ideas. Inevitably I will miss some, for which I apologise, but those of you I can remember are: Aleksi Aaltonen, Margaret Archer, Michaela Benson, Dave Berry, Gurminder Bhambra, Roy Bhaskar, Tom Brock, Gideon Calder, Mark Carrigan, Bob Carter, Daniel Chernilo, Rachel Cohen, Dean Curran, Asaf Darr, Gerard Delanty, Steve Fleetwood, Rob Garnett, Des Gasper, Christian Greiffenhagen, Mark Harvey, Tuukka Kaidesoja, Ruth Kinna, Chris Land, Tony Lawson, Terry Leahy, Paul Lewis, Andrea Maccarini, Lee Martin, Ashley Mears, Jamie Morgan, Graham Murdock, Karen OReilly, Lynne Pettinger, Jonathan Preminger, Olli Pyyhtinen, Hartmut Rosa, Sandy Ross, Michael Roy, Balihar Sanghera, Andrew Sayer, John Scott, Dennis Smith, David Thomas, Hilary Wainwright, Erik Olin Wright and the very helpful anonymous reviewers of both this book and the various papers I have drawn on in writing it.

I owe particular thanks to Dean Curran and Aleksi Aaltonen for reading parts of this book and giving me very helpful feedback, to Loughborough University for granting me the research leave that was used to write the vast majority of this book and my colleagues in the sociology group there for being the most supportive colleagues imaginable. As always, my greatest thanks are owed to my wife Alisa for both her tolerance and her encouragement.

Finally, I must thank several journals and their publishers for permission to re-use material from the following articles. None of them are reproduced in full, but sections are scattered throughout the book:

Towards a Social Ontology of Market Systems, CRESI Working Paper 200906, University of Essex, 2009 Dave Elder-Vass, used in .

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Giving and Social Transformation, Journal of Critical Realism (2014) 13:3, 261285, 2014 Maney Publishing, used in .

Commerce, Community and Digital Gifts in Robert Garnett, Paul Lewis and Lenore Ealy (eds) Commerce and Community: Ecologies of Social Cooperation , Routledge (2014), 236252, 2015 Dave Elder-Vass, used in .

The Moral Economy of Digital Gifts, International Journal of Social Quality (2015) 5:1, Berghahn Books, 2015 Dave Elder-Vass, used in .

Free Gifts and Positional Gifts: Beyond Exchangism, European Journal of Social Theory (2015), doi: 10.1177/1368431014566562, Sage Publications, 2015 Dave Elder-Vass, used in

Over three billion times a day, someone types a search term into Google economy, which is usually seen as an alternative to the commercial economy, making personal connections on the basis of reciprocal obligations.

The best-established ways of understanding our economy are the neoclassical

The real economy, however, is far more economy, with its proliferation of innovative economic forms.

Our failure to recognise the diversity of our existing economic systems is doubly consequential. On the one hand, it produces a warped and damaging understanding of how the existing economy works; and on the other, it radically limits our ability to think creatively about economic futures. Capitalism as a universal system, if such a thing could even exist, would be utterly inadequate to the challenge of meeting human needs, but this does not mean that the solution is some other universal system. If we are to think productively about alternatives we must stop imagining our economic futures in all or nothing terms: capitalism universal vs. capitalism destroyed.

The central original contribution of this book is to propose a new framework that enables us both to see and to analyse a vast range of diverse economic forms, and to illustrate that framework by applying it to cases in the contemporary digital economy. In this framework, which I call a political economy of practices , each economic form is understood as a complex of appropriative practices : social practices that influence the allocation of benefits from the process of production. Different combinations of appropriative practices give us different economic forms with very different effects on who receives what benefits and harms from the economy. The political economy of practices examines how the practices concerned interact to produce those effects, but it also takes an evaluative stance, offering grounds to judge which forms are more desirable in any given context.