Micro ownership?

We can extend the multi-dimensional model to another dimension for the economic partners, though how do we define this? What constitutes economic activity? This too may be informed by the economy of regard.

Reciprocity

Reciprocity may be observed in many daily contexts:

  • exchanges within the household
  • retail business
  • work: management relationships (employee – employer)
  • various jobs, sectors and fields of social interaction, e.g. politics

Among the benefits are personal and social interactions, which lead to the satisfaction of regard. Offer suggest this desire to satisfy regard is the key factor, but perhaps this is overstated; we would suggest other motives may have a significant role, especially selfless ones.

In order to succeed with an economy based on regard and particularly reciprocal exchange we need to determine the right conditions. Offer relates that price-driven markets thrive when information is scarce, coordination is difficult and goods are standardised and cheap. On the other hand, reciprocal exchange is favoured when trade involves personal interaction and goods or services are unique, with many dimensions of quality. In the SNS context, the value of uniqueness has long been recognised, but whereas many kinds of communication systems have supported personal 1-1 interaction, the general increase in automation and complexity of such environments has had a diffuse effect, leading especially to an increase in pseudo-personal communication, a tedious example of which is spam.

Reciprocity is also more nuanced in gift exchange, with various dynamics at play. Offer lists some of these:

  • price indeterminate
  • reciprocity may be delayed [not instant]1
  • delivery and ‘payment’ are separated
  • not only a material gain or economic transaction, but it is a good in itself, a “process benefit” – usually in the form of personal interaction or relationship2
  • Most of all, personal interaction is a very important source of well-being.

The temporality in most of these exchanges has or implies extended duration, which is in contrast with instant gratification. This fits in well with ‘5-star’ speech, which encourages restraint.

Forms of regard

Offer lists a very wide-ranging list of ‘forms’ of regard3:

  • acknowledgement
  • attention
  • acceptance
  • respect
  • reputation
  • status
  • power
  • intimacy
  • love
  • friendship
  • kinship
  • sociability
  • conviviality

We observe that some of the first items are readily identifiable as being aspects, but items further down the list, such as love and friendship, really stretch the meaning; it is more natural to say that both love and friendship are characterised by high regard and many other aspects of mutual interaction. Also, we assert that interaction is not likely to be wholly driven by the grant and pursuit of regard.

We may say, rather, that there arises the grant and pursuit of regard, whether or not they are actively pursued, within interaction, particularly interaction in or through status, love, or friendship as encapsulated in the term kalyanamittata described above. There is no desire for regard intimated in such conduct, but regard would arise from such actions. As the conduct covers activities in general, they include economic transactions, and thus contradict Adam Smith’s ‘The Theory of Moral Sentiments’ in which he claims the purpose of economic activity is the acquisition of regard4.

Whilst Smith’s fundamental views are questionable, his work is useful impetus for considering aspects relating to transaction. Offer touches on various anthropological aspects: regard needs to be communicated; the gift embodies the communication, carries the signal. This suggests that SNS may take account of the terms used in communication, to register a factor of regard that acknowledges this positive contribution to relationships. This would be amenable to semantic text analysis for which there are well-established techniques and tools.

Offer goes on to assert that “self-regard is difficult to sustain without external confirmation.” Once again, a spiritual view may be quite different: self-regard can be heightened without any external contact through prayer and meditation as expressed by the Buddha after his Enlightenment in which he declared his total assurance in attaining full final release – this is internal confirmation and assurance. One doesn’t need to be a Buddha to develop increased confidence through such methods and find a natural ability to sustain the regard it engenders.

Forms of gift

n analysing forms of gift at the personal level, we again find greater nuance than in purely material characteristic of impersonal transactions. Offer writes that gifts are personalised; if there is no regard, then a bribe is implied; giving gives rise to obligation, i.e. a debt, a burden, in the form of a bond on the recipient and this can be a driver for a repeated exchange of regard. Offer’s use of“bond” sounds like a loss of freedom; this is not necessarily the case, particularly if the giving is unconditional.

