Sarah Banet-Weiser and Manuel Castells
Like all human activities, what we call “the economy” is made up of human practices framed by institutions, both embedded in specific cultures, as argued by Douglass North, Elinor Ostrom, and Viviane Zelizer, among others (North 1981; Ostrom 2005; Castells et al. 2012; Zelizer 2013).
Economic practices refer to practices of production, consumption and exchange. But of what? In principle of “goods and services.” But the implicit materiality of this formulation is misleading, unless we extend the meaning of goods and services to everything. Because production, consumption, and exchange of knowledge is central to any economic system, as it is the production and consumption of culture itself. Moreover, contemporary economies are based on the production and exchange of financial value, an immaterial but also essential product and factor of production. Therefore, it appears that the object of economic practices is the generation and appropriation of value, whatever the material support of value is in every specific practice. This leads to the fundamental question: What is value?
A classical distinction in economic philosophy differentiates use value from exchange value. Indeed the first pages of Marx’s Capital: Critique of Political Economy open with this distinction and with a thorough elaboration on their relationship.1 The use value of anything is what is useful to satisfy human needs and desires, and it is realized by its use and its consumption. Exchange value, in Marx’s formulation, appears as the quantitative measure according to which use values of different kinds are exchanged. This relationship of exchange is constantly modified depending on time and place. However, Marx’s conceptualization refers specifically to the capitalist mode of production in which the wealth of society depends on “the immense accumulation of commodities.” Both use value and exchange value exist as commodities, and because commodities are different in quality, in order to be exchanged they need an exchange value measure that transforms different use values into a common measure of value. Therefore, the difference and interaction between use value and exchange value is internal to the logic of the capitalist mode of production and not, as is often thought, as an opposition between what humans want and like, and the capitalist process of commodification measured ultimately by money as a quantitative representation of exchange value.
What humans want and like, in Marx’s own words, has use value only if it is a “useful thing.” If it is not useful, the labor embodied in the “thing” has been wasted, and accordingly does not create value. Who, then, determines that something is useful? From the capitalist point of view there is no doubt: to increase the exchange value of the product, as determined by the mechanism of exchange value quantification, it is the marketplace, organized around the interaction of supply and demand as a means of allocation of scarce resources to satisfy ever expanding needs and desires. Thus, ultimately exchange value determines the actual value of use value. Yet, this is a logic internal to the process of capital accumulation in a society in which the entire social organization, including culture and institutions, is organized around the logic of capital. However, this logic is not an immanent feature of human nature (as the implicit essentialism of neoliberal ideology would have it; Harvey 2005), but the result of a particular social structure: capitalism in its different forms and stages of historical existence.
Therefore, economic value is exchange value, and exchange value is measured monetarily by the market. And the dominance of exchange value as the overarching value of everything is in fact an institutional feature, derived from the dominance of the institutions of capitalism over other institutional-cultural formations that are subordinated to the power of capitalism (Sennett 2006). Thus, in broader social terms, value, in a given social/institutional context, is what the dominant institutions and norms decide is valuable. Since the current global economy is capitalist, capital accumulation is the supreme value, in economic terms, and should translate in the capacity to buy everything with money, the material expression of exchange value in a fully commodified society.
However, economic organization is not tantamount to social organization, not even under capitalism. We live in a global network society structured around networks that follow different logics (Castells 2000, 2004, 2009). Each one of these global/local networks has its own principle of valuation. Thus if we consider that the power of the state, supported by its technological and organizational military capacity, is the supreme value that organizes societies, then value is what accrues this power in its various manifestations, as was the case with the Soviet Union and is still the case, largely, in China. If we say that in the last resort power resides in human minds, as humans are able to reverse the logic of institutions by their conscious actions, then major ideational systems are the holders of symbolic power, as is the case with religious institutions or mass media systems, and value will be measured by the extent and depth of adherence to God’s Law (in its diversity), or by the extent and depth of influence of media systems to construct representations of the human mind in specific contexts.
Then, the most important issue is the relative hierarchy of these global networks among themselves in each context (Castells 2009, 2011). Of course, all of these networks interact, each one with its principle of valuation, but is there a dominant network? A meta-network that organizes the functioning of the others as specific manifestations of the value-making principle of that network? Would this be the alpha network of capital accumulation that is referred to by all other networks? In a strict sense yes, but this would only be the case if we all lived in a capitalist society and not just a capitalist economy. Empirical observation shows that this is not the case. The principles of state power preempt economic considerations in the case of military conflict or potential threats: national security is priceless. The value in this case is security or victory. Economic benefits come second, although we know of many cases in which wars and conflicts are used as additional means of capital accumulation, though not for capital in general, but for the corporate allies of the state. It is what the media call crony capitalism and what these authors call the political pillage of resources using the power of the state, not the market logic. Moreover, the last century saw the formation of communist states and statist societies in much of the world. The fundamental value for these regimes was the accumulation of state power, not capital. Capital accumulation was a means to provide the resources for the enforcement of state power, domestically and internationally. This is not only the past (although it supports our analysis of value making beyond the logic of capital even if this was in the recent past) but also partially the present in the case of some societies, particularly China, the second-largest economy on the planet.
The Chinese state largely controls, owns, and ultimately dominates the Chinese economy. While economic growth and capital accumulation is a major goal, and thus a key value for Chinese society as a whole, what is valuable for the institutions that shape and control the life of Chinese is the power of the Communist Party. In China, unlike in the US, what is good for Huawei is not necessarily good for the country. Rather, what is good for the Communist State is good for Huawei (among other things because it is the property of the state). China operates simultaneously in different value systems: capital accumulation in the global economy; state power accumulation in the institutions and organizations of China (including economic organizations); and symbolic power, through cultural legitimation, in the controlled media system and consumerism as a guiding norm for the politically decisive urban middle class (Hsing 2014).
As for religion, it is the most significant source of violent conflict in today’s world. Imposing one’s religion, in multiple sectarian versions, is the most important value for the multiple theocracies and would-be theocracies around the world. God’s glory and service to God are the most important overarching values for billions of humans on the planet. Capital accumulation is only a means to broaden and deepen the kingdom of God. State power must be in the service of God. Otherwise it is a heretic institution that pretends to be superior to the law of God. This is the case in Islamic theocracies, but has been historically the case in Western countries as well: the Spanish conquest of America aimed primarily to convert the lost souls of the natives. The fundamental goal of the Reformation Church of England with the King/Queen as the nominal head of the Church was a merger of powers ultimately decided in favor of the state. In societies dominated by religious values, both by coercion and persuasion, value is defined by the conformity of behavior to God’s Law.
