Is an ethical economy possible: new forms of value in the information society?

In recent decades managerial discourse and actual business practice has paid increasing attention to ethics. What was chiefly an academic discussion about business ethics has grown into a virtual 'ethics industry' (Hyatt, 2005), and has been supplanted by a growing focus on corporate social responsibility and a booming consumer demand for ethical or 'fair' goods. Critical observers, myself included, have tended to dismiss this focus on ethics as little more than a cynical response to the new demands put forth by a more networked and better informed public opinion. Together with the managerial promotion of ideals like 'creativity' or 'self-actualization', such 'ethics-talk' has been read as part of a New Spirit of Capitalism, in which the critique put forth by the social movements of the Sixties and Seventies has been incorporated and transformed into a new way of legitimizing the same old forms of exploitation and capital accumulation (Boltanski & Chiapello, 1999). In this short piece I would like to try out a different approach. I will suggest, quite provocatively, that the managerial focus on ethics is more than just a cynical move. Nor is it merely a matter of benevolence. Rather, it reflects an important structural transformation within the information society: the growth of a number of strategically central, albeit quantitatively marginal productive practices: all working according to a logic where value is related to the quality of social relations, and not to the quantity of productive time, or as Marxists would say, socially necessary labor time. These diverse practices, which I collectively refer to as 'the ethical economy', are located within the boundaries of the corporate world, as in the case of new forms of knowledge work. But they also transpire outside of, or even in opposition to corporate capitalism, as in the case of more purist forms of Free Software. These processes are generally located at the top end of contemporary value chains and they have all to do with the production or manipulation of information and affect, like experiences, events and brand image. As such they have all been significantly empowered by the spread of networked information and communication technologies. The traversal nature of this ethical economy means that it is likely that its further growth and consolidation will quite radically redraw the boundaries of capitalist economy and redefine the field of conflict and compromise on which it evolves. (This is already visible in intensifying struggles over intellectual property and the 2 emergence of powerful hybrid forms like the social entrepreneurship movement, cf. Boyle, 2008.) The fact that the ethical economy is closely linked to information technology, or, more precisely, that it emerges out of the extended forms of cooperation that these technologies enable, implies that the ethical economy is likely to be central to the emerging economic ecology of the information society. The ethical economy might even become hegemonic to that ecology. Will value in the information society be conceived of as organized around ethics, just as it was conceived of as organized around labor in industrial society? That would amount to nothing less than a mutation in the socially dominant value form, a rare and radical kind of social transformation which has, nevertheless, occurred before (as when 'labor' and 'self-interest' emerged as central forms of value and motivation out of the tumultuous transformations of the European 17th century (Hirschman, 1977, Linebaugh & Rediker, 2000).