Adam Arvidsson

Bio

Adam Arvidsson teaches sociology at the University of Milano. He is the author of Brands. Meaning and Value in Media Culture (London; Rouledge 2006), and has published on social production, 'creativity' and creative industries, and the political economy of cognitive capitalism in general. Presently he is involved in four major projects: activist research on the conditions of 'creative labor' in the fashion industry in Milano; a research project on the financial value of reputation housed at the Copenhagen Business School; an EU funded attempt to develop bottom-up collaborative brands for small entrepreneurs in the creative industries, and a new book, The Ethical Economy, co-authored with Nicolai Peitersen and forthcoming with Columbia University Press in 2010.

Abstract

We are witnessing an emergence of wave of new productive formations: online phenomena like Web 2.0 and FLOSS, off-line practices like urban 'creative' scenes and booming local alternative economies, and new business fields like Open Innovation and Ethical Consumerism. This paper argues that these diverse phenomena take part in the common emergence of a new and radically different economic system: an Ethical Economy where production is mainly collaborative and socialized, and where value is based on the quality of social relations (rather than on the input of productive time). The talk will propose the beginnings of a theory of this ethical economy with particular emphasis on its new 'ethical' value logic. It will suggest an analysis of its historical emergence, showing how it can be understood to result from a dialectic between cooperation and competition that has been inherent to industrial capitalism form the start. Finally it will indicate how the concept of an 'ethical economy' can cast new light on present struggles around the capitalist appropriation of digital labor and other forms of social production, and how such an perspective can cast new light on the future of capitalism itself.