Authors

Mayya Shmidt¹;  ¹ Uppsala University, Sweden

Discussion

The proposed paper looks at timebanking ­– a system of exchange in which people trade services with one another using ‘time currency’ instead of money at an exchange rate of ‘an hour’s worth of any person’s labour’. Consensually, timebanking is framed in social work perspective as a social innovation that contributes to poverty alleviation and increasing inclusion. However, most of such organisations fail to institutionalize as care providers. I discuss the rare success story – a time bank in Nizhny Novgorod, the fourth largest city in Russia, a non-charitable organization that have been functioning over 15 years. I engage with sharing economy studies – a growing yet ambiguous field – to explain the success of the time bank in Nizhny Novgorod. Research in sharing economy to date has mostly concentrated on polar cases – business-to-customer operations or grassroots communities practicing radical alternatives to market exchange – united by an assumption that these sites would generate social capital. However, there have been limited evidence to support this claim. I test the hypothesis and explore whether the informal networks, norms of reciprocity and trust that are fostered among members of the time bank are the factors that explain the sustainability of this association. The study is informed with 22 in-depth interviews with the gatekeepers and members of community. In the interviews I paid attention to the 1) socio-demographic characteristics of participants and the structure of their social capital, 2) characteristics of the mode of exchange practiced in the community (volume, direction, repertoire of services, relatedness to professional activities and other spheres of life), 3) value set and worldview (egalitarianism, altruism, justice), 4) indicators of generalized trust. Results revealed that timebankers do not tend to create strong and sustainable relationships outside of the framework of exchange. I put forward the following explanatory hypothesis: calculativeness of timebankers, market-driven valuations of ‘egalitarian’ service exchange and unilateral attitude to the exchange stand in conflict with longing for Gemeinschaft – type of community with strong bonding interdependence, based on the norms of mutuality. At the same time, this association failed to provide conditions for generalized trust to emerge. The attempt to simultaneously create a tightly bonded community, but still answer the needs of digital age resulted in a pastiche of sharing economy platform. Beyond the case at hand, this study theorizes the rhetoric and reality of sharing economy by summarizing the grounds for expectations of social capital generation and explains why certain expectations could not be met.