Personal gifts may be substantive or symbolic and they may have various costs (time, attention etc.). One observation that is particularly pertinent in the online world is that attention is a scarce resource5. It depends on consciousness, time and energy, where Offer observes (p.79): “the counterparty cannot trade this regard with anyone else”.

Related to this, Offer claims (p. 80) that money is not used directly in gift cultures – so the notes are not to be exposed, hence the Chinese custom of using red envelopes. However, it may be argued instead that the red signals a cash reward and indeed end of year cash bonuses are traditionally issued in them; an envelope in an auspicious colour might merely indicate special value to this cash. Disguise of money may be cultural (or at least depends on context): in Thailand there is the popular tradition of money trees at temples; money is shown openly so everyone can rejoice in each other’s punnya (merit) and increase the merit. This case illustrates how merit might not be fixed nor confined to an individual, but expands as it is shared. Furthermore, such a view avoids the negative tinges of ‘debt’ or ‘burden’.

Such observations demonstrate how the capacity for regard is innate though the forms may be culturally specific (pp. 81-2).

Modelling Gift Exchange

If we could model completely gift exchange and all its consequences, then we could gain a deep insight into relationships. Turned the other way around, if we had a sufficiently deep understanding of relationships, we might seek predictive models. However, this is not easy to do and Offer states by way of explanation that there’s no unique equilibrium since human responses are complex and not always predictable6. Offer alludes to findings in Game Theory, which is a multi-disciplinary subject that draws on economics, psychology and mathematics, to determine strategies in any situation in which there are competing interests. It treats as special cases the scenario where communication and cooperation are allowable.

Offer lists a number of features as follows (p.83):

  1. voluntary transfer
  2. expectation of reciprocity
  3. reciprocity is notionally open to discretion as to value and time
  4. is motivated by a desire for regard, over and above any gains from trade.
  5. regard communicated by gift
  6. personalised gift authenticates regard
  7. hence avoidance of money. Gift is unpriced, often cannot be priced
  8. establishes repetitive, self-enforcing bond, which facilitates trade.
    [a compelling aspect for the design?]

The above list is generally coherent and we can use it in the design of Sigala to recognise and encourage such activities, perhaps assigning some valuation for them.

However, we would offer different views for some aspects. Motivation is key and from a Buddhist perspective the desire for regard indicates action based on tanha, craving, which, as already indicated, may not necessarily be the case. This means that a transaction might not be deemed incomplete if it appears from a material perspective to be one-sided.

We now proceed to consider various kinds of relationships as discussed by Offer using Sigala’s multidimensional model. Regard manifests differently according to the kind of relationship, so we are able to take the lists provided by Offer with its many aspects and successively apply the model in the context of a particular direction.

Family and Household

Especially relevant to Sigala’s support for kinship relationships is Offer’s treatment of families and households. Offer describes the changing resource allocation and power relations: in pre-industrial periods, personal transactions were normal in the collection of tithes; inequalities arose, yet at the same time surplus created that could be later distributed in times of need. However, as the scale of economic activity increased, this has become impersonal as tithes have been replaced by taxes.

Within the tithes setting there was the factor of obligation (p.84): the sense of kinship was strong so that proceeds and earnings were shared with the extended family. Two kinds of bonds were especially strong inholding the family together: between spouses and between generations. This has a direct bearing on the modelling the relationship types, and affirms the identification of the parent-child relationship dimension and the spouse relation, as introduced above.

The consideration of families highlights non-monetary values and the significance of strong social ties. Children (p.87) from a monetary perspective require large economic investment, but their affective value is “emotionally priceless”. Furthermore, the well-being of children is deeply affected by the quality of parental relationships: breakdown in marriage [strong social ties] correlates strongly with behavioural, educational and emotional disorders in children.7 Seen in this light, SNS should be mindful of how they affect the relationships – they should support their deepening, which for families means among other things encouraging face to face contact. The system can achieve this by appropriate reminders of birthdays, holidays and through its general guidelines.

