posted on 2017-01-09, 14:36authored byDave 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.
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