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Beyond commodification: re-reading the future of work
Colin C. Williams
The author
Colin C. Williams is Professor of Work Organization at the University of Leicester Management Centre, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK.
Keywords
Market economy, Capitalist systems, Social economics
Abstract
A widely held supposition is that goods and services are increasingly produced and delivered for monetised exchange by capitalist firms in pursuit of profit. The result of this view of an ongoing encroachment of the market is that there is only one perceived future for work and it is one characterised by an ever more commodified world. The aim of this paper is to evaluate critically this discourse. Analysing the balance between commodified and non-commodified work in the advanced economies, a large non-commodified sphere is identified that, if anything, is found to be expanding relative to the commodified realm. Rather than reading the future of work as a natural and unstoppable progression towards a victorious, all-powerful and hegemonic commodity economy, this paper thus opens up the feasibility of alternative futures beyond a commodified world.
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Introduction
The aim of this paper is to evaluate critically a
dominant narrative that currently closes off the
future of work. A common assumption amongst
business leaders, journalists, politicians and
academic commentators of all political hues is that
we live in a society that is increasingly organised
around the systematic pursuit of profit in the
marketplace. The prevailing discourse is that
wherever one looks, the overarching tendency is
away from (pre-modern or traditional) non-market
economic practices and towards the production and
delivery of goods and services for monetised
exchange by capitalist firms in pursuit of profit. Yet
despite the commonality of this commodification
discourse, it is somewhat worrying to find that
evidence is seldom if ever presented to validate this
thesis. Perhaps the transition to an ever more
commodified world is so obvious to all that there is
little need to provide any evidence. If so, then
adherents to this commodification thesis should not
be offended by the purpose of this paper which is to
seek verification for such a view. After all, no other
concept is accepted in the social sciences without
detailed corroboration and there is no reason why
this thesis should be exempted from such a process
of substantiation.
To evaluate critically this reading of economic
development that closes off the future to anything
other than a commodified world, firstly, this paper
outlines the commodification discourse that so
dominates, albeit often implicitly, most thinking
about the future of work and following this, the
extent to which commodified economic practices
have displaced non-commodified practices is
assessed. Examining the heartlands of
commodification, namely the advanced
economies, where commodification is assumed to
have penetrated most deeply, this paper will reveal
that non-commodified economic practices not
only persist to such a degree that the same amount
of time is spent engaged in non-commodified as
commodified work but, if anything, these non-
commodified practices appear to be expanding
rather than contracting relative to the
commodified realm. The outcome is that the
future of work that has been popularly portrayed as
characterised by the victorious onward march of
commodification will be shown to be much more
open to alternative possibilities than has been so
far considered the case.
The narrative of commodification
All societies have to produce, distribute, and
allocate the goods and services that people need to
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Volume 6 · Number 6 · 2004 · pp. 329-337
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited · ISSN 1463-6689
DOI 10.1108/14636680410569849
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live. As such, every society has an economy of one
form or another. Economies, however, can be
organised in a multitude of different ways. To
depict the configuration of economies, most
analyses differentiate three modes of producing
and delivering goods and services, namely the
“market”, the “state” and the “community”
(Giddens, 1998; Gough, 2000; Polanyi, 1944).
Analysed in these terms, the widespread consensus
is that most nations are witnessing a common path
so far as the trajectory of economic development is
concerned. A narrative predominates that the
market is becoming more hegemonic, expansive,
totalising and powerful as it encroaches deeper
into each and every corner of economic life and
stretches its tentacles ever wider across the globe to
colonise those areas previously left untouched by
its powerful force.
Indeed, for many academic commentators,
politicians, business leaders and journalists, this
has become something of an indisputable and
irrefutable fact. Even those opposing the
commodification of every crevice of life possess a
certain fatalistic despondence that this is a natural
and inevitable process about which little can be
done. The discourse of an unstoppable shift
towards a commodified world is so accepted that
few consider any other future for work. As Amin
et al. (2002a, p. 60) put it, “the pervasive reach of
exchange-value society makes it ever more difficult
to imagine and legitimate non-market forms of
organisation and provision”. For them, and akin to
most other commentators, the future of work is
cast in stone and it is a future characterised by what
is variously called a process “commercialisation”,
“marketization” or “commodification”.
