Sorting out economic forms: a field guide to contemporary capitalism

ABSTRACT

A series of recent works have put forward a post-commodification understanding of the contemporary economy as based on one central economic form. While this approach allows us to conceptualize the transformation of the economy around one particular type of valuable, it also suffers from conceptual monoculture, risking to overlook the specific relationships between different forms. To grasp the complexities of contemporary capitalism, this article offers an analytical field guide for analysing the interdependent relationships of the most salient economic forms – commodities, assets, gifts and singularities – on three levels: (i) form, defining the boundaries of economic forms as socio-material configurations determined by their mode of exchange; (ii) formatting, denoting the process of turning something into a particular economic form through relational and boundary work; and (iii) formation, referring to the wider configuration of prerequisites and opportunities that allows economic things to take on their respective forms. We argue that rethinking economies as specific relational configurations of multiple economic forms allows for a sharper understanding of regional dynamics and politics.

KEYWORDS:

• Economic forms
• gifts
• commodities
• singularities
• assets
• assetization

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for the thoughtful comments of Hannah Richter, Vicky Kluzik, Lisa Rail, Ira Zöller, Tom Chabosseau, and the two anonymous reviewers who have helped us refine our argument.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Likewise, this is a different endeavour from providing a cultural guide to those sites the reader should have seen to get an idea of the contemporary economy (Muniesa et al. 2017).

2 ’Circulation’ should be understood in a broad sense here: it does not mean that things travel in circles (Luhmann 1988) but that they have long-lasting trajectories (and ripples) across society. Something goes out and returns, usually in different form (Thomas 1991; Bourdieu 2008.

3 With Marx (1867/1991, 251), we can go one step further even and say that the commodity, albeit seemingly operating on the principle of equivalence, becomes an intermediary for the transformation of capital into more capital. Accumulated surplus is, after all, just labour power transformed.

4 Veblen (1908) distinguishes between tangible and intangible assets. While the former ‘designate pecuniarily serviceable capital goods, considered as a valuable possession yielding an income to their owner’ (1908, 105), the latter denote ‘material items of wealth, immaterial facts owned, valued, and capitalized on an appraisement of the gain to be derived from their possession’ (1908, 111).

5 Birch and Muniesa stress that their choice of ‘asset’ over ‘capital’ is a pragmatic one: ‘Both notions – capital and asset – often appear in the literature as substantive things (something that someone may or may not have), but they are also open to interpretations in terms of form, process, condition, or relation […]. For us, the term asset is less loaded with theoretical controversies and terminological quandaries than the term capital […]. And this is the main, practical reason that explains our inclination for the former in the pages that follow’. (Birch and Muniesa 2020, 4).

6 The most famous example are the so-called ‘Veblen-goods’. Rather than following the mechanism of supply and demand, which would imply that demand for a given commodity will decrease as the price rises, luxury goods like expensive cars or designer handbags are characterized by an uptake in demand by virtue of their lofty price tags. In other words, it is their relative unattainability and exclusivity that makes them predestined to become objects for what Veblen (1899/1931) has coined ‘conspicuous consumption’, in which the ostentatious display of luxury goods denotes social status.

7 What Karpik describes as a necessity stemming from the nature of goods is understood by Boltanski and Esquerre (2016, 2017) as a deliberate process of ‘enrichment’ in contemporary capitalism: companies augment commodities to escape the laws of the market, such as competition and decreasing profits. Similar to Kopytoff (1986), Veblen (1899/1931) and Bourdieu (2000), they see the stylisation of goods as unique objects as an expression of people's desire to distinguish themselves from others. For Karpik the obstacles to commodifying singularities are rooted in their material qualities and the limits of people's calculative capacities.

8 Butler stresses that the gaps between iterations are also spaces for intervention and reinterpretation (Butler 2010, 153f.), but the idea of ‘failure’ continues to exert its normative power in this framework.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alexander Dobeson

Alexander Dobeson is Assistant Professor in Culture and Economy at the Department of Management, Society & Communication at Copenhagen Business School. His work lies at the intersection of economic sociology and political economy and investigates the cultural landscapes of property.

Saskia Brill

Saskia Brill is a researcher and Ph.D. candidate at the department for Social and Cultural Anthropology at LMU Munich. Her work focuses on the economic and political aspects of human-environment relationships, especially in settler-colonial settings.

Veit Braun

Veit Braun is a research associate at the Institute for Sociology, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, where he studies the governance of biodiversity in cryobanks and the role of property in society. His work is situated at the intersection of science, economics, and law.