Adam Arvidsson, Nicolai Petersen and myself (Bauwens), have jointly published an expanded version of the Crisis of Value article for the Journal of Future Studies . This May 2008 issue is not yet online, so feel free to request an author’s copy.

The essay was written by invitation of one of the editors, Sohail Inayatullah
University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia, a futurist that I very much admire. Managing editor Mei-Mei Song did a lot of the editing.

Here’s the summary of the thesis, i.e. abstract:

This article argues that the information economy is split in two. On the one hand, there is the traditional capitalist economy that works with monetary incentives. This economy still handles the main part of material production: the production of cars, shoes, computer chips, and the transportation and maintenance of these goods. But immaterial production- the production of the ideas, innovations, experiences and other intangibles that virtually everybody agrees to be the most important source of value and development- is increasingly performed by another economy that does not primarily move according to monetary incentives. We provide a provisional analysis of the value logic of this non-monetary, ethical economy and point at three future scenarios in which the ethical economy challenges the hegemony of global capitalism.

Details:

Published in: Journal of Futures Studies, May 2008, 12(4): 9 – 20. By Adam Arvidsson, University of Milan, Italy ; Michel Bauwens, Foundation for peer to peer alternatives, Thailand, Nicolai Peitersen Actics Ltd., UK

Archives of JFS at http://www.jfs.tku.edu.tw/sarticles.html