For exponents of the commodification
discourse, therefore, contemporary economies are
characterised by the increasing dominance of one
mode of exchange that is replacing all others (e.g.
Comelieau, 2002; Ciscel and Heath, 2001;
Harvey, 1982, 1989; Kovel, 2002). In this view of
an increasingly hegemonic capitalism, the
commodity economy becomes the economic
institution rather than one form of producing and
delivering goods and services amongst others. If
this commodification thesis was but an
“academic” theorisation in the most derogatory
sense of the word (i.e. of little or no importance),
then perhaps the way in which so many
commentators seem to accept it would not even
matter. But it takes only a moment’s reflection to
realize that the commodification thesis is much
more than simply an academic theory about the
trajectory of economic development.
To see this, let me take just one example.
Consider how the world is conventionally divided
up into a first, second and third world. The first
world, composed of the supposedly “advanced”
economies of the west, is so defined because it has
commodified to the greatest extent. Based on the
view that commodification is a natural and
inevitable trajectory of economic development that
all nations will and must follow, these first world
nations are thus placed at the front of the queue in
this linear and uni-dimensional vision of
“economic development” while those nations in
the second and third worlds are positioned behind
them due to their slower progression towards
market hegemony. Indeed, so dominant is this
depiction of a universal trajectory of economic
development towards commodification that the
countries comprising the second world of central
and east Europe are now commonly referred to as
“transition” economies because they are seen to be
undergoing a transformation from a state-oriented
economic system to one in which the market is
becoming more hegemonic. The way in which
economies that are more grounded in
“community” or “subsistence” are labelled
“backward” compared with economic systems that
are market-orientated, meanwhile, is nowhere
better seen than in those countries aggregated
together under the banner of the third world.
Labelled “developing”, “undeveloped” or “under-
developed” countries precisely due to their
slowness in moving towards commodification,
these name-tags denote that there is only one
possible trajectory available to them and a singular
route to progress, and it is towards a commodified
world.
The commodification narrative, nevertheless,
does not only lead to a hierarchical ordering of
countries according to the degree to which they are
commodified. This economic discourse also serves
to shape thinking about the actions required by
supra-national institutions, national governments,
economic development agencies and individuals
themselves in the name of progress. Take, for
example, western governments. Grounded in this
grand narrative about the trajectory of economic
development that views the market as the
increasingly dominant sector of their societies,
governments of western nations have tended to
concentrate on developing this sector and viewed
the state and community sectors as at best, playing
a supporting role and at worst, deleterious to
development and something to be commodified so
as to allow this development path to be
implemented. It is similarly the case in the ex-
socialist bloc of central and east Europe where the
whole thrust of economic policy has been focused
upon how a market system can be introduced so as
to facilitate the “transition” to a market economy.
In the third world, it is again the pursuit of
commodification that sets the economic policy
Beyond commodification: re-reading the future of work
Colin C. Williams
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Volume 6 · Number 6 · 2004 · 329-337
330
agenda. One has only to consider the structural
adjustment programmes applied to these countries
to realize that a strong normative view exists that
progress lies in encouraging a successful
transformation towards an economic system where
the market becomes an increasingly dominant
mode of producing and delivering goods and
services. Throughout the world, therefore, the
process of commodification whereby the market
replaces the state and community sectors is not
only a theory that believes itself to be describing
the trajectory of economic development but also a
thesis that is shaping the actions taken in the name
of economic development.
