Diverse Economic Practices Research Articles

Regimes of value: Economic transformations, ecological livelihoods, and salt cooperatives on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast

This article investigates changing regimes of value in the salt flats on the southern Bulgarian Black Sea coast as a way of exploring how diverse economic practices reflect communities’ relations with their environment. Combining a feminist political economy (FPE) lens with postsocialist analysis of social change in Bulgaria, I trace the salt flats’ transformation from cooperatively managed local ecological livelihood to passive property rendered most valuable when sold for development into the now-dominant tourist industry. In contrast, I also outline contemporary diverse economic practices inspired by the salt flats, which seek alternative means of conceiving the economy. Drawing on these experiences, I argue that the postsocialist lens can offer a robust perspective on conceptualizations of the diverse economy.

Untangling alternative organising within and beyond capitalist relations: The case of a free food store

How do prevailing economic relations enable non-capitalist forms of alternative organising? Through an ethnographic case study of a free food store, I illustrate how an alternative organisational form emerges through the entanglement of diverse economic practices. By tracing the journey of the surplus food, I argue that the use value of food and labour plays a crucial role in mediating alternative economic, symbolic and political relations. Furthermore, the relationality of diverse economic practices reveals a non-capitalist parasitic alternative organising sustained by/for the community. This study contributes to the literature on alternative organising by introducing use value as a theoretical tool to untangle the intricate relationship between capitalist and non-capitalist economic practices from a critical political economy perspective.

How Far Does the Diverse Economies Approach Take Us?

How Far Does the Diverse Economies Approach Take Us?

Diverse infrastructures of care: community food provisioning in Sydney

ABSTRACT There is burgeoning interest in the role of infrastructures as performative socio-technical systems that shape urban life. In this paper, we make visible an often-hidden and diverse infrastructure of care, the Community Food Provisioning Initiative (CFPI) sector. We discuss CFPIs as often hidden, yet vital infrastructures of care. Drawing on research on the CFPI sector in Sydney, Australia, we attend to the diverse ways in which CFPIs are governed, the materialities that constitute them and the diverse economic practices that support them. Our work makes visible the spatial extensiveness of CFPIs across the city, the ways in which caring practice is made possible by ‘things’, and the diverse enterprises, transactions, labour, property and finance that constitute the diverse economies of CFPIs. We couple our work developing a typology of community food provisioning, GIS mapping and an overview of the diverse economy of CFPIs with empirical examples from three CFPIs. Throughout the paper we highlight how CFPIs are diverse and vital infrastructures of care that contribute to people’s ability to survival well in the city.

Diversifying Economic Practices in Meal Sharing and Community Gardening

This article aims to contribute to the diverse economies program of Gibson‐Graham. By studying the economic activities of participants of two Dutch food initiatives, we make diverse economic practices visible. Semi‐structured interviews were our main research method. Our analysis shows alternative, nonmarket, and noncapitalist elements, displaying inventiveness, creativity, and ease to cross borders between mainstream and alternative economic options. We explored the microscale reality of creating alternatives, focusing on how participants explore economic spaces and shape these. We demonstrate that people diversify their economic practices so as to better fit these into their daily lives. Especially the crossing of the public–private divide makes space for these alternative economic practices. Hence, respondents aim to expand their “repertoires of action”, looking to engage in activities that are useful, challenging, and enjoyable, and that enable the inclusion of ethical and pragmatic values. However, while rewarding, these alternative economic practices are also insecure and precarious. We suggest that rather than assessing diverse economic practices on their effects of ending the dominance of mainstream capitalist economies, they should be evaluated regarding the way in and degree to which they enable an expansion of repertoires of economic action.

Collaboration for survival in the age of the market: diverse economic practices in postsocialist Mongolia

ABSTRACTSince 1990, Mongolia has experienced postsocialist transformation and the government-imposed ‘free market economy’. With the collapse of socialism and the former economic order, ordinary people in Mongolia have survived by engaging in diverse economic practices. The aim of this article is to give careful analysis of how people employed everyday economic practices around three key commodities – cashmere, scrap metal, and marmot pelts – to sustain their livelihoods in this postsocialist environment. Based on ethnographic field research, this article argues that social networks and kinship relations persisted through the socio-economic changes and radical reforms of the postsocialist period, creating the foundations for the diverse economic practices found in contemporary Mongolia. These practices served to distribute wealth equally and to sustain livelihoods after the government’s ‘failed’ privatization in the 1990s.

