The Politics of Value by Jane L. Collins

Author:Jane L. Collins [Collins, Jane L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology, Political Science, Political Process, Political Advocacy, Labor & Industrial Relations, Business & Economics, Labor
ISBN: 9780226446288
Google: mPgmDgAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-03-29T05:49:07+00:00

Conclusion

In May 2015 a group of potential investors crowded into a law office in Madison, Wisconsin, to hear presentations from a group of budding entrepreneurs. They listened eagerly to young (and a few older) people presenting their plans to scale up production of spicy peanut butter ice cream, apple brandy, specialty vinegars, and old-fashioned pimento cheese; to young engineers explaining their modular system for growing microgreens on rooftops; and to older farmers explaining their vision for a new kind of sellers’ cooperative. Each presenter received feedback from senior investors, a loan officer, and a financial specialist. By the end of the evening, each had made plans to meet individually with one or more attendees whose interest had been piqued by the presentation.

What difference did it make that these entrepreneurs sought investments from their “neighbors” rather than from a traditional lending institution or a public offering of stock? Most obviously, their neighbor-investors would expect a lower rate of return; they would be more flexible about what counted as collateral; and perhaps they would offer a longer time horizon for repayment. Lenders likely would also visit the farm or factory and perhaps give advice. They would be able to see for themselves the way the new companies operated.

In these small, perhaps mundane, ways Slow Money activists saw themselves as contesting the nameless, faceless forces of globalization by revaluing place. As a revaluation project, the movement sought to demonstrate the value of locally deployed capital and face-to-face relations between investors and small enterprises. It sought to use that capital in ways that reinforced dense, multistranded economic relationships among neighbors and that fostered its recirculation through a variety of local projects. It sought to reframe the notion of “return,” encouraging investors to forgo the highest possible earnings in exchange for freeing entrepreneurs to “internalize” the costs of treating workers responsibly and protecting the environment.

As a revaluation project, Slow Money talked back to a market that made all places equivalent with practices that valued heterogeneity, and to a world economy that valued speed and efficiency with a philosophy of slowness and meaningful activity. In arguing that the connections of place were of value to the economy, Slow Money participants did not call on other businesses to behave differently. They did not seek to change the rules or incentives that government provided. Unlike Occupy Wall Street or the Global Justice movement, they did not seek to change those existing power relations but created autonomous spaces for economic experimentation. In those spaces they worked to show that local ties were qualitatively distinct from—and better than—global connections, and that “line of sight” relationships generated more responsible economic behavior. In an era when the division of labor between state, market, and civil society was shifting, they were crafting ways to absorb more of the costs of economic production and to experience more of the benefits within civil society.

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