also entails working out what ‘economy’ and ‘practice’ mean (Amin and Thrift 2004). The project of analysing the digital economy becomes one of building an understanding of whether there are any particular digital economic activities and, if so, what constitutes them. The aim here is not grand, in the sense of arguing that analysis of economic life should all be based on economic practices, but rather is specific; the argument is that to understand a new region of economic life looking at how it is lived and practised is an important way to grasp it. In the following chapters this will be done through a series of case studies focusing on particular digital economic practices. To undertake these studies we first need an understanding of ‘economic practice’.
Practices are the repeated actions taken to construct everyday life-worlds, or what Schatzki calls ‘a nexus of doings and sayings’ (cited in Reckwitz 2002: 250). While practice as a concept is often closely associated with Bourdieu, Schatzki and others (Bourdieu 1977; Schatzki 2008; Cetina et al. 2005), one way of applying such ideas to digital economics is to draw a parallel with Couldry’s attempt to use the sociology of practice to change how media is studied. Couldry sought to move media studies from a study of texts and effects toward a study of media practices; in doing so he emphasised three things. First, in the analysis of practice, culture is recentred on routine, often unconscious, actions and on the structures of meaning that allow something to be said (rather than on the thing said). Second, the analysis is open to following what people are doing in relation to media, and should not presume prior existing categories of media, such as ‘the audience’. Finally, there is a focus on the kinds of practices that produce categorisations or identities that are enduring (Couldry 2004: 121–2).
The value of practice theory … is to ask open questions about what people are doing and how they categorise what they are doing, avoiding the disciplinary or other preconceptions that would automatically read their actions as, say, ‘consumption’ or ‘being-an-audience’, whether or not that is how the actors see their actions. (Couldry 2004: 125)
While Couldry here addresses media, his focus on following the routine, the everyday and repeated actions and the meanings of and within media is strongly indicative of the way I wish to use ‘practice’ to open up the phenomena of the digital economy. In this regard, a cognate conceptual ally is the feminist materialist focus on the ‘trouble’ or the ‘mess’ of life. As with Couldry’s extensive work, there is insufficient space here to outline all that is relevant, but it is worth noting the connection here to Haraway’s notion of the ‘trouble’ inherent in becoming-with each other, from microbes to humans. As she says when discussing partners in making life’s troubles: ‘The partners do not precede the knotting’ (Haraway 2016: 13; see also Barad 2007).
In the following chapters, practices are understood as entanglements of meaning and action in which various actors appear and are formed, or disappear and are deformed, and which are in some sense repetitive, iterative and patterned. ‘A “practice” (Praktik) is a routinized type of behaviour that consists of several elements’ (Reckwitz 2002: 249). We might think of practices as habits, like using an ATM to obtain cash, or clicking to register our agreement to an end-user licence online; in such ways we become habituated in the habitus. ‘The paradox of habit’, as Deleuze puts it, ‘is that it is formed by degrees and also that it is a principle of nature … The principle is the principle of contracting habits’ (1991: 66). Habits and repetitions are important because if a set of meanings and actions is simply a one-off then it does not form a practice; the principle of habit and iteration is that it forms habits by degrees. If practice seems to focus on meaningful actions then the latter are meaningful only because they have been replicated in order to be part of a practice.4
From Couldry in media studies to Haraway on troubling boundaries, I could also have looked at Barnes’s (1988) collective action theory, Butler’s (1997) theory of performativity, and Latour’s (2007) actor network theory, which broadly and similarly demonstrate how practice encompasses the myriad interactions and entanglements between many different kinds of actors (human and non-human) that create patterned forms of life. Drawing inspiration from these sources but focusing on the digital economy, the aim is to follow the practices; paraphrasing Touraine, when analysing the digital economy it is important to ‘pass on the side of actors’ practices’ (2002: 89).
Economic practices, then, are the habits, actions and meanings, formed into repeated routines, that sustain how we produce and exchange the goods that provide for life, wealth and their reproduction. Adam Smith famously, and broadly, enquired into the ‘wealth of nations’, and particularly into the peculiarly human ‘truck, bartering and exchanging’ of one thing for another, while Marx enquired into humans who, in producing their subsistence, ‘are definitely producing their actual material life’ (Smith 1982; Marx 1978). To these we can add Marshall’s view that the economy is the ‘social action which is most closely connected with the attainment and with the use of the material requisites of wellbeing’ (1890: 6). As Keynes emphasised, this attention to social life and its production and reproduction makes economics a moral and therefore imprecise science, and one that requires the observation of economics in action (Keynes 1938). Feminist accounts have ensured that such a view of the economy is not just about the production of goods and labour but also their reproduction (Jarrett 2016). The economy connects the production and reproduction of life to the creation, exchange and consumption of the goods and commodities of all kinds that constitute wealth. Furthermore, because these complex inter-relations between creation, exchange and consumption are embedded in ways of life, they have to gain meaning within practices: an economy of exchange of food and shelter for sheer subsistence is very different to an IT-enabled, app-focused economy of attention, but both are economies embedded in and gaining meaning from the ways people live. Whatever it is that is created, exchanged or consumed, it can only derive its meaning from being embedded in social worlds which give meaning to goods or commodities themselves.
The definition of economic practices employed here follows this, perhaps more classical, understanding of the economy, while also drawing inspiration from revisions of economics in the light of the 2008 financial crisis (e.g. Piketty 2014), and from the work of contemporary cultural economists and analysts of the creative industries (Core 2018; Hesmondhalgh 2010; Banks 2017). This is important, for being open to finding a new phenomenon requires attention to what is occurring, since it is all too easy to see what is already known. Economic practices are then the practices that create and sustain the wealth of a society, seen in its exchanges of goods or commodities, and the organisation of the production and reproduction of life through everyday practices. These two sides are closely connected and ensure that various cultures in society are attended to, something that will be crucial in understanding the digital economy.
This book treats digital economic practices as repeated and patterned habits of creating, exchanging and consuming a huge range of goods and commodities that make up the wealth of society, while understanding that often the meanings of these commodities must themselves emerge from within those practices. This entails paying close attention to the practices that produce and reproduce social life. My approach is then a materialist and a qualitative one. The numbers can only speak when we know what they are talking about, and, when confronted by what seems to be a new form of economy, we can only reach that understanding by following and examining its economic practices and particularly its distinctive causal mechanisms. If the digital economy is powerful and fast growing – at least according to the faulty numbers I have presented – then it is important to examine the economic practices that constitute it.
Plan of the Book
Any self-respecting university course or textbook on industry economics spends some time at the outset discussing the difficulties of defining an industry – i.e. whether the concept of industry can be delineated according to groupings of producers, product classifications, factors of production, types of consumers, location, etc. What is problematical for industries in general is especially so in the cultural sphere because of uncertainties in the definition of cultural goods and services. (Throsby 2014: 112)
The