Thus, since value making depends on the hierarchy of power between the networks that organize human life, including strictly speaking economic activities, values and value making are largely an expression of power relationships.
Largely but not exclusively, that is. Since power, in every network or dimension of society, is contradicted by counterpower, the principles of value making projected by the counterpower networks will interact with those imposed/proposed by the institutions, and may result in different values as guiding principles of human behavior, including economic activities (Castells 2015). If we consider the economy as a set of practices organized around processes of production, consumption and exchange to generate value according to certain criteria of what is valuable, then the market and other forms of economic institutions will not be the exclusive domain of capital accumulation but the expression of different goals and projects coming from humans operating as economic subjects on their own, even disregarding the values proposed by the institutions of society. These counter-projects could come either from collective expressions of alternative forms of values or from autonomous individuals organizing their lives, and therefore their economic practices, around their own values, thus creating their own value-making procedures. We will illustrate our argument by considering two processes of value making that do not adjust to the norms of capital and yet have immense impact in the informational network economy in which we live: the open source economy and the rise of feminist economics.
However, before engaging in the analysis of alternative projects of value making, we will show how capitalist values are embedded in the social practices of the most fundamental capitalist institution in our economy: financial markets. We contend that financial practices are also culturally constructed, as the structures of capitalism evolve and change over time. Capitalism in the twenty-first century is characterized by the domination of capitalism by global financial capitalism, enacted by financial elites whose role and cultural underpinnings have been transformed in the network society under the impulse of neoliberal ideologies and politics (Harvey 2005; Crouch 2011; Engelen et al. 2011; Mason, 2015).
Values do not exist in a social vacuum. They are enacted by individuals and embedded in institutions. Global informational financial capitalism as a specific form of capitalism has been shaped by a specific culture (Hutton and Giddens 2000). This culture is supported by financial practices because it fits the interests of the actors, the financial elites. Indeed, contemporary financial culture may be damaging for the interest of “the system” as a whole, because it threatens its stability. Yet, contemporary financial elites could not care less about the broader picture, as their behavior is guided by personal gain with a quarterly horizon for their lucrative bonuses (Nolan 2009; Engelen et al. 2011; Murray and Scott 2012). This is exactly the specific culture we refer to, and this is the culture whose content and formation we analyze in this section of the chapter.
The culture of the contemporary financial elites is formed by the articulation of different cultural layers that in their historical weaving induce a specific financial culture:
The first layer is, historically, the Protestant Ethic, following the classic analysis by Max Weber. It can be defined as the search for salvation through accumulation of wealth by reinvesting profits to increase profits: earned value is used to expand the production of value. In terms of the culture of the actors, it is characterized as a deferred gratification pattern. Their primary goal is not to consume the yield of their labor but to obtain their reward in the afterlife and in family reproduction of wealth, transforming profits into assets that will accrue their value faster than earnings because they start from a higher level of accumulation (Piketty 2013). For these elites, there is little hedonistic consumption; their lives tend to be relatively austere (at least in historical comparison with our time). Profit making is the supreme value, both for the economy as a whole and for personal salvation and reputation.
The second layer is the culture of liberty, based on the assumption that the market knows better, as supply and demand are constructed by the free decisions of investors and consumers, guided by their rational choice in terms of self-interest. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” is the ultimate driver of the market, thus of the capitalist economy. This is the cultural tenet of liberalism and neoliberalism (Harvey 2005). The culture of liberty emerged historically as a reaction against the arbitrariness of state power and theocracy (Crouch 2011). In such context, the free exchange of economic value levels the field and allocates resources depending on supply and demand, and, as a derivative, the expectations of profits. The most important market in capitalism is the financial market. Liberalism advocates acknowledge the need for regulation of the market, including the financial market, by government and legal institutions. Indeed, North showed in his classic analysis that institutions are absolutely necessary for the market to work properly (1981). However, regulatory bodies aim for allowing rational choices to be processed in the market. Yet, values and rationality are not the same. Rationality is framed within a value system that is institutionalized. What is rational from the perspective of one set of values may not be from another. For instance, the paramount need of energy supply at a lower price may be highly beneficial for the economy even if it is accomplished by the new technologies of fracking. But if the preservation of the environment in the most fundamental sense is brought into consideration, what appears to be a rational choice is actually an irrational, damaging decision. Based on neoliberal assumptions, the financial elites believe government intervention distorts markets, and so regulation should be limited to assure fair play in the rules of the game without interpreting the value content of these rules, so that the submission to maximizing the profit rate of private investment is paramount.
The third cultural layer underlying contemporary financial cultures is individualism, defined as the culture in which the unit of reference for the benefit of an action is the individual herself (Santoro and Strauss 2013). The emphasis on individual identity predisposes the direct connection for the financial operators between their personal projects and the market by acting in the market for personal gain in priority of maximizing profits for the shareholders whose capital they represent. The priority given to personal gain is only checked by the regulatory framework and by competition with other financial operators. Yet, here is where policy and institutions matter. Because under the conditions of deregulation the priority for individual gain derived from the culture of individualism translates into financial practices such as (a) defining the success of an investment in a financial operation by quarterly financial results, which ultimately leads the market as a whole to evaluate the results of corporations also in quarterly terms, meaning short-term gains, regardless of long-term prospects for the soundness of the investment; and (b) compensation for financial operators that is largely linked to performance bonuses. These bonuses depend on: (i) short-term evaluation by the market of the traded financial products; and (ii) volume of transactions; since the amount of profit is more important than the rate of profit, it increases the market power of those investors who accumulate a larger share of assets.