The commodification thesis, in other words, is
not just an abstraction seeking to reflect reality
but also an economic discourse used to shape the
material world. As Carrier (1998, p. 8) puts it,
there is a “conscious attempt to make the real
world conform to the virtual image, justified by
the claim that the failure of the real to conform to
the idea is a consequence not merely of
imperfections, but is a failure that itself has
undesirable consequences”. In this virtualism,
economic thought and practice thus shape each
other in an ongoing recursive and reflexive loop
“driven by ideas and idealism [and] the desire to
make the world conform to the image” (Carrier,
1998, p. 5). This is nowhere more finely shown
than in the seminal work of Escobar (1995) who
displays how so-called third world economies
became viewed as a problem due to their lack of
“development” (i.e. commodification) and then
charts the ways in which a whole range of
institutions and practices were constructed to
make them conform more to the desired image of
a commodified society.
The outcome of such a commodification
discourse, therefore, and whether it is the first,
second or third worlds that are under the spotlight,
is that the future for work is closed. There is only
one future so far as the story of economic
development is concerned and it is one in which
economies pursue a linear and uni-dimensional
development path towards a commodified world.
Until now, however, one of the most worrying
and disturbing aspects of this commodification
discourse is that few have sought to corroborate it.
For example, when Rifkin (2000, p. 3) asserts that
“The marketplace is a pervasive force in our lives”,
Ciscel and Heath (2001, p. 401) that capitalism is
transforming “every human interaction into a
transient market exchange” and Gudeman (2001,
p. 144) that “markets are subsuming greater
portions of everyday life”, no supporting data of
any kind is offered. Similarly, the assertion by
Carruthers and Babb (2000, p. 4) that there has
been “the near-complete penetration of market
relations into our modern economic lives” is
justified by nothing more than the statement that
“markets enter our lives today in many ways ‘too
numerous to be mentioned’” and the spurious
notion that the spread of commodified ways of
viewing particular spheres of life signal how
commodification has stretched its tentacles ever
deeper into daily life. Watts (1999, p. 312), in the
same vein, supports his above-stated belief that
although “commodification is not complete . . . the
reality of capitalism is that ever more of social life is
mediated through and by the market” merely by
avowing that subsistence economies are
increasingly rare. The thin evidence offered by
these authors is by no means exceptional. Few, if
any, commentators attempt to move beyond what
Martin and Sunley (2001, p. 152) in another
context term “vague theory and thin empirics”.
Here, therefore, this thesis is subjected to critical
investigation.
Before doing so, however, it is first necessary
to be clear what is meant by commodified and
non-commodified work. Here, commodified
work refers to the production and delivery of
goods and services for monetised exchange by
capitalist firms in pursuit of profit. As such,
commodified work has three constituent
components all of which must be present for it to
be defined as commodified: goods and services
are produced for exchange; exchanges are
monetised, and monetary transactions take place
for the purpose of profit.
Non-commodified work, by definition, is thus
composed of all economic practices that do not
possess one or more of these characteristics.
Here, therefore, the non-commodified sphere is
split into three distinctive types of work. Firstly,
there is non-exchanged work (sometimes known
as subsistence activity, domestic work or self-
provisioning) which is unpaid work undertaken
by a household member either for themselves or
for some other member of the household.
Secondly, there is non-commodified work where
goods and services are exchanged but no money
changes hands. This non-monetised exchange
(sometimes known as unpaid community work,
voluntary work, mutual aid or community self-
help) involves a household member conducting
unpaid work for members of households other
than their own. Third and finally, there is non-
commodified work where monetised transactions
take place but the profit-motive is absent. This
covers a whole range of economic activities, as
will be shown, but particularly those taking place
in the public sector as well as what is variously
referred to as the “not-for-profit sector”, “third
sector”, “social economy” or “social
enterprises”.
Beyond commodification: re-reading the future of work
Colin C. Williams
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Volume 6 · Number 6 · 2004 · 329-337
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A commodified future? A critical evaluation
To determine whether there is a displacement of
non-commodified work by a colonizing
commodified realm, the component parts of the
commodification thesis will be here investigated. If
this thesis is correct, then firstly, monetised
exchange should be expanding relative to non-
exchanged work and non-monetised exchange and
secondly, this monetised exchange should be
conducted for profit-motivated purposes.
