This article explores the potential for Community and Complementary Currency (CC) use to enhance human aspects of economic exchange. As far back as Aristotle, social thinkers have expressed concern that the pursuit of profit for its own sake leads to the dehumanization of those participating in economic relations, a concern which was echoed in the work of foundational thinkers in the modern Social Sciences, for example Karl Marx and Max Weber. This article probes the scope of CC use to alleviate such dehumanization, situated within this broader social context of contemporary global Capitalism. Beginning with a review of the types of CCs, this paper considers the objectives and goals of CCs worldwide. Indeed, there is room for optimism that CCs may ease negative aspects of traditional financial exchange by serving those on the fringes of and/or excluded from formal economies, and without necessarily competing with public or private traditional banking institutions. The paper concludes with reflections on the key aspects of CCs aiding their successful implementation and sustainable use. Although this paper is conceptual in nature, it offers a meta-analysis from many case studies of CCs, and suggests that CCs can be an effective tool for lessening some of the harmful impacts of the dominant economic relations found in today’s globalized world.
This paper provides a bibliometric analysis of the digital sustainability literature from four angles: economics, management/business, information systems/IT, and sociology/communication. The core contribution is to map the development of the literature in digital sustainability over time and across various clusters. Through VOSviewer analysis, we identify the main keywords used by the literature; the countries from which most of the literature is emerging; the most influential authors working in the field; and, their impacts by observing their citations and networks. Moreover, through CitNetExplorer analysis, we track the development of the field over time, i.e., identify key publications and divide those into clusters. The analysis finds a much more developed coverage of digital sustainability in the scholarship of management/business and therefore reveals a clear need for greater exploration of the sociological and economic aspects of digital sustainability. We argue that more robust collaboration patterns should be established among all four considered disciplines to achieve progress in digital sustainability. We envisage that digital sustainability as a field of study will mature as publications and ideas will become consolidated. Such integration strengthens the evolution of the field and topics across all four considered disciplines.
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