The fourth layer in financial culture is the culture of risk (Admati and Hellwig 2013). In the traditional rationale for capitalism, the reward for companies and individuals alike is justified by risk taking. The assumption is that if they fail in their risky investments they lose and become responsible for their losses. If they win, their audacity is rewarded by the market. However, the current strategies of financial elites tend to minimize risk for the individuals of these elites, through several mechanisms: (a) at the individual level, financial operators set up contracts that limit their legal responsibility, which provide “golden parachutes” in case they lose their jobs, and insure their wealth in the long term through their knowledge and contacts; (b) at the institutional level, financial elites count on government bailouts in case of crisis – the so-called “too big to fail” argument – while still cashing their personal bonuses (insured by contract) even if the company goes bankrupt; (c) the high volume of transactions they perform, which is the most important counter-risk mechanism for the financial operators; in some cases the investment fails, in others it is profitable, but ultimately it is their clients who lose or win. The operators, as intermediaries protected by their contracts and conditions, win in (almost) all cases, because their compensation is based on the amount of their activity, in addition to their share of the profits they obtain. Thus, in the practice of contemporary finance, the culture of risk has become an ideological myth, self-serving individually motivated financial practices. This is in sharp contrast with innovation-driven industries, such as the technology industries in which the entrepreneurs risk their capital and their jobs, and depend on their performance (Saxenian 2006). Indeed, this confirms Schumpeter’s old fears (Schumpeter 1942) about the end of the culture of risk, the engine of entrepreneurialism and innovation, under the conditions of oligopolistic corporatization, typical of the financial industry.
The fifth cultural layer that frames the practice of financial elites is patriarchalism, defined as the structural assumption of the systemic power of males over females and their children. This is because patriarchalism, as a fundamental structure of all historically known societies, is transversal to any other form of social organization, including the economy. The meaning of patriarchalism in this context refers to unequal chances of opportunity for men and women in the management structure of key financial institutions. But even more important is the prevalence of masculine values in the practice of all financial elite members, men and women alike. These masculine values include the rejection of any criterion to evaluate financial practices other than the best performance in terms of profit making and the personal maximization of the benefits of any financial transaction, including those that do not benefit the shareholders. Winning at all costs, as in war or in politics, is the fundamental attribute of masculinity throughout history, and this is reflected in the ruthless practices of finance, in the winner takes all principle, and in the praise for extreme risk taking, and the ability to be bold against all odds, even if this endangers the stability of the economy and the preservation of the assets entrusted to financial managers. Moreover, the framework of masculinity, or masculine values, that shape financial culture acts to eclipse any other values – emotional, affective, reproductive – that are modified to function in ways that actually sustain masculine values. So there is a double movement at play here: masculine values dominate financial culture to the extent that no other values are seen as legitimate, but it is precisely these other values that allow masculine values their dominance. An overwhelming male presence in the circles of higher finance characterized the industry in earlier stages of capitalism. However, in neoliberal capitalism, masculinity as a specific set of values is more decisive than the gender symmetry in the heights of finance, as the speed and complexity of global financial transactions requires a one-dimensional determination to beat the competition, regardless of the broader, potentially damaging consequences. The macho culture of young, daring financial wizards has its roots in the history of violence associated with the cult of manhood. It manifests itself in the bravados of the new financial entrepreneurs, such as those twenty-something managers that imagined the credit default swaps (CDSs) during a weekend meeting in Atlantic City.
We hypothesize that the above described cultural layers form, in their interaction and articulation, the core of the financial culture that led to triumphant global financial capitalism and ultimately to its crisis in 2008.
There is continuity between traditional and contemporary financial elites in one fundamental attitude vis-à-vis the institutions of society. They abhor trade unions. This is not just a matter of class ideology. It comes from their deep conviction that any control or limitation to their freedom to make decisions in an ultra-competitive and complex industry may lead to their being outperformed by other companies and individuals. They would rather pay more to their workers than allow them to unionize. Indeed, the financial industry displays, in general, the lowest rates of unionization among industries in most countries.
The financial industry’s attitude toward governments is more complex. They oppose government interference, but they acknowledge the necessity of some sort of regulation and they count on governments as their guarantor in the last resort. Thus, in practice, they tend to buy politicians and place their representatives at the highest level of government, making sure their interests are well served. This is the case in the United States where Wall Street executives have traditionally served in the White House cabinets for both parties. In the world at large, in the twenty-first century we have observed increasing influence of the financial elites in governments and political institutions, as was demonstrated in the management of the financial crisis of 2008 with a massive transfer of resources from taxpayers to the financial institutions to bail them out without demanding personal or corporate responsibilities (Castells et al. 2012). In cultural terms, the prevailing attitude of the financial elites is the deep feeling that they are indispensable and that governments, all governments, must work for them and through them in a global economy built around interdependent financial markets. Arrogance and self-assurance, together with a thinly veiled disdain for politicians, characterizes the new financial elites.
Are the financial elites citizens of the world? Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that they feel they belong to a special class of cosmopolitans. They operate under similar rules in an interdependent financial system, with similar technologies, managerial techniques, and strategies. Their industry is largely global, and so they are as well. They work and live in global networks of cooperation and competition. Furthermore, they are often culturally glued by attendance to similar educational institutions around the world: business schools, law schools, and engineering schools of the top private universities in the world (for themselves and their children alike). And they socialize in similar private clubs and venues, attending exclusive meetings where they hobnob with non-financial elites (political, media, academics) in forums such as the Davos World Economic Forum, the Netherlands-based Bilderberg Group, or California’s Bohemian Grove. So, yes, there is a cosmopolitan culture of global financial elites that is crucial for their management of the global economy in their own interests.
On the other hand, the global financial elite is in fact plural, and lives in the diversity of their cultural/national origins (Anglo-Saxon, Japanese, Arab, Jewish, Chinese, Russian, French, German, Latin American, etc.), with specific norms and codes of conduct, specific references to their cultural traditions and religions, and specific references to their own institutions. Simplifying the matter, we can say they are culturally diverse but their network has a shared global, cosmopolitan identity.
Thus, there is a new kind of financial elite, whose culture and behavior have internalized the norms and structures of the network society and of the global networked economy (Kahneman and Tversky 1973; Aldridge 1997; Castells 2000; Zaloom 2006). Individual financial operators may have personal values of ethics, professionalism, and service. But the operators that the new financial system requires, in generic terms, are disembodied economic actors that increasingly insulate the global financial markets, and themselves as well, from the human condition in all its multidimensionality (Ferguson 2013). They become material supports of abstract capital markets operating with simulation models enacted with the gut feelings emerging from their feverish minds.