Subsistence (non-exchanged) work
To evaluate the prevalence of non-exchanged
work, it is in theory possible to estimate the volume
and value of either the inputs or outputs
(Goldschmidt-Clermond, 1982). In practice, it is
the volume and value of the inputs that have been
measured using time-budget diaries (e.g.
Gershuny, 2000; Murgatroyd and Neuburger,
1997; Robinson and Godbey, 1997). Participants
fill in diaries indicating the activities in which they
engage in each segment of the day and from this,
the time spent on various types of work is then
calculated.
As Table I indicates, the finding of these studies
conducted throughout the advanced economies is
that subsistence work has far from disappeared.
Indeed, so far as work schedules are concerned,
subsistence work occupies roughly the same
amount of time as paid work. The reach of
commodification, in consequence, does not appear
to be quite so extensive as many perhaps previously
imagined. This finding however, is not
unexpected. When Polanyi (1944) portrayed “the
great transformation” from a non-market to a
market society, he went to great lengths to
emphasize that this was merely a shift in the
balance of economic activity. He never suggested
that it was total. Even if some have since
interpreted this transformation as rather more
complete than Polanyi ever wished to portray (e.g.
Thrift, 2000; Harvey, 1989), Table I displays that
Polanyi was quite correct not to over-exaggerate
the reach of the market.
Over the past 40 years, moreover, by no means
all countries have witnessed a shift of work from
the unpaid to the paid sphere. Indeed, in many
nations, quite the opposite has occurred. In
countries such as Denmark, Finland, France, the
UK and the USA, subsistence work has occupied
an increasing proportion of people’s total working
time. However, this is not due to an absolute
growth in the time spent on such work. The
aggregate number of hours spent on subsistence
activity has declined. Nevertheless, the time spent
in paid work has decreased faster than the time
spent in subsistence work (e.g. Gershuny, 2000;
Robinson and Godbey, 1997). The result is that
work schedules do not display that an increasing
proportion of working time is being spent in the
commodified sphere but quite the opposite.
Relatively more time is now spent working on a
subsistence basis than 40 years ago.
One interpretation of these shifts in time use is
that over the past four decades, a so far
unidentified second “great transformation” has
occurred in some western nations whereby there
has been a shift towards the subsistence sphere and
away from the monetised realm. An alternative
interpretation, looking wider than solely these
shifting work practices, is that the growing time
spent on non-work activities, such as recreation
and leisure, coupled with the on-going
commodification of such consumption (see
Gershuny, 2000), displays the advent of a market-
based consumer culture. However these data are
interpreted, the important point here is that
working life is not becoming more monetised, as
propounded by exponents of the commodification
thesis.
These time-budget studies, therefore, reveal
how the commodity economy has not only failed to
fully colonise working life (cf Harvey, 1989; Thrift,
2000) but is very far from even approaching such a
situation. Indeed, these time-budget data might
even be exaggerating the extent to which the
advanced economies have become commodified.
This is because they over-estimate the time spent
in paid work and under-estimate the time spent in
subsistence work. They exaggerate the time spent
in paid work because respondents add up the total
time that they spend in activity related to the
employment-place (e.g. meal and coffee breaks,
associated travel and socialising) as time spent in
paid work. Time-budget studies under-estimate
the time spent in non-commodified work,
meanwhile, in three ways. Firstly, they measure
only time commitment to concrete activity,
Table I Subsistence work as a percentage of total work time, 1960-present
Country 1960-1973 1974-1984 1985-present
Canada 56.9 55.4 54.2
Denmark 41.4 – 43.3
Francea 52.0 55.5 57.5
The Netherlands – 55.9 57.9
Norway 57.1 55.4 –
UK 52.1 49.7 53.9
USAb 56.9 57.6 58.4
Finland – 51.8 54.5
20 countries 43.4 42.7 44.7
Sources: a Chadeau and Fouquet (1981), Roy (1991) and Dumontier and Pan Ke Shon (1999). b Robinson and Godbey (1997). Other countries derived from Gershuny (2000, Tables 7.6, 7.12, 7.16)
Beyond commodification: re-reading the future of work
Colin C. Williams
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Volume 6 · Number 6 · 2004 · 329-337
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excluding the time and effort involved in planning
and managing one’s own and others’ activities.
