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 steadily colonized by capitalist businesses, which have frequently found ways to incorporate forms of gift and cooperation into profit-oriented business models. This article proposes to reformulate Habermas’s distinction as a reference to different kinds of causal mechanisms, detaching it from his functionalist framework and enabling a 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. (shrink)

Within thirty years of first appearing, the networked digital economy has spread its tentacles into the lives of half the population of the world, and transformed the balance of power in the commercial economy. Social theory has been slow to recognize the significance and scale of these developments, and this special issue is a contribution to redressing the balance. It is organized around the concept of moral economies: the values and norms that underpin and shape our participation in larger economic (...) structures. The digital economy today is the site of a range of competing economic models, and this is reflected in clashes between a corresponding range of moral economies. The contributors to this special issue map these tensions in examples of both gift and commodity models of economy, analyse the implications for global risk, and re-evaluate classic analytic schemes to represent these tensions. Because the economy is built on moral economies, the process of economic change is already inherently a process of debate and contestation between different moral economies, with the consequence that academic work on the ethics of the economy can influence these processes of change. (shrink)