Every major techno-economic transformation in history has been associated with, if not induced by, a specific cultural foundation. This was the case for the protestant ethic as the spirit of capitalism, in Max Weber’s formulation. The rise of the networked economy, related to the technological paradigm of informationalism rooted in the revolution in information technologies, should therefore be supported by a new cultural formation. What is it? Pekka Himanen suggested an illuminating hypothesis in his 2002 book The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age. We know hackers are not malicious geniuses, in spite of the media confusion of technological innovators and destructive minds. Hackers, in the original concept that emerged in MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, are simply those technically able individuals who “hack” (that is, work relentlessly), moved by the passion to create new, cool technologies that open up avenues of thinking and doing in the context of one of the most extraordinary technological revolutions in history. Based in the history of discovery in the digital culture, and in the biographies of some of its main actors, Himanen’s concept refers to the supreme value embraced by these hackers: not money making, not power, not fame, but the feeling of creating technological excellence, the understanding and shaping of a new world in the making, the fire in the belly of creation, pursuing their own path and only recognizing their peers and the authority of their community of excellence. These individuals, each one of them and their communities of reference, did change the world, as without their passion to create and their willingness to immediately and openly distribute their discoveries without copyright, the traditional corporations who were appropriating/stalling the technological revolution would have wasted its potential yield. The Internet ICP/IP protocols that created the most potent horizontal communication network in history were designed by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn in 1973–5 and were immediately posted on the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web in his spare time after work and posted the server program on the Internet in 1990 for everyone to use and improve. The email systems, the email lists, GNU, Unix, Linux, and Apache were among the many free and open software programs that provided the technical basis for the rapid spread of digital communication networks around the planet, reaching seven billion mobile communication users; at the time of this writing, over 50 percent of the planet’s adult population uses smartphones. Most of the key discoveries of the digital age that created the information economy and spurred productivity, thus creating wealth, were advanced by the culture and practice of open source, particularly in the key technology, computer software, the DNA of the technological revolution. Open source is based on the principle of free disclosure of the kernel (or alpha code) of any new program with the purpose of improving it by the work of a cooperative network of peers.
As Steve Weber (2004) has documented in his seminal book on open source, the community is structured with a meritocratic hierarchy based on reciprocity and moved by the reward of enhanced reputation among peers. In fact, this is not too different from the truly academic research communities, which thrive in the pursuit of science and are often spoiled and ultimately destroyed when the search for monetary gains prevails in the process of discovery. Free culture, in the terms of Larry Lessig, asserting the value of technological excellence, and the drive to create are the cornerstones of the wave of innovation that has transformed the world in the last four decades (English-Lueck 2002).
This is not to deny that out of this revolution driven by the passion of discovery a whole new business world emerged, including some of the most valuable corporations in today’s world. Indeed, capital accumulation on a gigantic scale resulted from the harvest of innovation. But this is precisely the point. The value of creation for the sake of creation, not profit searching, has been the engine of creation of capital value in the information economy. And in the process of creating a new economy, many of the actors became instant billionaires. Yet, the value drivers of this economy are mainly cultural and psychological, rather than profit searching, excepting a few significant cases, particularly Bill Gates’s Microsoft.
The lessons of the technological revolution can be generalized to the broader concept of creativity as the key inducing factor in the current digital economy. Creativity, and its derivative, innovation, are the key factors of wealth creation in the digital economy, and of meaning creation in the digital culture. But creativity and innovation emerge from the culture of creativity, not from the anticipated value of capital accumulation. And they only yield extraordinary value added in all domains if their products are networked in an open source logic, in which the interaction in the network increases their synergy and ultimately their value in any way this value could be measured.
Let us lay down the argument in a systematic way.
For the sake of clarity let us start with a precise definition of creativity and innovation. We understand creativity as the capacity to create, which is to produce a new knowledge or new meaning. The newness must be considered not from the point of view of the subject (e.g. what is new for me?) but against the stock of scientific and cultural products existing in a given society. Innovation is the process by which, on the basis of creativity, new value is added to a product (good or service) or to the process of production or distribution of a product. Value can be exchange value (e.g. money) or use value (something useful for society, for some institutions, for some organization, for the individual, or for a collective of individuals).
Creativity and innovation both involve, of course, a mental process, therefore a process of activating the mind and brain. But this mental process, while being rooted in our biological wiring, develops in interaction with a social context, namely cultural context (values and beliefs), spatio-temporal context (material forms of space and time, including the natural environment, that organize and frame social interaction), and institutional context (political institutions, legal environment). Furthermore, any mental process becomes a social process by crossing the biological boundaries of the individual that hosts the originating brain. This border crossing is what we call communication. Therefore, communication is the cornerstone of social life, and therefore of human life, since human life is social, as consciousness, our distinctive feature, is founded in communication. Communication constructs culture, which is the set of values and beliefs informing behavior, as they are enshrined, always in a conflictive way, in the institutions of society. Communication processes depend on the characteristics of the sender, on the characteristics of the receiver, on the context of the process, and, not least, on the technology of communication, that is by the material process through which the signals are produced, transmitted, received, and interpreted. There are distinctive forms of culture depending on distinctive technologies of communication, although the precise forms of interaction between culture and communication technology must be established by research rather than asserted by speculative claims. But we do know that we live in a global, digital culture that is inextricably articulated with a global, digital economy.
Thus, the process of knowledge production and meaning in our time, that is the process of creativity, and its derivative, innovation, are specified by their form of communication, that is microelectronics-based, digitally formatted and transmitted communication built around telecommunicated computer networks and databases. Internet and wireless communication are at the heart of this digital environment of knowledge and meaning production.
Cultural creation and communication have been deeply transformed by the digitization of products and processes (Neuman 2016). The development of Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 have transformed the Internet by increasing the role of users as producers of both content and applications. New business models are redefining intellectual property rights in accordance with technological evolution. Thus, the traditional division between popular culture, high culture, and commercial culture is increasingly blurred (though this blurring does not take place solely because of technological changes). It follows a broadening of the scope of creativity, and the potential for creative processes to migrate from the domains where they are born to other fields of application. For instance, creativity in social software may spur artistic creativity in design or music. Or else, imagining virtual forms of social organization may induce experiments in business innovation or in learning processes, including a transformation of the education system. Moreover, thousands of people around the world are already experimenting with hybridization between virtual and non-virtual processes, and with the cross-fertilization of these experiments between different domains of human activity. The key is the interaction between different realms of application of these creative practices, e.g. video games and learning, collaborative art online, new forms of mass self-communication [what Castells (2009) has called mass self-communication], new business models that allow for free production and consumption of content, and new forms of citizen intervention in the polity of societies. There are multiple forms of creative initiatives that take advantage of the possibilities offered by new social software and the networks of digital communication. The new frontier of creativity research seems to be exploring the rivers of creativity currently flowing on the Internet to reconstruct both our theories of human creation and our practices of organizational innovation.
