Doctoral Dissertation Research: Making Real Money: Local Currency and Social Economies in the United States

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SES-0503199Sarah SouleAlan SchussmanUniversity of ArizonaLocal currencies have been founded in dozens of communities around the United States. By printing their own money that can only be used at participating local merchants or service providers, or in direct exchange with community members, advocates of local currencies try to reinvigorate local commerce, demonstrate community opposition to ``big box'' retailers and globalization, and support local employment. Although many local currencies have been founded around the country, most of them have had only limited success, but evenwhere local currencies fail to thrive, they raise scholarly questions about the reasons and the ways in which we organize the institutions within which we live. This project has two key concerns that emerge from those questions: First, the project seeks to explain the conditions under which local currencies operate, with the goal of building an understanding of how alternative economic organizations successfully challenge the deeply embedded and institutionalized practices that surround the use of money; second, and relatedly, this project explores the ways in which the meaning of money is reconfigured by the organizers and the users of local currencies.This project makes use of several research methods. The first is the compilation of a set of city-level data and data on the status of local currency projects in the United States; this data will be used to conduct a quantitative analysis of the survival of local currency projects. The second and third components of the project are surveys of local currency organizers and participants. These surveys will gather additional information about the organizations that sponsor and promote local currency around the country, and will explore the characteristics of the people involved with these projects, both those who manage them and those who participate in them by buying and selling using local currency.Local currencies are an innovative form of community economic organization that have previously gone under-studied by scholars. This project, the first to address local currencies with a large set ofquantitative data as well as case-oriented data, adds to sociological knowledge of organizational development and maintenance, social movement participation, and the social construction and use of mone