Beyond Longevity, A life-cycle approach to time banks

Abstract

Over the past couple of decades, scholars and activists have devoted considerable energy to envisioning and enacting alternatives to capitalism through various micro-initiatives. In addition to being small, many of these initiatives are relatively short-lived, leading critics to consider them failures. This article challenges the association of success with scale and longevity. We focus on time banks, a form of community currency organized around labor-time as the unit of exchange. While time banks have been shown to have myriad benefits for communities, very little attention has been paid to how benefits and challenges vary as time banks evolve. Rather than treating time banks as static institutions, we approach them dynamically, as entities that undergo different stages of development with evolving impacts throughout their lifespans. Drawing on over six years of qualitative research on US time banks, we model what we call a Time-Bank Life Cycle. Examining time banks through a life-cycle lens enables us to disassociate success from longevity while garnering a fuller understanding of the variety of challenges time banks face and the range of material, social, and ideological impacts they may have over the course of their lives.