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2015-08 Moral Economy of Digital Gifts IJSQ PPV.pdf (126.96 kB)

The moral economy of digital gifts

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journal contribution
posted on 2015-10-01, 14:11 authored by Dave Elder-Vass
The significance of giving as a contemporary socio-economic practice has been obscured both by mainstream economics and by the influence of the anthropological tradition. Andrew Sayer’s concept of moral economy offers a more fruitful framework for an economic sociology of contemporary giving, and one that appears to be largely consistent with social quality approaches. This paper analyses giving from the perspective of moral economy, questioning the view that giving is a form of exchange, and opening up the prospect of seeing it as the outcome of a more complex constellation of causal factors. It uses examples from the digital economy, in particular the phenomenon of open source software, which nicely illustrates both the progressive potential of digital gifts and the ways in which they can be absorbed into the commercial economy.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Published in

International Journal of Social Quality

Volume

5

Issue

1

Citation

ELDER-VASS, D., 2015. The moral economy of digital gifts. International Journal of Social Quality, 5(1), pp. 35-50.

Publisher

© Berghahn Journals in partnership with Zhejiang University and the International Association on Social Quality

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2015

Notes

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal International Journal of Social Quality and the definitive published version is available at http://journals.berghahnbooks.com/ijsq/

ISSN

1757-0344

Language

  • en