Stinking Creek Stories: Memory, Agriculture, and Community in Rural Southeastern Kentucky

Stinking Creek Stories:Memory, Agriculture, and Community in Rural Southeastern Kentucky Kathryn Engle (bio) "What does agriculture mean to you?" A hot July day was winding down on Coles Branch in Knox County, Kentucky.1 Conrad Smith, a bachelor in his mid-60s with a small stature and toothy smile sat on an old lawn chair in the middle of his extensive vegetable garden. He seemed at ease in his work clothes with his scruffy face partially hidden by his ball cap and large sunglasses. I sat on a nearby five-gallon bucket used for watering. We had already toured his plot as he eagerly showed his garlic, beans, squash, cucumber, peppers, eggplant, tomatoes, and cabbage. We chatted about the weather, bugs, and people we knew as we wound through the rows and half rows scattered with hoses, mulch, and wire cages. The sun was slowly setting over the large sunflowers that rimmed the garden. The buzzing of the bees in the tops of the sweet corn began to subside. The humidity hung thick in the air while the sound of summer night bugs emerged. I propped the recorder on the [End Page 457] tiller sitting between us—it teetered on the only surface available. Conrad told me he fashioned it out of two different tillers from the 1980s. We continued our conversations, now with the red light of the recorder on. I met Conrad in 2014 when he became a participant in the Grow Appalachia Gardening Program I coordinated through the Lend-A-Hand Center, a nonprofit organization in Walker, Kentucky, that has served the community since 1958. As we began, I asked him about growing up, what his family was like, the different jobs he had over the years, and what it was like to live in the area of Knox County, Kentucky, known as Stinking Creek. He told me of his experiences with the Lend-A-Hand Center and its founders Irma Gall and Peggy Kemner and recalled the community center program through the Community Action Agency in Knox County during the War on Poverty.2 Conrad reminisced about cutting hay, killing hogs, canning vegetables, plowing with mules, selling strawberries, and keeping bees. About three quarters of the way through the interview I asked, "What does agriculture mean to you?" There was a long pause. The silence hung between us as he picked at the ground with his shovel. He struggled to find the words. "Well, I'd say it'd be my way of life. Being in this gardening, farming. I growed up with it. That's all I know here. I can't imagine not knowing it. It'd be terrible not to know how to raise something to eat. We've all got to have something to eat so it's simple to me, but I know a lot of people can't do it."3 Conrad's thoughtful answer reflected deep emotional ties to place. He explained his family history on Coles Branch and how his father bought the farm from money made working in the coal mines. He remembered the practices handed down that he has carried on through the years. His pause pointed to the complex meaning of agriculture [End Page 458] in rural Appalachia, in addition to tensions and uncertainties about the future for a way of life that is in many ways waning. Through oral history, this account will profile Stinking Creek residents and share some of their stories and the meanings they give to agriculture, community, and the small, local nonprofit service organization, the Lend-A-Hand Center. The stories, experiences, and knowledge of Stinking Creek residents like Conrad provide insights into larger changes in agriculture and the political economy of eastern Kentucky. While Kentucky is known for horses and tobacco, small-scale diversified agricultural and gardening practices in eastern Kentucky have likewise made important contributions to the history and development of the state.4 Rural communities in eastern Kentucky employed diverse economic practices and adapted to changing economic and agricultural systems. These insights shared by Stinking Creek residents reveal agricultural traditions of the past and provide local possibilities for the future, including relocalization of food systems and...

