The matter of payment (original) (raw)
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Common cents: situating money in time and place
Economy and Society, 2005
This paper engages with a wide range of social theories to argue for a more nuanced understanding of money that is attuned to its spatial and scalar dimensions. The paper begins with a brief overview of modernist and postmodernist accounts, including the works of These theories have provided a useful corrective to neoclassical economic accounts that distil the economic from society and culture, but they reinforce an understanding of money that is homogenizing, in that it is said to annihilate space by time. By contrast, network theories of money, which are reviewed in the following section of this paper, offer a more contextualized understanding of money's embeddedness in social relations, in particular vis-à -vis the trust that is invested in money forms and institutions that help to knit together the networks through which money circulates. The spatial dynamics of monetary circulation are intrinsic to this model, but there is little sense of the geopolitical dimensions of money's role in the territorialization of space. The studies of money that are reviewed in the penultimate section of this paper begin to address the dimensions of power at work in money's production and circulation, largely in terms of the rise of the state and national currencies, with particular attention to the particularities of money forms. As I argue in the conclusion to this paper, these various epistemological approaches are not easily reconciled. But I suggest that the aim should not be to resolve the paradoxes that emerge, but to foreground them. In so doing, not only will it be possible to think more carefully about the scales through which money circulates and which it helps to produce and reproduce, but to invest our understanding of money with a little more life and dynamism.
MONEY -SPECIAL REFERENCE TO DIGITAL MONEY
Money is derived from a Latin word, Moneta, which was another name of Goddess Juno in Roman history. The term money refers to an object that is accepted as a mode for the transaction of goods and services in general and repayment of debts in a particular country or socioeconomic framework. Money is an important and powerful tool which was created by man thousands of years ago. "Money is a pivot around which the whole economy clusters". Anything that serves as a medium of exchange, as unit of account and used as a store value can be referred to as money. It should have characteristics of Durability, Portability, Divisibility, Uniformity, Acceptable, Scarcity, Stability, Cognizability means its value must easily identifiable and compare its worth.
Money 2.0, 2020
The article is a proposal — in the form of some personal reflections and some what-if scenarios, if you will — for the modernisation of money, which includes: the complete digitisation of money , where each monetary unit is both unique and traceable; the introduction into the economy of a parallel value system of, on the one hand, untransmissible personal credits and, on the other, of exchangeable real credits; the use of said credits for the conditioning (in varying/proportional amounts, and excepting from it certain goods and services) — as a prerequisite — of consumption. On this basis, the societies and economies of the future will be able to evolve towards more just, stable and lasting organising models.
Technophany, A Journal for Philosophy and Technology
This article presents an ethnography of alternative currencies that foregrounds the notion of “circulation”. Building upon a long legacy wherein money is equated with a primary life force—being either water or blood—that is contained within a body, “circulation” became a dominant metaphor for the use of money from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. Imagining money as a liquid that flows and circulates means that remedying economic inequalities and injustice is often reduced to a matter of redistribution. Instead, money is itself an institutional project engineered to distribute resources and authority based on a philosophy of growth and accumulation. Alternative currency initiatives aim to re-design, rather than re-distribute, money. Importantly, they believe the technological fix of a circular software system effectively does away with the inequalities of the capitalist mode of production. What happens when on-going practices towards systemic change converge on money and the econ...
The Philosophy of Money and Finance
Is money an object? Although paper money is naturally regarded as a material or concrete object, this does not hold for electronic money. John Searle maintains that institutional statuses, such as money and property, are imposed on concrete objects. But he regards electronic money as an exception. He claims that, as it is realized by computer systems, the status of money is not imposed on anything. But this somewhat mysterious claim leaves us in the dark about its ontological standing. I critically discuss four alternatives to the view that money is always a concrete object. It might be an abstract object. But it could also be a property of an agent. A further possibility is that it is a concrete object in some cases and has one of these other ontological standings in other cases. To shed light on the plausibility of these views, I discuss the nature and functions of institutions more generally.
The unbearable lightness of digital money
This paper examines the factors that make cash ‘sticky’ in the increasingly digitised Kenyan financial landscapes. On the one hand, it discusses the mismatch between assumptions implicit in the financial inclusion discourse and ideas of saving, accumulation and money enshrined in local financial practices, and provides an overview o f the current digital payment situation in Kenya, in terms o f strategies and data. On the other hand, it draws insights from industry efforts in which industry expectations are tested against a background shaped by the dominance o f cash and traditional financial institutions. The overall goal is to further the understanding of potential drivers and challenges o f ‘cash-lite’ approaches to financial inclusion, as well as the convergence and divergence of theory and evidence. This study uses qualitative methods of data collection to understand the social, cultural and economic drivers o f payment behaviours, and the opportunities and constraints for adoption and acceptance of technology. It argues that the enduring reliance on cash suggests that a rational calculative approach is not adequate to understand people’s decision making when considering different options in a repertoire o f financial alternatives. Most importantly, the materiality of cash affects its pragmatics within a broader repertoire of financial practices revolving around different means of payment and storages o f value. It thus recommends that an approach to the design o f epayment systems should not only be largely ‘open-source’ for ease o f interoperability with other payment systems, but also localised, to converge with local contexts.
Digitization and the evolution of money as a social technology of account
Journal of Evolutionary Economics
Throughout the history of monetary thought, economists have predominantly emphasised the function of money as a medium of exchange along with the intrinsic properties that enhance its salability and credibility as the most liquid store of value. But the social institution of money co-evolves with technology. It is significant that the advent of digital crypto-currencies was initiated by computer scientists and has taken economists completely by surprise. As a consequence, it also forces our profession to rethink the basic phenomenology of money. In accordance with the views of Wieser and Schumpeter, digitization brings to the fore the immaterial function of money as a standard of value and social technology of account, which increasingly absorbs its function as a medium of exchange. The potential impact of this on economic policy is huge. The variety of different crypto coins has proven the technical feasibility of competing private currencies as proposed by Hayek. In the long term,...
Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology, 2015
This article explores the relevance of Georg Simmel’s phenomenology of money and interpretation of modernity for understanding and evaluating contemporary financial information and communication technologies (ICTs). It reads Simmel as a philosopher of technology and phenomenologist whose view of money as a medium, a “pure” tool, and a social institution can help us to think about contemporary financial media and technologies. The analysis focuses on the social-spatial implications of financial ICTs. It also makes links to media theory, in particular remediation theory and Marshall McLuhan, and refers to work in anthropology and geography of money to nuance the story of the progressive dematerialization and delocalization of modern life. The conclusion highlights Simmel’s continuing relevance for thinking about the relation between technologies and social change, and explores alternative social-financial media and institutions.