Throughout the Western world, governments and financial elites responded
to the financial crisis of 2008 by trying to restore the conditions of
business as usual, but the economic, social and human damage inflicted
by the crisis has given rise to a reconsideration of the inevitability
of unfettered capitalism as a fact of life. A number of economic
practices and organizations emerged in Europe and the United States that
embodied alternative values: the value of life over the value of money;
the effectiveness of cooperation over cut-throat competition; the social
responsibility of corporations and responsible regulation by governments
over the short-term speculative strategies that brought the economy to
the brink of catastrophe.
This book examines the blossoming of innovative new experiments in
organizing work and life that emerged in the wake of the financial
crisis: cooperatives, barter networks, ethical banking, community
currencies, shared time banks, solidarity networks, sharing of goods,
non-monetary transactions, etc., experiments that paved the way for the
emergence of a sharing economy in all domains of activity oriented
toward the satisfaction of human needs. Other innovations included the
creation of cryptographic virtual currencies, epitomized by bitcoin,
which blended a libertarian, entrepreneurial spirit with information
technology to provide an alternative to standard forms of currency. On
the basis of a cross-cultural analysis of alternative economic
practices, this book develops an important theoretical argument: that
the economy, as a human practice, is shaped by culture, and that the
diversity of cultures, as revealed in a time of crisis, implies the
possibility of different economies depending on the values and power
relations that define economic institutions.
This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in
sociology, economics and the social sciences generally, and to anyone
who wishes to understand how our societies and economies are changing
today.
