The grammar of money: a discursive institutional analysis of money in light of the practice of complementary currencies

Adopting the notion of Norman Fairclough’s progression from a negative critique of structures to a positive critique of change strategies (Fairclough 2010, p. 14), the analysis of our financial system and economies must not fail to recognise the novel approaches and prototyping practices of complementary currencies and monetary reform. These novel and extremely diverse practices, ranging from political campaigns for full-reserve banking to local currencies, timebanks, business-barter systems and so called crypto-currencies, highlight a blatant conceptual under-determination of money in legal, regulatory and economist discourses (Costa & Gauvin McNeill 2015; Ingham 1996). While there are no coherent theoretic frameworks to understand all kinds of complementary currencies and “money as we know it” (Blanc 2011), the lack of a clear touchstone definition of conventional money impedes the recognition of new forms of monetary innovations and the developmental pathways for monetary reform (Bendell et al. 2015) and systemic financial sustainability (Lietaer et al. 2012). This PhD research projects aims to pinpoint the conceptual discrepancies of monetary conceptualizations in the discourse of financial regulators and central banks when compared to that of complementary currency practices and thus elucidate policy options to improve the recognition and impact of community currencies and other monetary reform initiatives. It aims to critically analysis money, including the practices of complementary currencies, as discoursive institutions (Schmidt 2010) according to their constituent rules, norms and customs in an application of the“grammar of institutions” proposed by Crawford and Ostrom (Crawford & Ostrom 1995)