Of Fields and Forced Labor

Biblical narratives about ostensibly “local” barter (Abraham’s purchase of the cave at Machpelah), protection of battle spoils (Achan’s theft and subsequent execution), and commodification of labor and bodies (Ruth gleaning for hours and offering herself to Boaz) reveal much about ideologies of economic control operative in ancient Israel. The materialist analysis of Roland Boer provides a richly detailed study of Israelite agrarian and tributary practices, offering a salutary corrective to naïve views of Israelite economic relations. Highlighting labor as the most ruthlessly exploited resource in the ancient Near East, Boer examines the class-specific benefits and sustained violence of economic formations from kinship-household relations to militarized extraction. Boer’s erudite study will compel readers to look afresh at the subjugation of the poor and plundering of the powerless as constitutive features of diverse economic practices throughout the history of ancient Israel.

Alternative Economies of the Forest: Honey Production and Public Land Management in Northwest Florida

ABSTRACTWithin public lands across the United States, “natural” environments are given boundaries, subject to regulation, and managed for various uses. However, the effective and judicious management of these socionatural spaces for the greater good of both long-term sustainability and the mutual benefit of disparate stakeholders remains a challenge. One such stakeholder group includes forest-dependent communities, specifically, harvesters and producers of nontimber forest products (NTFPs). Relying on a case study of honey producers in rural northwest Florida, this article demonstrates how competing notions of forest management create tensions between local resource users and resource managers. NTFP research engages in timely discussions of diverse economic practices, resource politics, and issues of contested land use and access within a post-industrial context.

Gender equality and economic empowerment in the Solomon Islands and Fiji: a place-based approach

The economic empowerment of women is emerging as a core focus of both economic development and gender equality programmes internationally. At the same time, there is increasing importance placed on measuring outcomes and quantifying progress towards gender and development goals. These trends raise significant questions around how well gender differences are understood, especially in economies dominated by the informal sector and characterised by a highly gendered division of labour, as is the case in many Pacific countries. How well do existing international and national indicators of gender equality reflect the experiences and aspirations of Pacific women and men? What do concepts such as gender equality and economic empowerment mean in this geographical context? How might local attitudes and practices be identified and measured? In this paper, we draw on Boaventura De Sousa Santos’ call to recognise and value knowledges of the majority world that have been rendered either largely invisible or non-credible by mainstream development and human rights policy agendas. Reflecting on an action research project conducted with partner organisations in Fiji and the Solomon islands, we explore a more nuanced place-based approach to understanding and measuring gender equality and economic empowerment. This approach takes account of diverse economic practices, such as non-market transactions, and forms of non-cash exchange and unpaid labour, and recognises the imbalance in women’s and men’s household and care work.

Rethinking the origins of homonormativity: the diverse economies of rural gay life in England and Wales in the 1970s and 1980s

This paper rethinks the origins of contemporary homonormativity. Through an analysis of archival material from a rural lesbian and gay social movement from the 1970s, it questions the common link between homonormativity and urban neoliberalism. The Gay Rural Aid & Information Network (GRAIN) provided support to lesbians and gay men living in rural Britain or who were exploring the possibility of leaving the city for rural life. The network consisted of a heterogeneous mix of lesbian and gay environmentalists and ‘back‐to‐the‐land’ enthusiasts, older lesbians and gay men who had retired to the countryside, and rural‐based gay activists. Drawing on archival material relating to GRAIN, this paper traces the diverse economic practices engaged in by rural‐based lesbians and gay men in this period. GRAIN members engaged in a complex mix of diverse economic practices and relations, both as a means towards their goal of living more ‘sustainably’ and in order to fit in to the changing post‐productivist rural economy. By acknowledging the ambiguous sexual politics of this counter‐cultural social movement, the paper questions theorisations of contemporary homonormativity which locate its origins solely in relation to neoliberal socio‐economic relations and subjectivities.

