Abstract
Sardex is an interest-free digital money created in Sardinia (IT) in 2010 that grew rapidly and created a new community. Sardex money is imbued with a utopian view of society as cooperation and local exchanges. It has technical characteristics and rules of functioning that trigger specific social mechanisms (selection, monitoring and sanctioning, signaling, and belief formation), and influences social interaction with a high level of trust, a sense of familiarity, and social support. Sardex can be considered a form of transformative experimentalism toward sustainability. Digital monies risk becoming a techno-leviathan, but they can also influence social dynamics by balancing competition and cooperation, decreasing inequalities, and forging the boundaries and the goals of new communities. Creating money is a terraforming operation that requires a new sociological agenda for investigating money as social ties.
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Notes
- 1.
Dollarization refers to the situation in which a country substitutes its own currency with the US dollar (Melvin 1988).
- 2.
The analysis uses 37 semi-structured interviews done in 2017 with entrepreneurs (E.) member of the Sardex network and 11 interviews with the Sardex management and employees of different areas of activity. The sample of firms was differentiated by the number of employees, business sector, year of entry in Sardex, proximity to the regional capital, and peripheral area. Interviews were conducted by the author, took place in person, and were transcribed. The evaluation included coding and categorizing, for details and for the complete analysis of the interviews see Bazzani (2020a).
- 3.
- 4.
The jointly spatial and political nature of the Greek community is evident also in the etymology of the word politics that comes from the Greek polis that means city-states, while ethics comes from ethea that means habitats, and, more in general “‘society’ stems from socius, signifying ‘sharing’—and sharing is done in a common place” (Casey 1997, xiv; cit. in Irwin 2016, 250).
- 5.
Classical sociologists described this process with different emphases and expectations. For Durkheim (1997) urbanization and labor division represent the shift towards a big community linked together by the organic solidarity, while for Marx (1926) the community continues to be the local dimension of a larger form of association in society. Tönnies (1955) sees the advent of modern society as a real change in the nature of association: in the past communitarian form (Gemeinschaft), social ties were primarily based on shared values, emotions and direct reciprocity, while in modern society (Gesellschaft) they are based on interests and contractualism. Simmel (1971) and Weber (1958) also recognize this shift but they treated the two poles as a typology that allows the observation the characteristics of modern form of association and social action (for an introduction, see Irwin 2016).
- 6.
The selection made by Sardex, unlike the selection between feudal lords described by Elias, will never result in one company monopolizing an entire economic sector because the broker management intentionally operates to provide multiple offers in each sector, to ensure members have freedom of choice.
- 7.
- 8.
Both values are net of the estimated euro-to-Sardex substitution effect of 13% of customers and 11% of revenues of the total increase recorded (for details see Bazzani 2020a).
- 9.
- 10.
For Polanyi, this idea of self-regulated market with expected long-term benefits implied a “stark utopia.” “Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness. Inevitably, society took measures to protect itself: but whatever measures it took impaired the self-regulation of the market, disorganized industrial life, and thus endangered society in yet an other way.” (2001, 3)
- 11.
The four freedoms of movement of money, goods, services, and persons are at the heart of the European integration project, and specifically, of the European monetary union and the euro (Emerson 1992). This mechanism should bring, the building of a European identity and a real political European integration as secondary effects. Unfortunately, unexpected negative political consequences are emerging: nationalism rises in European countries as well as unexpected redistribution effects (Matthijs and Blyth 2015; Streeck 2015; see Veira-Ramos and Tetiana Liubyvaand in this handbook for the case of Ukraine).
- 12.
Notwithstanding it could be argued that Sardinian community already existed before the coming of Sardex money due to established close kinship ties (Pinna 1971), it is evident how the we-ness and the common goal of the Sardex community do not exist in parallel to economic activity with euro money. Moreover, the development of similar experiences in different contexts support the thesis of the exogenous creation of the community (Bazzani 2020a).
- 13.
There are two main risks connected to the local boundaries of community: one is the exclusivity provided by a real sense of belonging (Miller 1990) and the second is the effects of constraint over individual freedom (Etzioni 1998). For the distinction between bridging and bonding communities see Putnam (2000).
- 14.
See, for example, the cases of New York City, under its One NYC 2050 program, or Bristol which established the Bristol SDG Alliance working to raise awareness about the SDGs in the city, or the Helsinki City Strategy 2017–2021.
- 15.
Sardex money experimented as a tool for digital payment of social subsidies in the city of Sassari. In this experiment, social subsidies could not be used, for example, for gambling.
- 16.
The access of the fiscal authorities to all the bank accounts and their transactions is already not far from the market transparency of digital money.
- 17.
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Bazzani, G. (2021). Digital Money for Sustainable Communities: The Sardex Case. In: Maurer, A. (eds) Handbook of Economic Sociology for the 21st Century. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61619-9_16
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