The ‘giving’ ecosystem of which volunteerism is a part, is notoriously difficult to define and poorly understood. Giving should be understood in a broad sense. Giving relationships are built on giving all kind of resources of value, not just financial such as donations, but time-based and skill-based resources as well, such as volunteering.

So what is the gift economy and what is this ‘giving’ ecosystem? According to Wikipedia (itself a gift economy), the concept of the gift economy is:

“a society where valuable goods and services are regularly given without any explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards (i.e. no formal quid pro quo exists). Ideally, simultaneous or recurring giving serves to circulate and redistribute valuables within the community”

Giving can be reciprocal, where each party is focused on the needs of the other. However, it is not dependent on a legally binding exchange or even an explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards. A giving relationship often looks to the collective interest and breaks under the weight of a legally enforceable contract.

That’s not to say that giving can’t be in a person’s self-interest. But it is without the formal quid pro quo of an exchange of goods or services that began with the barter economy and lies at the heart of the free market economy in modern industrial capitalist societies.

To be sure, this is the tip of a debate which has a rich tradition in the theory of political economy. It’s a debate going back in modern times looking at the relationship between citizen and state that includes in Western thought thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Tocqueville and many, many others. Professor Steven B. Smith has a lecture series on this subject on Open Yale courses.

Typically giving relationships have predominated where contracts are difficult to enforce and/or where relationships between the parties are already strong and it would introduce unnecessary complication or serve to undermine the gift itself, as with families and tight-knit communities. Marriage is an interesting case study fusing the gift and exchange model. Controversy and debate surrounding prenuptial agreements in part revolves around the clash of models between those who see marriage as an exchange and those who see marriage as a gift.

The gift economy can struggle to deliver goods and services where either party requires a high degree of certainty. It’s likely to be a while before we see houses or other kinds of property given away through Freecycle – a site that brings together groups that match people who have things they want to get rid of, with people who can use them.

Different gift economies

The experience of many in the newspaper industry as they’ve moved online has demonstrated that when they use social media, giving is more effective than exchanging. A willingness to share and be open (as when giving to each other) is a more effective strategy than limiting supply and being closed (as when formally exchanging with each other). Jeff Jarvis believes that these giving relationships online amount to what he terms as a ‘link economy‘.

“Links can be exploited and monetized; get links and you can grab audience and show ads and make money. Content is becoming a cost burden, what you have to have to get the links, but in and of itself, content can’t draw value without an audience, without links.“

How do online newspapers get these links? They are given them by their audience, amongst them participants, enthusiasts and volunteer bloggers, by opening up their content and inviting people in. They can’t oblige consumers of their product to link. Instead they can make it easier and more worthwhile to link. It’s the gift economy in action.

The tradition of giving

In fact, the gift economy has become big business, more than it ever was at previous times in history such as in the case of the tradition of potlatch. The potlatch is a festival or ceremony practiced among Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast. At these gatherings a family or hereditary leader hosts guests in their family’s house and hold a feast for their guests. The main purpose of the potlatch is the re-distribution and reciprocity of wealth. It is also interesting to consider the more modern tradition at the Burning Man festival in this idea of building community based on giving.

Chris Anderson in his recent book ‘Free – The Future of a Radical Price‘ explores the new business model of giving products away for free. What’s fascinating from a volunteerism perspective is how Anderson grapples with the hinterland where giving relationships and exchange relationships meet. For many in the business world used only to the culture of exchange relationships, his ideas are unfamiliar. He essentially sets out how the take up of social media has led to the culture of the gift economy becoming mainstream for many businesses.

The comparative advantage of giving

In this book, Anderson touches on two critical points that can help us understand what is happening with volunteerism as social media grows.

“[Lewis] Hyde (author of The Gift) focused mostly on gift economies of things—actual objects exchanged… But there has always been a much larger gift economy of deeds, the things we do for each other without charge. As with the attention and reputation economies, this ephemeral gift economy has suddenly become explicit and measureable as it moves online.” (p.137)

Suddenly all this activity that previously happened below the radar, is increasingly visible and measurable as these giving activities transfer to the web. Giving relationships work better when transparency and openness are preeminent. One example is charity: water shows donors where their projects are on Google Earth. Sharing and collaboration (giving relationships) rewards openness, and mitigates against a lack of transparency and an effort to maximise comparative advantage, as with an exchange model.

The other point that Anderson makes is the new scale at which giving via social media can operate:

“If only 1 percent of the hundred people in some school‘s sixth-grade class volunteer to help make the yearbook, it doesn‘t get done. But if just 1 percent of the visitors to Wikipedia decide to create an entry, you get the greatest trove of information the world has ever seen. (In fact, it‘s closer to one in ten thousand Wikipedia visitors who are active contributors.)” [see history of Wikipedia]

Participation rates that previously would have been a disaster on a smaller scale, are suddenly viable now as they take place on much bigger scales. We are becoming more aware of the huge social impact as the social web gets better at aggregating the many tiny acts freely given by individuals across the globe. Unprecedented access to the social web means giving goes further than before, and the ‘long tail’ distribution of giving can be more successfully leveraged.

The ‘network effect’

Typically there’s an imbalance when people participate in all kinds of social activities: there are a few who are very active and a larger proportion who are a lot less active. Clay Shirky wrote about this power law distribution in “Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality“.

The work of Yochai Benkler – “The Wealth of Networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom” developed this understanding of the network effect. Chris Anderson in his earlier book “The Long Tail” also looked the bigger picture as smaller acts could be measured and their importance better understood.

It is difficult to discuss volunteerism and the gift economy and ignore the huge literature on social capital and volunteering. For example check out “Volunteering and the concept of social capital” by Dr Judith Sixsmith, and Dr Margaret Boneham. Much has been made of the contribution that volunteering can make in building social capital.

Reciprocity and Exchange

Perhaps the most popular notion of social capital within this debate was identified by Robert Putnam. For Putnam, social capital is defined as the:

features of social organisation, such as networks, norms, and trust, that facilitate co-ordination and cooperation for mutual benefit (Putnam, 1995, page 67 [Bowling alone: America's declining social capital])

Putnam in his classic book on the subject ‘Bowling Alone’ argues that the cornerstone of social capital is the principle of ‘generalised reciprocity’.

I’ll do this for you now, without expecting anything immediately in return and perhaps without even knowing you, confident that down the road you or someone else will return the favour (Putnam, 2000, p.134)

In this Putnam is effectively explaining the basis for the gift economy is reciprocity rather than exchange. For Putnam social capital holds out the possibility of putting a value on the social networks that we have. The key then is understanding the difference between exchange and reciprocity which we look at in a post on here soon!

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Related posts:

  1. Giving activities: Part 3 – Civic engagement
  2. Mapping giving relationships
  3. Giving paradox: personal freedom and social impact
  4. Volunteering: Giving to Strangers
  5. Giving activities – Part 1: Participation