This might occur when watching television, lying
in bed or undertaking some leisure pursuit or
indeed when engaged in employment (Haicault,
1984). The result is that this unpaid work might be
classified as sleep or leisure for instance. Secondly,
the emotional and affective activity involved in
much subsistence work is either ignored
completely, or is portrayed as leisure and
socialising (Chabaud-Richter and Fougeyrollas-
Schwebel, 1985). Third and finally, they fail to
differentiate between profit-motivated and not-
for-profit monetary exchange. This is important
when it comes to assessing commodification. If
non-profit motivated paid work is shifted out of the
paid sphere to the de-commodified realm,
commodification will be shallower than suggested
when all paid work is viewed as commodified.
Unpaid exchange
For commodification advocates such as Rifkin
(1990, p. 30), “What we have lived through in the
rich world has been the accelerating passage of
non-monetised activity into the formal economy,
its colonization by market transactions”. It takes
only a moment’s reflection, however, to realise that
this is not the case. Throughout the advanced
economies, what is variously referred to as
voluntary work, unpaid community exchange or
mutual aid persists in bountiful amounts. Take, for
example, the UK. A 2001 UK government survey
(Prime et al., 2002) found that some 3.7 billion
hours of volunteering occurred in the previous 12
months. This is the equivalent in hours to the total
work of just over 2 million people employed on a
full-time basis (i.e. at 35 hours per week). Or put
another way, for every 14 hours worked in formal
employment in the UK (assuming 27 million
people working an average of 35 hours),
approximately one hour is spent working on a non-
monetised basis. Constituting 7 per cent of the
total time people spend engaged in formal
employment, such work is thus far from some
marginal leftover.
Similar results are identified elsewhere. A
survey in South Australia (Ironmonger, 2002)
finds that in 2000, volunteers donated the
equivalent of an additional 11.5 per cent of gross
state product (GSP) to other households, both
directly on a one-to-one basis and through
organisations and groups. These donations are
additional to actual donations of money made
directly to other households or through charitable
organisations. Alternatively, measuring total
volunteer time in relation to the total wages earned
by South Australian employees, such activity was
found to represent an additional 21.7 per cent of
the total value of the wages paid to employees in
employment in South Australia in 2000.
Moreover, there is little evidence that such non-
monetised exchange is diminishing in importance
over time. As Ironmonger (2002) finds, as a
proportion of GSP, non-monetised work is
growing. South Australian volunteers donated an
additional 7.8 per cent of GSP in 1992 but an extra
11.5 per cent of GSP in 2000 to other households.
Put another way, total volunteer time was
equivalent to an additional 14.1 per cent of the
total value of the wages paid to employees in
employment in South Australian in 1992 and 21.7
per cent in 2000. In sum, and contrary to the
tenets of the commodification discourse, the
evidence on non-monetised exchange intimates
that this sphere of economic practice is growing in
size relative to the commodified sphere. As such, it
is difficult to accept the view that the commodity
economy is penetrating deeper and wider,
especially when these results which display the
growth of on non-monetised are combined with
the earlier data displaying the expansion of non-
exchanged work.
Not-for-profit paid work
The view that monetary exchange marches hand-
in-hand with the profit-motive runs deep across
economic discourse ranging from neo-classical to
Marxist thought. As Jessop (2002) points out,
depicting monetised exchange as always profit-
motivated serves the interests of not only neo-
liberals whose belief is that this must be met with
open arms and radical theorists who use this as a
call to arms to resist its further encroachment. The
outcome is a perpetuation of a crude view of
monetised exchange. This is further reinforced by
a formalist anthropological tradition that reads
exchange mechanisms in advanced economies as
less embedded, thinner, less loaded with social
meaning and less symbolic than in pre-industrial
societies (Mauss, 1966).