While creativity has always been at the source of human economic practices and cultural practices, there are specific processes in the digital culture that transform the inducement and effects of creativity, including:
As a result, in the digital culture, creativity is not an exceptional moment of an exceptional mental breakthrough, but a way of life. This is not the future. This is current practice for millions of people. It ranges from survival strategies (using mobile phones’ lost call to communicate without paying); to the copy, paste, and add of students around the world; to synthetic securities and constantly reinvented derivatives in the financial markets; to the remix culture in musical creation. Inventing nothing new since Andrade’s Manifesto Antropofago in the 1920s, Brazil has already proposed the syncretic notion of cultural creativity brilliantly realized by Gilberto Gil during the 1960s re-invention of Brazilian music. But in a context of light speed reconfiguration enacted by millions of minds in a relentless flow of communication of all kinds of cultural products and economies from around the world, the production of new knowledge and new meaning goes beyond the creators to shift to networks of creation. Because innovation ultimately depends on the ability to channel creation into each specific realm of activity, the transformation of creativity in the digital culture ushers in new processes of wealth creation and destruction, as well as new forms of expressing and feeling the human experience. In this sense the digital economy is more than ever a culturally produced economy.
However, the promise of an economy driven by creativity and innovation is hampered by a fundamental roadblock: sexism. It is truly extraordinary to observe the rarity of women among the hacker tribes, the creators of information and communication technologies, or the most innovative engineers in Silicon Valley (Neff 2012). This is in spite of the fact that in terms of users, the majority in social networking sites are women. They are users but not producers of networking technologies. The gendered entry barriers to the realm of innovation in a decisive technological field greatly curtails the innovation potential of industries and countries. Women may be half of the human population, but they occupy a very small corner of the advanced sectors of electronic R&D. In many ways, masculinity structures the culture of creativity in much the same way that it structures the culture of finance, with restricted barriers of entry, a de-valuing of reproductive labor, and a privileging of a kind of technology that has historically excluded women.
The study by Cecilia Castaño (2010), in Spain and in Europe, advanced several hypotheses to explain the masculinist structure of creative culture. Among them: the sexist bias of the engineering schools and the engineering profession at large, inherited from a tradition of technological elitism often perpetuated by the professional organizations, at least in the European context; the male-dominated hierarchy of technology firms, particularly in telecommunications, the matrix of the electronics industry in several European countries; sexism in secondary education, since women in the school have historically been discouraged from studying mathematics and were oriented toward humanities by their teachers, according to the gendered division of intellectual work in most societies. Furthermore, most hacker communities were formed by small coteries of young techies, often along the cultural patterns of young male bonding, a logic that not only deliberately excludes women but also devalues and diminishes them. Thus, although there are a number of examples of remarkable women in technological innovation and in the electronics industry, the barriers women have to face to enter the world of technolocal excellence appear to be greater than in most other fields (in contrast, for instance, with medical research) (Castaño 2015). The prevalence of masculine values in the electronics industries has serious consequences for the characteristics of processes and products designed in the industry; for instance, the overwhelming proportion of violent, masculinist games in the important video game industry; or the narrow range of applications developed, until very recently, in the educational field. In this sense, in the wake of the 2008 crisis, information technologies for education were a driver in the new wave of innovation in Silicon Valley. And an unprecedented number of women were recruited to work on these products: another example of the persistence of a gendered division of labor, exemplified by the fact that women tend to represent the large majority of teachers in primary and secondary education.
Furthermore, the transformation of creativity and innovation in the digital culture and in the digital economy is constrained and contradicted by the institutions of cultural production, consumption, and exchange that resulted from the domestication and commercialization of creativity and innovation in the industrial age and in financial capitalism. Therefore, rather than seeing the triumph of our collective mind as creators, we are currently suffering the consequences of the iron cage in which we enclosed ourselves out of the vertigo of our freedom.
This is why the transformation of value, in economic practices as in social practices at large, requires more than the projection of a passion by autonomous individuals, usually young and male. It can only result from the rise of new values in the human condition, including the demasculinization of the human condition, and the revaluation of women needs to be on par with that of men. Since the most fundamental transformation of this human condition comes from the feminist challenge to the millennial patriarchal structure, it is our contention that the seeds for a redefinition of value, including economic value, as if people matter, are being planted in feminist culture. Feminist economics could be the harbinger of a new economic culture, thus of a new economy.
It is clear that both financial and creative culture have been shaped and framed by masculinist and patriarchal values. How can we re-read economics from a feminist perspective? We began this chapter with a discussion of value. As we pointed out, value is determined by dominant social relations, institutions, and norms, which determine what will be valuable and what will not. In a world structured by patriarchy, dominant social institutions and norms are powerful in determining what kind of value gender relations and practices will have.
As a way to address structural economic gender disparities, feminist economics not only examines gender roles within different economies, but also critiques gendered biases in the discipline of economics. More than anything else, feminist economics seek to render women more visible within economies, as well as to re-value women as key players in every economy, even if their labor is not recognized as such by traditional economics (including Marxist theory).
In other words, to think of feminism from an economic point of view, or economics from a feminist point of view, not only indicates an examination of gender roles in the economy, as conventional economists might study this. In fact, in a neoliberal capitalist context, to think about feminism in economic terms has often meant a more popular practice, that of how women can enter the capitalist workforce, rather than re-imagining cultures of the economy from a feminist perspective. The difference between these is crucial: in the first instance, there is no critique of capitalism, but rather just an insertion of women and gender roles into an already established material framework – one that continues the work of capitalism and the way it is designed to create and sustain inequalities (Piketty 2013). In the second instance, the project is to re-imagine and re-think what is possible in cultures of economy, possibilities that include re-valuing women and thinking in new ways how more equitable gender relations might be part of the culture of economy.
Let’s first turn our attention to the first instance of feminism and the economy, what we call popular feminism.
For popular feminism, becoming popular has meant, among other things, something that feels familiar: commodifying and branding a movement. As Banet-Weiser has written elsewhere (2012), while we primarily associate brands with their material visibility (and audibility), through symbols, logos, jingles, sound, and design, the definition of a brand exceeds its materiality. More than just the object itself, a brand is the perception, the series of images, themes, morals, values, feelings, and authenticity conjured by it, the essence of what will be experienced, a promise.