Rethinking the Economy with Thick Description and Weak Theory

In this paper I rehearse the thinking steps J. K Gibson-Graham developed in order to theorize diverse economies and reveal a landscape of economic difference. Reading with and against Clifford Geertz’s 1973 essay “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” I discuss how “thick description” of diverse economic practices can be combined with weak theory to produce a performative rethinking of economy centered on the well-being of people and the planet. I discuss the difficulties of resisting the influence of “strong theory”—that is, powerful discourses that organize events into understandable and seemingly predictable trajectories. I outline the diverse economy, a reframing that allows for a much wider range of social relations to be seen to bear on economic practices including, to name just some, trust, care, sharing, reciprocity, cooperation, coercion, bondage, thrift, guilt, love, equity, self-exploitation, solidarity, distributive justice, stewardship, spiritual connection, and environmental and social justice. In the complexly overdetermined field of a diverse economy, we are invited to trace multiple dynamics at play. It is in the apprehension of these diverse determinations that ethnographic thick description comes into its own and leads the way toward rethinking the economy. For ethnographers today, no task is more important than to make small facts speak to large concerns, to make the ethical acts ethnography describes into a performative ontology of economy and the threads of hope that emerge into stories of everyday revolution.

National Citizens, Global Economies: Sarah Gertrude Millin and the Professionalization of Envy

This article examines the South African novelist Sarah Gertrude Millin’s writings on economics. Though Millin has most commonly been treated as a theorist of race and miscegenation, her novels and nonfiction writings demonstrate an equally strong interest in how global economic institutions affect South African life. Eatough proposes that Millin’s fascination with such diverse economic practices as currency speculation, actuarial accounting, and stock broking stems from the way in which these practices dramatize a seemingly insuperable tension between Anglo professionalism and South African nationalism. As the article shows, Millin’s efforts to overcome Anglo-Afrikaner rivalry and fashion a unified white nationalism entailed a radical rethinking of what global professional networks were in their innermost essence. Central to this nationalist project, Eatough argues, was Millin’s tendency to regard such networks less as rooted national institutions than as distant speculative devices capable of inflating the value of South African nationality. Over the course of the article, Eatough investigates how Millin uses this definition to finesse complaints by (primarily Afrikaner) nationalists against British control of the professions by suggesting that such articulations of envy drive speculative enterprise—and, thus, provide a means for transforming national abjection into national value.

All aboard? Women working the spaces of gentrification in Toronto's Junction

Despite early attention being paid to the connections amongst ‘gender, work and gentrification’ in the urban geography literature, there have been few attempts to examine the experiences of women as workers in gentrifying neighbourhoods. This gap leaves open critical questions about the nature of the links between the production of gendered work practices and the production of gentrified urban landscapes. In this article, I explore how women working in a variety of differently precarious situations – as struggling small business owners, self-employed workers and part-time workers – manage the tensions and contradictions of struggling for economic survival while attempting to support community-building efforts and social reproduction needs in a gentrifying area. Using data drawn from interviews and urban ethnographic methods in Toronto's ‘Junction’ neighbourhood, I argue that precarious conditions of work in the context of gentrification engender a variety of diverse economic and social practices – developed through immaterial and affective labour – that, in turn, produce particular, and often contradictory, social and economic landscapes of gentrification. I will explore the ways in which gendered vulnerabilities and insecurities are ironically produced, in part, by the feminized consumption landscape, which primes neighbourhoods for widespread gentrification. Through examining these dynamics, we can begin to theorize the structural production of precarity, and in particular, gendered precarity, through urban processes such as gentrification.

River floodplain aggradation history and cultural activities: Geoarchaeological investigation at the Yuezhuang site, Lower Yellow River, China

Archaeobotanical research at the Yuezhuang and Xihe sites of the Houli culture in the Lower Yellow River has found abundant carbonised plant remains, including rice, millet, weed seeds and many other plants (7800–7000 cal BP). Although studies of the diverse economic practices of the Houli people have begun, issues such as ecological diversity and relationships between site formation processes with environmental changes are still poorly understood. Applying soil micromorphology and related methods such as particle size distribution and loss-on-ignition at Yuezhuang, this paper presents results of the geoarchaeological investigation and the implications for the reconstruction of site formation processes in relation to river alluvial history. A long alluvial sequence is reconstructed, consisting of frequent alternations of short-periods surface stabilities and succeeding alluviations. Human occupations corresponded to those short-term surface stabilities and are evidenced by the presence of anthropogenic inclusions in thin sections, including burned bone fragments and pottery sherds. The significances of this study to an ecological approach focusing on environmental changes and cultural adaption are discussed.

