The gift and the market: alternative economic relations in the Comox Valley local exchange trading system
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Comox Valley Local Exchange Trading System (LETSystem) was a complementary community monetary system active in the Comox Valley on Vancouver Island during the 1980s and 1990s. Drawing on archival sources and ethnographic interviews, I argue that the LETSystem combined the individualized economic rationality of liberalism with the communalism and social embeddedness typically associated with non-monetary gift exchange. As a complementary system of money, the LETSystem was an economic alternative that did not seek to replace conventional money, but instead sought to carve out a distinctive space that was separate but still compatible. In so doing, it was exemplary of illiberal money in the sense that it conforms with key liberal principles such as market exchange, individualism, and the division of labour, while also consciously formulating a critique of liberal money in its rejection of the profit-generating capacity of money as well as the scarcity and competition that it can elicit. Illiberal money produces a specific morality where users encouraged one another to act according to an individually defined vision of responsible behaviour where one was expected to first contribute something before spending money. This act led to the perception of a greater degree of interpersonal connection than is typical of liberal markets while still allowing for the pursuit of individual gains, and therefore problematized the dichotomy between the gift and the market.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".