Thus it is not wholly surprising that political movements, as well as political identities, have been re-imagined within a general context of neoliberal capitalism and financial culture as brands. Wikileaks has been branded, as has Occupy Wall St. But in the twenty-first century, feminism has been one of the most successful political brands, for a range of reasons. This brand is expressed in a number of forms, from popular media circulation to celebrity endorsement to a heightened visibility of female leadership.
Because branding is not only an economic process but also a cultural dynamic, the brand of feminism takes on a variety of forms. For example, in March 2013, Sheryl Sandberg’s now both famous and infamous book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead hit the bookshelves and generated an immediate media frenzy. In this book, it seems that for women, aspiration to capitalist contribution and of course capitalist excellence is really the issue and also the handy explanation for most of the data on wage and role discrepancy.
Entrepreneurialism and capitalist accomplishment are here the only routes to feminist political identity. What we see here and over and over again in the feminist positionality that Sandberg and her fans construct is the conflation of feminist politics with the ethics of capitalist production and participation. It is, for her, the shining example of what a feminist subjectivity could mean; nothing else exists. There are no other routes to feminist expression for Sandberg; the options are either career or feminist inauthenticity. And we are reminded of this often throughout the memoir. Feminism, it seems, is nowhere if it isn’t leaning into capitalist success.
There have also been more conventional efforts to rebrand feminism, using the media platform of advertising and marketing to circulate feminism as a brand in wider culture. The twenty-first century has witnessed many marketing efforts to use feminism as a vehicle to sell products. For example, as Banet-Weiser has written elsewhere, Dove soap (parent company Unilever) is one of the most successful brands in feminine beauty and hygiene products (Banet-Weiser 2012). In 2005, the brand launched the “Dove Campaign for Real Beauty,” defined as “a global effort that is intended to serve as a starting point for societal change and act as a catalyst for widening the definition and discussion of beauty.”2 The campaign featured billboard ads, advertisements, and videos on social media that asked consumers to reconsider dominant notions of feminine beauty and the body. Harnessing the politicized rhetoric of commodity feminism, the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty makes a plea to consumers to act politically through consumer behavior – in this case, by establishing a type of brand loyalty with Dove products, and in effect, branding a version of feminism.
This visibility of branded feminism incites a breathless excitement in the air about feminism in the contemporary moment. It lives in hashtags, best-selling memoirs, and in the popular press; on Tumblr, and on popular blogs; emblazoned on tank tops and embodied by pop stars. Beyoncé owned the embattled label at the 2014 VMAs, but even before her we had a host of “empowerment” feminism corporate initiatives: Verizon, Always, Cover Girl and then other empowerment organizations that focus on girls in STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math), such as BlackGirlsCode or GirlsCode. Today, popular “feminist” explorations and affirmations circulate in and across multiple media platforms with ease and frequency, creating a frenetic landscape of feminist discourse, and also firmly situating this feminist discourse within the contours of brand culture. In fact, Time Magazine in 2014 listed “Feminism” in industry parlance as a “buzzword,” forgetting that feminism is a complex movement, not a buzzword.
Aside from these efforts to reboot feminism as a kind of brand that finds expression in retail and celebrity culture, we also have literal rebranding efforts. In 2013 the fashion magazine Elle UK hired three advertising agencies, Brave, Mother, and W&K, to rebrand feminism. According to Elle UK, they invited “three feminist groups to work with three award-winning advertising agencies to re-brand a term that many feel has become burdened with complications and negativity” (Swerling 2013). Elle UK attempts to do what most successful branders do, take out the “negativity” and complexities associated with feminism, smooth out those inconsistencies, and produce a seamless, coherent, and recognizable narrative that defines feminism for all. Indeed, trying to reign in popular feminism and create it as a coherent brand has been difficult, not simply because of information glut, but also because there are as many overlaps and convergences as there are contradictions. As Lucy Mangan from the Guardian points out, in her critique of the Elle UK rebranding effort, “Feminism doesn’t need rebranding. It just needs to overcome the people-pleasing instincts of its majority members and focus on a few core issues, and then beat the shit out of everything and everyone in its way until those issues are satisfactorily resolved” (Mangan 2013). This notion of “people pleasing” is at the heart of branding feminism; like other commercial efforts, the trick to branding is to not alienate consumer constituencies.
Of course, the problem is that feminism is alienating to some constituencies, and for good reason. While there is no singular definition of feminism, there is typically a shared goal of critiquing and challenging patriarchal structures. Since so much of the world is built on, and depends on the maintenance of, these structures, feminism should be de facto alienating. Feminist branding, then, is not an alternative economic practice, but rather works squarely in the service of dominant financial culture, shoring up dominant economic practices and processes, reifying feminism as a product. To return to the question of value, the value of feminism as a brand is measured in economic terms. If economic value is exchange value, and thus measured by the market, then we need to consider the market for feminism. If the dominant understanding of the market is derived from the dominance of capitalist institutions, this means that other institutional-cultural formations are subordinated to the power of capitalism. As we have argued, this power is not totalizing; there are rips and seams within the fabric of capitalism, and the economic organization of capitalism as the dominant institution doesn’t eclipse totally cultural and political organization.
So how to understand the differences and similarities between branded feminisms, or what Roxane Gay calls “the popular media feminist flavor of the week,” and those that recognize intersections and contradictions and also insist upon a structural critique of patriarchy and gender discrimination? This is the context in which we forget, as Gay reminds us, the “difference between feminism and Professional Feminists” (Gay 2014).
We need to think more carefully about this difference, especially in the context of alternative economic practices. Some iterations and practices of feminism are alternative, but these compete with those practices of “professional feminism,” which is what dominant institutions and norms decide is valued in the contemporary moment.
Rather than valuing the reification, or commodification, of feminism, what if we were to take our attention off of the product and re-route it to practice? What does an alternative feminist economic practice look like?
To engage in feminist alternative economic practices means to actively re-theorize capitalism, and to reclaim the economy as a site that can be vibrant and productive for alternative economic activism. The increasing mediation and circulation of “neoliberal feminism” is, again, not an alternative economic practice. While we need to contend with the ways in which a popular or branded feminism brings public attention to gender discrimination and gendered practices, and thus could potentially offer a space for rethinking feminist politics in the contemporary moment, it doesn’t challenge the normative practices and concepts of a neoliberal capitalist economy.