Recently, however, this profit-motivated
representation of monetised exchange has started
to be contested by a range of commentators.
Inspired by Polanyi (1944), the formalist
anthropology approach that assumed profit-
motivated markets to be the universal economic
mechanism in western economies has been
challenged from a “substantivist” anthropological
position which attempts to display the messiness
and diversity of exchange relations in advanced
economies (e.g. Crang, 1996; Crewe and Gregson,
1998; Gibson-Graham, 1996; Lee, 2000).
Numerous studies of what Leyshon et al. (2003)
term “alternative economic spaces” such as car
boot sales (Crewe and Gregson, 1998), second-
hand and informal retail channels (Williams and
Beyond commodification: re-reading the future of work
Colin C. Williams
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Volume 6 · Number 6 · 2004 · 329-337
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Paddock, 2003), inflation-free local currency
experiments such as local exchange and trading
schemes (Lee, 1996; Williams et al., 2001), sweat-
equity money projects such as time dollars (Cahn,
2000; Seyfang and Smith, 2002) and gift-giving
(e.g. Carrier, 1990) have all uncovered how
monetary exchanges are not always and necessarily
imbued with the profit-motive.
These studies, however, can be easily dismissed
as examinations of minor and trivial economic
practices on the “margins” of the mainstream
economy (cf Martin and Sunley, 2001). To more
forcefully challenge the supposedly inextricable
relationship between monetary transactions and
the profit motive, it is necessary to analyse larger
spaces of paid work. Here, in consequence, three
spheres are analysed: the public sector; not-for-
profit sector, and private sector enterprises.
The public sector
If goods and services were being increasingly
delivered by the public sector that by definition is
not orientated towards profit, then one would be
able to conclude that monetised exchange is by no
means becoming increasingly dominated by the
profit motive. However, trends such as
privatisation and quasi-privatisation of the public
sphere, the contracting out of goods and services
previously provided by the state directly, and
various public-private finance initiatives (e.g.
Tickell, 2001) all strongly intimate a transfer of the
mode of delivery of goods and services from the
state to the market.
Nevertheless, before racing to the seemingly
inevitable conclusion that the transfer of
production and delivery from the state to the
market suggests the advent of profit-motivated
monetary exchange, the crucial issue that needs to
be understood is that not all goods and services are
being transferred to the private sector. Many are
being transferred to not-for-profit organisations
(Amin et al., 2002b; Birchall, 2001) and this
suggests a weaker relationship between the profit
motive and monetised exchange. And even when
they are provided by the private sector, it is by no
means certain that profit is the sole motive in
attendance.
Not-for-profit organizations
The not-for-profit sector is here defined as
organisations that are private, not profit
distributing, self-governing and voluntary in that
membership in them is not legally required and
they attract some level of voluntary contribution of
time or money. Using this common definition, the
John Hopkins Comparative Non-Profit Sector
Project, has provided a baseline assessment of its
size and nature in 26 countries (Salamon et al.,
1999).
The findings provide strong evidence that this
sector is not some insignificant backwater but is in
fact a major “third prong” in the mixed economies
that constitute the western nations. In the 26
countries studied, they identify that the
transactions of non-profit organisations
represented 4.6 per cent of GDP on average across
these nations, and that there were some 31 million
full-time equivalent workers (or 6.8 per cent of the
non-agricultural workforce) including 19.7 million
full-time equivalent paid workers and 11.3 million
full-time equivalent volunteer workers. The not-
for-profit sector in consequence, is a large sphere
of activity that cannot be dismissed as being of only
limited or marginal importance and nor can it be
assumed that the transfer of responsibility for
delivering goods and services away from the state
has resulted in a universal shift to the market rather
than the not-for-profit sector.
