Beyond Profit-Motivated Exchange

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Abstract
The aim of this paper is to evaluate critically whether under a market system, monetary exchange is always and everywhere based on profit-seeking behaviour. To do this, the paper examines paid informal work, a form of work conventionally conceptualized as low-paid employment heavily imbued with profit motivations on the part of both the consumer and supplier. Using structured interviews with 400 households in UK lower-income urban neighbourhoods, however, this paper shows that most paid informal exchange is seldom undertaken by either purchasers or suppliers to achieve maximum money gains. Instead, it is mostly conducted for and by close social relations for reasons associated with redistribution and sociality. In line with recent developments in economic geography associated with the ‘cultural turn/s’, therefore, this paper points not only to the social-embeddedness of paid informal exchange but also to how, at least in these UK lower-income neighbourhoods, the increasing penetration of monetary exchange has not marched hand-in-hand with market relations. In this extensive and growing sphere of monetary exchange, the profit motive is largely absent. Consequently, rather than construing paid informal work as the ultimate manifestation of unbridled profit-motivated capitalism, this paper instead shows such work to be a large alternative economic space within contemporary capitalism where monetary exchange is embedded in alternative social relations, motivations and pricing mechanisms.

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