Offer echoes the sentiment that children cannot ordinarily repay the kindness of their parents by pointing out that, for instance, the costs of care for the old is asymmetric financially compared with the costs of childbirth and bringing up a child8. He goes on to observe that “obligations arose and were discharged in a complex web of personal reciprocity, in which intensity of kinship was only one factor, and less important than previous interactions” (pp. 88-89). This suggests that in the design of online SNS, the history of interactions should be used to help model the quality and depth of relationships9.

Labour Market [giving at work]

In considering relationships with work colleagues and associates Offer identifies as further factors the intensity and quality of effort. These are difficult to observe, about which Offer remarks that “they are to that extent discretionary, and need not be acknowledged reciprocally”. Yet they are not without significance as there is motivation behind them and some perception of benefit. This also is a factor in training; the first works may be few and require a great deal of effort, but that experience may lead to greater productivity and efficiency in future. They are also relevant in Weber’s thesis on the Protestant ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism where the aspiration to reach heaven is expressed by putting effort into good deeds. Similarly, these subtleties are accounted for in the concept of punnya where the amount of punnya correlates to quality and quantity of effort – the two factors recognising the means of the wealthy and the sacrifice of the widow’s mite.

Offer highlight’s the efficacy of small groups, which is widely recognised, particularly by large companies that encourage teamwork. Most SNS designs certainly support this, though the optimal online balance in terms of form and functionality has proved a significant challenge. There are many livelihoods that have remained small-scale: for instance, the mainly family-run businesses and small communities in agriculture. Such small-scale operations offer much scope for the economy of regard.

Whether offline or online, we would echo Offer’s statement that “in face-to-face settings, the economy of regard kicks in.”

Professional Academic Context

Entering the academic context (Offer’s own professional context, page 90), there are two kinds of relationships for professionals:

  1. peer
  2. teacher-student

Offer relates that the peer relationships sustain honesty in tenure, allowing the contract to have minimal obligation. On the other hand, the teacher-student relationship has a major obligation, so “the conflicting demands of these two bonds are often difficult to resolve.” For Sigala, this endorses the basic structure of relationships expressed in the 3D relationship model, but also suggests adding some granularity to the ‘associates’ direction.

Offer makes the telling statement that “a great deal of evidence (both experimental and historical) has accumulated to show that money crowds out virtue.” What Offer has in mind here is how financial imperatives may have a negative impact on the process of peer approval. This prompts reflection of how monetisation may affect SNS. Receiving payments for making certain contributions generally seems reasonable, but what about paying to make contributions more prominent? Great care is needed to properly evaluate what happens to virtue when people’s comments or conversations become monetised.

We continue on the subject of payments, by discussing … the business of selling.

Notes 

1 Also unilateral transactions are possible whilst still having an element of regard in terms of hopes and aspirations (e.g. bequests for future generations, but especially merit making for the deceased).

2 Compare this with the Buddhist notion of kamma-vipaka, which may be regarded both as very personal as it is rooted in intentional actions of the individual (kamma) and impersonal in that the vipaka (fruits arising from these actions) operate according to natural laws.

3 These are all subjective (and thus may be compared and contrasted with the economy of esteem, which is impersonal).

4 Such a narrow purpose might seem, especially to a Buddhist, to be one that is rooted in craving and thus inimical to friendship.

5 Sharon Gifford, Allocation of Entrepreneurial Attention, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Volume 19, Issue 3, December 1992, Pages 265–284.

6 It is inherently more challenge than developing climate models.

7 Offer attributes these disorders largely to bad parenting. We may observe further a self-perpetuating downward cycle in that the process of a marriage breakdown itself may naturally impair parenting. Among the parents itself, communication breakdown and subsequent separation disrupts the reciprocal exchanges (in joint participation) needed to sustain regard.

8 And the disparity in non-monetary considerations is arguably greater still.

9 Continuing the Buddhist analysis, this observation is evocative of Dependent Origination.