Indeed, and as this project reveals, this sector is
growing relative to the wider formal economy over
time. Examining the changes in non-profit sector
full-time equivalent (FTE) employment relative to
overall employment, in all eight nations analysed
(with the exception of Israel), the pace of job
growth in the not-for-profit sector was identified as
outstripping total job growth. In the USA, for
example, although there was an overall increase in
FTE employment of 8 per cent between 1990 and
1995, the growth in FTE employment in the not-
for-profit sector was 20 per cent. In the four EU
nations considered (France, Germany, the UK
and The Netherlands), meanwhile, the 24 per
growth in overall FTE employment in the not-for-
profit sector far outstripped the 3 per cent growth
in the economy as a whole, thus accounting for 40
per cent of total employment growth (3.8 million
new FTE jobs). In the three other developed
countries for which there were employment data
(Israel, Japan and the USA), the increase averaged
21 per cent, though this accounted for a somewhat
smaller 11 per cent of the 16 million new FTE
jobs.
The only conclusion that can be reached is that
the not-for-profit sector is a large and growing
sphere of activity. Indeed, the inference is that the
relationship between monetised exchange and the
profit motive might well be growing weaker rather
than stronger.
The private sector
It might be assumed that whenever the private
sector partakes in monetary transactions, the
motive of profit is always to the fore. Yet numerous
studies have displayed that private sector
enterprises are not all, and always, driven by a
common imperative of profit. There is now a vast
literature that displays that the motive of profit is
by no means always to the fore in private sector
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Colin C. Williams
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businesses. Other goals that might be pursued
include growth of sales, securing control over a
field of transactions, maximizing their own
management payments, such as expense accounts
and superior accommodation, or preserving
corporate reputation (e.g. Lee, 2000; Morel, 2003;
O’Neill and Gibson-Graham, 1999;
Schoenberger, 1998).
To consider just one example, O’Neill and
Gibson-Graham (1999) unravel the role of
competing discourses of management in shaping
the fluid entity that is unproblematically
represented as the “profit-seeking capitalist firm”.
Examining an Australian minerals and steel
multinational, they produce a disruptive reading
that emphasizes the de-centred and disorganized
actions taken in response to multiple logics
circulating within and without the corporation.
Uncovering the enterprise as an unpredictable and
potentially open site, rather than as a set of
practices unified by a predictable logic of profit
maximisation, the enterprise becomes no longer
tethered to a pre-ordained economic logic but,
instead, recognisable as an ordinary social
institution; one that often fails to enact its will or
realize its goals or even fails to come to a coherent
conception of what these might be.
Hence, even in the commercial sphere, so
dominantly perceived as the embodiment of the
profit motive, enterprises are not always tied to the
motive of profit and profit alone.
Discussion and conclusions
Until now, the widely held view that the
commodity economy is reaching ever further into
every crevice of daily life has led many to conclude
that the future of work is closed. There is only one
future and it is one in which the commodified
world stretches its tentacles ever wider and deeper
into every nook and cranny of contemporary life
throughout the world. However, the identification
in this paper of a large non-commodified sphere in
the advanced economies that, if anything, appears
to be growing rather than contracting relative to
the commodified realm, disrupts this reading of
the commodity economy as victorious, colonizing
and all-powerful and opens up the feasibility of
alternative futures for work beyond a commodified
world.