Socially embedded workers at the nexus of diverse work in Russia

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore an important nexus of formal/informal economic activity in Russia: “normative” workers (in waged formal employment) by virtue of a strongly embedded work‐related social identity and characterized by a significant number of weak social ties, move with little “effort” between formal and informal work.Design/methodology/approachThe paper presents extensive ethnographic data from the Russian provinces on workers and diverse economic practices. It utilizes participant observation and semi‐structured interviews from periods of fieldwork over the course of a year (2009‐2010).FindingsThis study traces the theoretical debates on the informal economy from 1989 to 2008 and argues for a substantivist position on household reproduction that focuses on the interdependence of social networks, employment, class‐identity and (informal) work. The findings demonstrate significant performative and spatial aspects of embedded worker identity, including the workspace itself as a contested domain, that facilitate movement between formal‐informal work.Originality/valueThe originality of the paper resides in its ethnographic approach to informal economies under post‐socialism and the substantivist evaluation of diverse economic practices in Russia as supported by formal work‐based shared identities.

The work that parks do: towards an urban environmentality

Cities today are typically framed as sites of capitalist development, while the urban park is theorized as an indirect response to the emerging hegemony of industrial production in the nineteenth century. Yet, this historical framing tells us little about the process through which our notions of ‘the city’ and of ‘nature’ are produced, or how this knowledge affects the formation of urban people's identities. The discursive formation of the capitalist city can be traced to specific historical moments, one of which is the construction of urban parks during the mid- to late-nineteenth century, which I argue was instrumental in producing a new knowledge of the capitalist city by creating a boundary between the social space of the city and the natural space of the park. Using Philadelphia's Fairmount Park as a case study, I draw on archival photographs and annual park commission reports to explore the formation of park subjects during this period and shed light on diverse economic practices that were once widespread in and around the city but whose erasure was ultimately a prerequisite for the successful formation of an urban discourse organized around the construction of the city/nature boundary.

Rethinking the nature of community economies: some lessons from post-Soviet Ukraine

This paper contributes to a small but growing body of thought that has questioned the hegemony of capitalism by revealing the persistence of multifarious economic practices in everyday community economies. To further advance this school of thought, first, a conceptual framework is developed to map the diverse economic practices used by communities and second, this is applied through a survey of 600 households in Ukraine. The outcome is to reveal that just as multifarious economic practices prevailed under state socialism, the same applies in societies in transition to capitalism, suggesting that there are alternative futures for community economies beyond market hegemony.

The spirit of post-socialism: Common spaces and the production of diversity

Since 1989 scholars and policy-makers have articulated different notions of post-socialist reform. Each presupposes or privileges distinct notions of space. This paper focuses on the ‘spirit of post-socialism’ and outlines these different understandings of post-socialist reform and their corresponding embedded assumptions about space and geography. It then argues that various attempts to frame post-socialism in terms of a series of broader universal projects of economic harmonization and integration have been increasingly supplemented by more conjunctural analyses of diverse economic and social post-socialist practices and spaces, and comparative analyses of post-socialism and reform-socialisms across and beyond Central and Eastern Europe.

The Emergence of a Working Poor: Labour Markets, Neoliberalisation and Diverse Economies in Post‐Socialist Cities

Abstract: This paper examines the transformations of urban labour markets in two central European cities: Bratislava, Slovakia and Kraków, Poland. It highlights the emergence of in‐work poverty and labour market segmentation, which together are leading to a reconfiguration of the livelihoods and economic practices of urban households. The focus of the paper is on the growing phenomenon of insecure, poor‐quality, contingent labour. It examines the ways in which those who find themselves in, or on the margins of, contingent and insecure labour markets sustain their livelihoods. We ask how such workers and their households negotiate the segmentation of the labour market, the erosion of employment security and the emergence of in‐work poverty and explore the diverse economic practices of those who cannot rely solely on formal employment to ensure social reproduction. Further, we assess the articulations between labour market participation and exclusion, and other spheres of economic life, including informal and illegal labour, household social networks, state benefits and the use of material assets. We argue that post‐socialist cities are seeing a reconfiguration of class processes, as the materialities and subjectivities of class are remade and as the meaning of work and the livelihoods different forms of labour can sustain are changing.