A lot of people have asked me about clarifications of this concept. What do we mean by the term ‘Ethical Economy’? Let’s start with what we don’t men. We donät think that contemporary economic processes are somehow nicer or more ethical than their precedents. The term ethical economy does not per se entail any value judgement. Rather, with the term we want to refer to the fact that cooperation, the construction of social relations, community, values in common- is becoming the most important force of production. Think about it. The more complex an economy gets, the more crucial it becomes to produce the often temporary and mobile social forms that can provide cooperation (team works, project teams and the like); the more empowered and networked users get, the more likely they are to produce innovation and creativity that can be appropriated by companies, and the more unstable the social world becomes, the greater the value we attach to more or less stable values, lifestyle and processes. In short it is the production of ethically relevant things- let’s call it an ‘ethical surplus’ that comes to increasingly underpin the generation of values.

Management is by no means blind to this, over the last ten years or so there has been a long discussion about corporate values, corporate culture, brand values and the like. Implicit in this discussion is are cognition that the ethical climate- the ways in which people go about in producing an ethical surplus has a relevance for the performance and value of a company. The problem with these discussions is that they have no way to manage and or even to make visible such crucial ethical variables. That is the problem that Actics will solve. We make visible and allow our clients to manage the increasingly crucial ethical aspect of social action.

For a more detailed discussion of these issues you can consult my ongoing book project, hosted by Michel Bauwens and the P2Pfoundation.