That is, branded and/or popular feminism is produced and articulated within what J.K. Gibson-Graham calls “essentialist and abstracted thinking about economy” (Gibson-Graham 2006). In order to have a truly alternative feminist economics, we need to interrogate the conventions and assumptions about capitalism, and challenge these conventions and assumptions in ways that profoundly redefine and reshape how we organize the economy and position ourselves as economic beings. As Gibson-Graham points out, “Where once we believed that the economy was depoliticized largely through its representations, we have more recently come to understand that its repoliticization requires cultivating ourselves as subjects who can imagine and enact a new economic politics. Bolstered by the upwelling of various movements across the world, we see the need not only for a differently theorized economy, but for new ethical practices of thinking economy and becoming different kinds of economic beings” (Gibson-Graham 2006: 14). Since the economy has come to depend (especially in neoliberal times, but also in historical periods of capitalism) on “feminized” or what Maya Weisinger calls “housewifized” work, we need to think in new ways about unpaid labor, maternal or reproductive labor, and networks of care (Weisinger 2012).
One ethical practice of “thinking economy and becoming different kinds of economic beings” is to revalue care work as an alternative feminist economic practice. The invisible labor that women perform in every economy has been critiqued from a Marxist feminist perspective, with a significant feminist mobilization around this issue in the US and Europe in the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, feminists in the 1960s and 1970s sought to reveal the way power relations function in terms of the economy, where individual empowerment was bestowed upon those who were able to maintain a position in the formal economy. This position, however, could only be sustained by labor in the informal economy, namely the household. As Weisinger (2012) points out:
In the case of housewives, an entire economy is build upon the idea of free labor and care: the informal economy. Housewives do not get reimbursed for taking care of children, shopping, cleaning, cooking, etc. These are elements of support that are deemed necessary in order for the Male counterpart of the family unit to be able to work and provide for the family financially and to be able to develop in the formal economy, which is the ultimate definition of success in our society.
Feminists relied on Marxist theory in part because the Marxist concept of a “social whole” allows us to see the mutual shaping of family formation, reproductive practice, sexual construction, economic determinism, and the ideology of the “feminine.” Additionally, this concept allows us to see the way in which these institutions are rooted in particular economic conditions. Marxist feminists then called attention to the material order of existence, and explored the dynamics of power and domination within that order.
Of course, while Marxist thinking gives feminists powerful tools for thinking through the dynamic of history and oppression, there are numerous limitations in the ways these tools have been framed by the men who developed them. Marxist feminists then had to modify these tools, and ask questions such as: What is material for women? What is the relation of women’s material order to ideology? What is the limitation of Marxism for appreciating gender as a problem of social construction?
It is clear that there needs to be an expansion of the material realm for Marxism to be an analytic that feminists can use to “become different kinds of economic beings.” A feminist framework needs to open up a definition of economy to include household labor, reproductive work, sexuality, and emotional labor and care work. Thus, an alternative feminist analysis should seek to expand the “economy” as a realm of production and exchange to an economy with a much wider geographic and conceptual sense. To get back to our earlier discussion of value, a feminist alternative economic practice would not only widen and deepen a Marxist notion of the economy, but would strive to decenter it altogether.
One way Marxist feminists attempted to widen the Marxist notion of the economy in the late 1970s was to call for wages for housework. This was a compelling argument that organizing domestic life, from cleaning to cooking to childcare, was absolutely crucial to maintain a capitalist economic system (as it was the necessary reproductive labor that allowed for the continuation of the productivity of waged labor), but went uncompensated. This debate centered on how, and whether, housework actually produced surplus value for capital (that is, women’s free labor services not only men, but also capital; it is not only free labor, but because it is unwaged, it is not counted as labor) (Hartmann 1979; Federici 2012). This analysis widened the Marxist notion of economy, but still remained quite close to Marxist terms.
As Italian feminist Silvia Federici has detailed in her work, the Wages for Housework feminist movement sought to unmask the process of naturalization housework has undergone because it is unwaged, to demonstrate the capitalist logic of “waged labor,” and to “demonstrate that historically the question of ‘productivity’ has always been connected with the struggle for social power” (Federici 2012: 8). The movement was crucial in that it revealed some of the main ways capitalist economies maintain power: by devaluing “entire spheres of human activity, beginning with the activities catering to the reproduction of human life, and the ability to use the wage to extract also from a large population of workers who appear to be outside the wage relation: slaves, colonial subjects, prisoners, housewives, and students” (Federici 2012: 8).
There have also been feminist efforts to deepen the Marxist notion of the economy, which aimed to develop a material basis for women’s oppression that challenged Marxist terms more overtly. For example, reproductive work needs to be valued differently, not as a natural phenomenon but as a social one, which is to say that it is organized, controlled, and situated in particular ways, but also that reproductive work produces certain consciousness and ideology and can’t be reduced to economic relations.
Sex, sexuality, subjectivity, and affect are also feminist mechanisms to deepen a Marxist notion of the economy, where, as Catharine MacKinnon points out, feminism permits us to wed and transcend Marx and Freud, and to understand the construction of sexuality not as the construction of subjectivity but rather as a dimension of the material construction of people in a system of domination and oppression. MacKinnon argues that sexuality is the material domain of women’s oppression, and the construction of it within masculine terms is what makes men dominant and women subordinate (MacKinnon 1982). It is precisely the naturalization of this relation that makes the subordination of women appear to have no material base. Is women’s subordination really not so material as class subordination? This is the question that was at the center of feminist efforts to deepen a Marxist notion of economy.
However, there are crucial problems within the attempts to use Marxist theory to understand gender relations of power. Importantly, the circumscription of the economic entails the simultaneous circumscription of what is political. The Marxist primacy of the economic means that the relations of production are seen as shaping all else, and in the contemporary moment the dominant relations of production are those of capitalism, so that capitalist relations are seen as shaping all other relations. Marx simply did not recognize the centrality of reproductive labor, regardless of whether he was discussing capital accumulation or an ideal communist society. To get back to Gibson-Graham, we need to get out of this kind of essentialist and abstracted thinking, and think about what it means to be different kinds of economic subjects. In other words, while widening and deepening a Marxist notion of the economy are necessary first steps, we need to decenter this notion of the economy, and imagine a different set of dynamics and parameters.