For some analysts, the findings of this paper
might be seen in a positive manner as
demonstrative of the possibilities for the creation
of post-capitalist futures for work. Firstly, and for
non-market social democrats, the persistence and
growth of non-commodified work will be read as
evidence that it is wholly feasible to construct
alternatives to capitalism and in non-commodified
work, they will view the seeds of a post-capitalist
future for work (e.g. Archibugi, 2000; Beck, 2000;
Gorz, 1999). Secondly, this is also the case for
radical ecologists for whom the recognition and
fostering of economic pluralism resonates strongly
with this overarching desire for more localized,
self-reliant and sustainable economic development
(e.g. Dobson, 1993; Henderson, 1999; Mander
and Goldsmith, 1996; Robertson, 1991). Third
and finally, post-structuralist theorists who argue
that there is a need to recognize, value and create
non-capitalist economic practices that are already
here and emerging so as to shine a light on the
demonstrable construction of alternative
possibilities and futures (e.g. Byrne et al., 1998;
Escobar, 1995; Community Economies
Collective, 2001; Gibson-Graham, 1996;
Williams, 2002, 2003) will view this
deconstruction of the commodification thesis as
allowing the articulation of alternative regimes of
representation and practice in order to imagine
and enact alternatives to a commodified world.
Indeed, reading these non-commodified
economic practices as what Harvey (2000) calls
“spaces of hope” is not without foundation.
Recent studies of people’s motives for engaging in
such work, especially affluent populations, display
that they choose to engage in non-commodified
economic practices rather than externalising the
work on a commodified basis (see Williams and
Windebank, 2003), thus reinforcing the view of
Urry (2000, p. 146) that “a largely unintended
effect of a highly individualized and marketized
society has been the intensification of social
practices which systematically ‘evade the edicts of
exchange value and the logic of the market’”.
Such a view of non-commodified work as a
“chosen space” and site of resistance to a
commodified world, however, is not the only
reading of this process of de-commodification. For
lower-income populations, non-commodified
work is not a matter of choice. For them, it is a
result of a lack of choice (see Williams and
Windebank, 2003). As such, explanations
grounded in human agency need to be
complemented by more structural economic
explanations, especially in relation to lower-
income populations, if non-commodified work is
to be fully understood.
In this regard, an emergent view is that the
growth of non-commodified work is the product of
a new post-Fordist regime of accumulation that is
off-loading social reproduction functions from the
commodified sphere back onto the non-
commodified realm (Amin et al., 2002b; Castells
and Portes, 1989; Portes, 1994). In this reading,
the breakdown of the post-war economic
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regulations and welfare states through a general
trend of deregulation and flexibilisation of social
relations of production and the transferring of
social services to private and communal hands has
led to a practice of de-commodification. Non-
commodified work is re-colonising spaces of
production (and reproduction) previously covered
by market relations and state subsidies.
As such, the contradictions inherent in the
commodification process have led to the de-
commodification of some spheres of social
reproduction. To compete in the global
marketplace in realms where goods and services
can generate external income, advanced
economies have reduced social costs by re-
imposing activities associated with social
reproduction onto the non-commodified realm.
This is reflected in the decrease in expenditure on
social protection as a percentage of GDP
throughout the 1990s, even in regions such as the
European Union that is comparatively supportive
of comprehensive formal welfare provision
(European Commission, 2001). Those no longer
of use to capitalism, in this view, are thus being off-
loaded onto the non-commodified sphere to eke
out their living. Read in this manner, especially in
relation to lower-income populations, non-
commodified economic practices are more “spaces
of despair” than “spaces of hope”.
Before reading the above findings as a positive
sign that it is wholly feasible to pursue post-
capitalist futures for work, therefore, and racing
ahead with attempts to cultivate such non-
commodified work, this more economistic reading
suggests that caution is required. Indeed, unless
exercised, then those seeking to develop
alternatives to capitalism may well find themselves
merely aiding and abetting this very order by
creating depositories into which those excluded
from the market can be abandoned.
If this paper ends on such a cautionary message
for those seeking post-capitalist futures,
nevertheless, this should not obfuscate the overall
finding. For those who have believed that there is
only one future and it is one in which there is an
inevitable and natural shift towards an ever more
commodified world under the market-driven
search for corporate profit, this paper provides a
potential source of renewed optimism. A
commodified world has been widely held to be the
one and only future available, not least by those
with a powerful vested interest in the further
encroachment of the market. In this paper,
however, it has been revealed that buying into this
future is not the only option available. It is wholly
feasible to imagine and enact alternatives to a
commodified world.
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