Between decommodification and recommodification : negotiations of value in open-source cultural production

The authors of this paper revitalize classic work on gift economies, exploring the ways in which the fiscal and moral economies are articulated together in commons-based production. Through a multi-sited ethnographic study of open source animation film-making communities tracing the movement between actors and objects across different regimes of value, the authors describe negotiated transitions from commons to commodity and back again. They argue that when engaging with producers’ own accounts of their community-based processes and the agonistic ethics holding sway there, we are better able to see the fluid dynamics of decommodification and recommodification taking place within commons production integrated into the commodity-based capitalist economic environment.The theme for the conference was “Digital Imaginaries”.