This volume emerged from the challenge to rethink the meaning of economic practices in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008 and beyond. While governments and financial elites reacted to the near collapse of financial capitalism by attempting to restore the conditions of business as usual, the economic, social, and human damage inflicted by the crisis prompted a reconsideration of the inevitability of unfettered capitalism as a fact of life. A number of economic practices appeared throughout Europe and the United States that embodied alternative values: the value of life over the value of money; the effectiveness of cooperation over cutthroat competition; the social responsibility of corporations and responsible regulation by governments over the short-term financial strategies, led by greed rather than long-term profit-making, that took the overall economy to the brink of catastrophe. From Spain to Greece, from the US to Australia, and to many other countries beyond our direct observation, we saw the blossoming of multiple experiences of innovation in organizing work and life: cooperatives, barter networks, ethical banking, community currencies, time sharing banks, alternative means of payment, etc., that paved the way for a fast-developing sharing economy in all domains of activities oriented toward the satisfaction of human needs. Furthermore, while some of these new economic practices appear to be a reaction to the inability of the standard economic operations to provide goods, services, and credit during the crisis, other innovations became increasingly visible when taking a broader look at the way economic transactions co-evolve with culture, technology, and institutions in a fast-changing society. This is the case with cryptographic virtual currencies, epitomized by bitcoin, which blended a libertarian, entrepreneurial spirit with information technology to provide an alternative to standard forms of currency. In a very different vein, this is also the case of forms of banking for those at the bottom of the pyramid, who are creating a financial underworld with its own rules and effects – an underworld that can only be understood through the methods of participant observation that inform some of the work presented in this volume.

Yet, this is not a collection of diverse case studies. Because throughout our collaborative research and in this volume, there is a common theme that provides the link to our polyhedric observation. There are as many economic practices as there are cultures. If standardized forms of capitalism appear to provide uniformity to economic practices it is only because of the cultural domination of capitalism, of the different forms of capitalism, enforced by institutions whose rules result from power struggles institutionalized in the law – always in flux. Thus, when standardized economic practices do not mesh with people’s practices, either because they cannot practice them in situations of crisis, or because they challenge the values embodied in financial capitalism, alternative economic practices appear. These are not necessarily anti-capitalist (bitcoin is not), but different from current capitalism. At the source of this observation is our common statement. The economy is not simply related to culture: economy is culture. Looking at a whole range of economic practices, some directly observed, others studied more broadly from a cultural perspective (such as feminist economics or ecological economics), we can understand the logic of social change at the heart of the economic system. If economy is culture and if cultures are diverse and often contradictory, a whole range of economic practices are equally relevant and equally able to organize the way people produce, consume, exchange, innovate, invest, and live. This is the terrain we explored for three years in our research network, moving freely between observation, quantitative analysis, theory, and practice. This is our project: to unveil the cultural foundation of all economic practices by focusing on those that, because they are “alternative” (to contemporary financial capitalism), make more visible the cultural content of their economic logic. We have constructed an argument, not just collected a number of research papers and theoretical elaborations. Our argument is this: economic practices are human practices that, as such, are determined by humans who embody their ways of being and thinking, their interests, their values, their projects. There is no abstract, inevitable economic logic outside human practice, a metaphysical, a-historical logic to which humans should conform. If they do, it is because they are compelled or induced to resignation. When they are not, they redefine the goals and means of their economic practices, as in all dimensions of their practices. There is no such thing as a non-human economy. There is, yes, an inhuman economy because it sometimes benefits certain humans who try to appropriate humanity as a whole for their own advantage until other humans think differently, practice differently, and end up creating alternative forms of production, consumption, and exchange. This is our story, the story of this book, told in a plurality of voices, but in the harmony of a shared intellectual purpose.