Money, Morals and Valuation: How Local and Complementary Currencies Question the Global Financial System

“With the SOL [local and complementary currency], it’s not about consuming more, but it’s about converting a ‘black’ GDP into a ‘green’ GDP.” (Sol Violette launch meeting, 2009) Our study aims at understanding the processes through which groups of citizens search to fight the global financial system through the creation of new valuation devices, i.e. local and complementary currencies (LCC). An LCC can be defined as “a currency parallel to the national currency, issued and managed by the citizens. It aims to restore ‘humanity’ to the territory, and restore meaning that conventional currencies do not incarnate anymore” (SOL document, 2012, according to Philippe Derudder). Although they have long existed, the number of LCC created over the last decade has exploded across the world (over 5000 LCCs worldwide according to Savoie, 2016), and particularly in Europe following the 2008 financial crisis (Lietaer & Kennedy, 2008). Fundamental to this development is the desire of citizens to provide an alternative currency that relies on values and an evaluation infrastructure they perceive to be opposed to those of the official currency (e.g. Euro) (cf. Figure 1). The choice of LCC over other modes of resistance (e.g. boycott, compromise, avoid using money, defy or manipulate) is driven by the desire of those citizens to dispute what they perceive to be among the most symbolic and material incarnations of the social-material arrangements of a country: its money (Zelizer, 1994). Underlying the creation of LCC in Europe is the rejection of an European technocracy and a globalization movement judged to be detrimental to the citizens. The LCC movement searches to change the collective representations of wealth and how the society values it. However, this transformation is not easy to achieve since LCC face various difficulties, from the involvement of their members or the inability of organizations to reinject the LCC into the local economic ecosystem to the legal obstacles implemented by the States for preventing such development. When faced with such challenges, the question is: How can a local and complementary currency transform the social meaning of money? By exploring such issue, we enrich the sociology of valuation by investigating the mechanisms through which the valuation infrastructure of money is transformed towards the integration of a plurality of values (Barman, 2015; Geiger et al., 2014; Helgesson & Muniesa, 2013). We also contribute to the sociology of money by studying the transformation of money into an “object of desire” (Yuran, 2014), not for what it could bring to the individuals who possess it but for the alternative project of society it embodies (Zelizer, 1989). By joining the sociology of valuation to the sociology of money, we contribute to the understanding of the relationships between morals, money and the valuation processes attached to a currency. Research methods include 18 months of participative observation of a French LCC ‘Sol Violette’ (SV) together with (pending) interviews with the members of the LCC and external stakeholders and documentary evidence (all archives and email exchanges from the start of the movement to 2016). Secondary public data such as the annual reports and the monthly newsletter from the SV were also collected. SV is both a revelatory case, in the sense that local and complementary currencies have not yet been studied in the accounting and organizational literature, and a representative case study (Yin, 2009) in the sense that the SV is both an early LCC and the model of the majority of existing local currencies in France today, and the third most important in the French context in terms of circulation.

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