2015-08 Moral Economy of Digital Gifts IJSQ PPV.pdf (126.96 kB)
The moral economy of digital gifts
journal contribution
posted on 2015-10-01, 14:11 authored by Dave Elder-VassThe 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 QualityVolume
5Issue
1Citation
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 QualityVersion
- 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
2015Notes
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
1757-0344Publisher version
Language
- en