One way to think through this is to re-value care. As Evelyn Nakano Glenn has pointed out, it is important to have a society that values care and care work differently – which is very different than a society that values the branding and commodification of popular feminism (Glenn 2012). In the contemporary Western world (especially the US), care is a privatized good, its articulation and operation the responsibility of the individual. A feminist politics of care would suggest that we decenter this dynamic, and understand that care is a collective right for both caregivers and those who need care. This would require a redistribution of social wealth in the direction of those that need care (primarily the elderly and children), and a commitment to constructing a collective form of reproduction (Federici 2012). The labor involved in the organization of the domestic sphere, the maintenance of the family, nurturing and emotional work are typically relegated to women and people of color, and is certainly not a priority of the state. A feminist economic politics of care re-prioritizes care, understanding it as a crucial form of social reproduction, and challenges the linked ideologies of individual independence and family responsibility, and thus position caring and care work as a public social responsibility.
As Federici has argued, the care of the elderly has always existed in a state of crisis within capitalist societies, “both because of the devaluation of reproductive work in capitalism and because the elderly are seen as no longer productive, instead of being treasured as they were in many precapitalist societies as depositories of the collective memory and experience” (Federici 2012: 116). As governments dedicate less and less state money to the care of the elderly, and places the burden of care on private individuals, it becomes clear that from a conventional economic viewpoint, care of the elderly (as well as others) is devalued, seen as the responsibility of the individual, and not considered a crucial element of the social reproduction of a nation or community.
Arlie Hochschild has written in The Outsourced Self that in the current historical moment, we have monetized intimate relations, moving from what she sees as a “world of villagers to one of outsiders” (Hochschild 2013: 55). She continues, “Along the way, we’ve also created a market in emotional states. Ironically, one of the feelings the market can sell us is the feeling of being authentically out of the market” (Hochschild 2013: 55). This has implications for care work, as one of the markets for “emotional state” is the market for care – care of the elderly, care for children. As we have been arguing, markets not only create norms, they rely on norms for a context; they are a continuous normative process. In the context of the market for care, the social institution of care work must be built up and maintained, and in conventional economics, the responsibility of this maintenance has primarily been on poorly paid women and people of color. And many elderly and families cannot afford to hire care workers, so the burden is placed (usually) back on women in families to provide this kind of care.
There have been recent practices that have addressed the individualism of care work, especially maternal care work. As Julie Wilson and Emily Yochim have written, the blogosphere has become a rich space for mothers to establish networks of care and community, leading to what they call the “momosphere” (Wilson and Yochim 2015). “Mommy blogs” (an unfortunate name, as it diminishes the potential importance of these communities by labeling them as the domain of the “mommy,” so I will use “maternal blogs”) have flourished in recent years, and have provided a digital space for mothers to collectively share their maternal labor and the real stresses and burdens of nuclear family life within neoliberal capitalism. While maternal and reproductive labor have always been central for the operation of capitalism, within neoliberal capitalism the role of reproductive labor is even more crucial, as the welfare state continues to be dismantled and more and more labor hinges on individuals and families. As Wilson and Yochim point out, the precarity of labor figures centrally through mothers and their labor
for it is their labors as the keepers of the domestic realm that underwrite and make possible ongoing privatization and government through insecurity. In this way, the staggering upward redistribution of wealth over the past decades has been achieved on the backs of mothers, who are constantly adjusting their lives, labors, affects, and sensibilities in order to stabilize their increasingly shaky family scenes as their lifeworlds are looted. (Wilson and Yochim 2015: 673)
Importantly, digital care networks such as maternal online communities do important work in terms of re-valuing the labor of women. Yet, at the same time, this re-values women’s labor for the individual women involved, rather than always challenging the structural invisibility of this labor. Wilson and Yochim call this “individualized solidarities” where the “aim of collectivity is the stabilization and valorization of individual nuclear families.” This tension between individuals and collectivities is indicative of much of social activism in the current environment, including feminist economics.
That is, feminist economics, like the culture of creativity, challenges the individualism of neoliberal capitalism not only by re-valuing particular kinds of labor, but also insisting on a notion of the “commons” as a way to think about alternative economies (see Varvarousis and Kallis, this volume). In fact, the same economic processes and logic that authorize neoliberal capitalism and privilege the individual to become a norm ironically allow for alternative economic practices, such as a feminist understanding of the commons. As Federici comments, the way that neoliberal capitalism seeks to make all things into markets also ironically works to create alterative spaces that are newly threatened by privatization. These new spaces, such as digital spaces like maternal blogs, means “that not only commons have not vanished, but new forms of social cooperation are constantly being produced, also in areas of life where none previously existed, as for example the Internet” (Federici 2012: 139).
The key here is to actively challenge the co-optation of the commons by either the market or the state. A feminist commons, one that recognizes the essential role of the reproduction of human life as a collective, and not a private, practice, is truly an alternative economy.
It should be obvious that economic practices are shaped by cultural values. In fact, this elementary observation runs against standard economic analysis, and economic calculations, because neoclassical economics stands on top of an essentialist assumption of human nature: homo economicus, as a rationally oriented individual. Rationality is measured in terms of the best allocation of scarce resources to maximize personal utility. For this naïve formulation to escape the contradiction of a value-free utility, the personal satisfaction has to be equated to maximizing monetary gain. Indeed, there is a second assumption: that if money does not necessarily lead to happiness, at least it can buy it. Thus, satisfaction is circumscribed to what the market may offer. The loop is closed: economic value is equated to monetary value determined by the market in terms of the relationship between supply and demand as a mean to satisfy most needs and desires. Of course, mainstream economists acknowledge that this is an oversimplification of the diversity of human behavior. Life cannot be reduced to economic transactions, societies cannot be reduced to markets. However, all other human behavior is dispatched to the world of irrationality, with the economy being the domain of rational choice and quantifiable outcomes. So be it. Therefore, we need an explanatory framework powerful enough to account for the cultural diversity that guides human behavior to understand why people do what they do, beyond the strictly defined rationality paradigm. And because practices of production, consumption, and exchange are fully embedded in the social fabric of people’s lives (beyond the parameters of economic models), we need a multifaceted cultural analysis to understand human practices, including economic practices. This is what we have attempted to propose in this chapter, relating to the analytical effort of the contributors to this volume in their specific inquiries.