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Lifeworld and systems in the digital economy

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journal contribution
posted on 2017-01-09, 14:36 authored by Dave Elder-Vass
The digital economy has provided opportunities for new forms of economic practice. At their purest, these forms deliver economic benefits as gifts and depend on cooperation without authority. Drawing loosely on Habermas, we may call this a lifeworld economy – an economy that is coordinated by communicative interaction – as opposed to the systems economy of market and state, coordinated by money and power. This formulation, however, faces both theoretical and practical challenges. On the theoretical side, the notion of a lifeworld economy does not sit easily with Habermas’s own formulation of the distinction between lifeworld and systems. On the practical side, the digital lifeworld economy has been colonised steadily by capitalist businesses, which have frequently found ways to incorporate forms of gift and cooperation into profit-oriented business models. This paper proposes to reformulate Habermas’s distinction as a reference to different kinds of causal mechanisms, detaching it from his functionalist framework and enabling more flexible application to empirical cases. It then applies it to a series of iconic cases from the digital economy: amazon, Wikipedia, and open source software, to demonstrate its continuing relevance to very current issues.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Published in

European Journal of Social Theory

Volume

21

Issue

2

Pages

227-244

Citation

ELDER-VASS, D., 2017. Lifeworld and systems in the digital economy. European Journal of Social Theory, 21(2), pp. 227-244.

Publisher

© The Author. Published by SAGE Publications (UK and US)

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/

Acceptance date

2016-12-09

Publication date

2017-05-11

Copyright date

2018

Notes

This article was published in the European Journal of Social Theory [© The Author. Published by SAGE Publications (UK and US)] and the definitive version is available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431017709703

ISSN

1461-7137

Language

  • en