Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T13:56:11.204Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Defining the gift

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2019

Dave Elder-Vass Open the ORCID record for Dave Elder-Vass [Opens in a new window]
Dave Elder-Vass*
Affiliation:
Loughborough University
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Economics has tended to neglect giving, and thus both its important contemporary economic role and its potential contribution to alternative, non-market systems. To remedy this, it will need to draw on the broad debates on the nature of the gift that have developed in and across the other social sciences. This paper addresses several of these by asking how we should define the terms gift and giving. It rejects definitional associations of giving with obligation, reciprocity and the development of social relationships. Such definitions exclude many phenomena commonly understood as giving and underpin misguided attempts to analyse gifts in contemporary late-modern societies in terms derived from anthropological discussions of very different societies. Instead, the paper develops a definition of the gift based on contemporary giving institutions. A more open, contemporary definition of the gift helps to sensitise us to the continuing importance of gift institutions in social and economic life.

Keywords

GivinggiftsMaussdefinitionreciprocity
Type
Symposium on Institutional Analysis and the Gift
Information
Journal of Institutional Economics , Volume 16 , Issue 5 , October 2020 , pp. 675 - 685
Copyright
Copyright © Millennium Economics Ltd 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adloff, F. and Mau, S. (2006), ‘Giving, Social Ties, Reciprocity in Modern Society’, European Journal of Sociology, 47: 93–123.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barnett, J. M. (2018), ‘The Costs of Free: Commoditization, Bundling and Concentration’, Journal of Institutional Economics, 14(6): 1097–1120, available at https://doi.org/10.1017/S1744137418000012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benkler, Y. (2006), The Wealth of Networks. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Benkler, Y. (2013), ‘Practical Anarchism’, Politics and Society, 41: 213–251.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boulding, K. E. (1973), The Economy of Love and Fear, Belmont CA: Wadsworth.Google Scholar
Caillé, A. (2000), ‘Gift and Association’, in Vandevelde, A. (Ed.), Gifts and Interests, Leuven: Peeters, pp. 47–55.Google Scholar
Carrier, J. (1995), Gifts and Commodities, London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Cheal, D. J. (1988), The Gift Economy, London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Danby, C. (2002), ‘The Curse of the Modern: A Post-Keynesian Critique of the Gift/Exchange Dichotomy’. Research in Economic Anthropology, 21, 13–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Donati, P. (2003), ‘Giving and Social Relations’, International Review of Sociology, 13: 243–272.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Douglas, M. (2002), ‘Foreword: No Free Gifts’, in Mauss, M., The Gift, London: Routledge, pp. ix–xxiii.Google Scholar
Elder-Vass, D. (2014a), ‘Commerce, Community and Digital Gifts’, in Garnett, R. F., Lewis, P. and Ealy, L. (eds), Commerce and Community: Ecologies of Social Cooperation, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 236–252.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elder-Vass, D. (2014b), ‘Giving and Social Transformation’, Journal of Critical Realism, 13: 261–285.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elder-Vass, D. (2015), ‘Free Gifts and Positional Gifts: Beyond Exchangism’, European Journal of Social Theory, 18: 451–468.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elder-Vass, D. (2016), Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fine, B. (2002), The World of Consumption: The Material and Cultural Revisited (2nd edn), London; New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gerring, J. (1999), ‘What Makes a Concept Good? A Criterial Framework for Understanding Concept Formation in the Social Sciences’, Polity, 31: 357–393.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gerring, J. and Barresi, P. A. (2009), Culture: Joining Minimal Definitions and Ideal Types’, in Collier, D. and Gerring, J. (eds), Concepts and Method in Social Science: The Tradition of Giovanni Sartori, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 241–268.Google Scholar
Gibson-Graham, J. K. (2006), The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Giesler, M. (2006), ‘Consumer Gift Systems’, Journal of Consumer Research, 33: 283–290, available at https://doi.org/10.1086/506309.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Godbout, J. (2000), ‘Homo Donator versus Homo Oeconomicus’. in Vandevelde, A. (Ed.), Gifts and Interests, Leuven: Peeters, pp. 23–46.Google Scholar
Godbout, J. and Caillé, A. (1998), The World of the Gift, Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.Google Scholar
Graeber, D. (2011), Debt: The First 5,000 Years, New York: Melville House.Google Scholar
Gregory, C. A. (1997), Savage Money: The Anthropology and Politics of Commodity Exchange, Newark NJ: Harwood Academic.Google Scholar
Gruchy, A. G. (1987), The Reconstruction of Economics, Westport CT: Greenwood Press.Google Scholar
Gudeman, S. (2001), ‘Postmodern Gifts’, in Cullenberg, S., Amariglio, J. and Ruccio, D. F. (eds), Postmodernism, Economics and Knowledge, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 459–474.Google Scholar
Gupta, A. (2014), Definitions, available at http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/definitions/ (accessed 10 June 2019).Google Scholar
Healy, K. (2006), Last Best Gifts, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hodgson, G. M. (2006), ‘What Are Institutions?’ Journal of Economic Issues, 40: 1–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hodgson, G. M. (2015), ‘Much of the “Economics of Property Rights” Devalues Property and Legal Rights’, Journal of Institutional Economics, 11: 683–709, available at https://doi.org/10.1017/S1744137414000630.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hodgson, G. M. (2019), ‘Taxonomic Definitions in Social Science, with Firms, Markets and Institutions as Case Studies’, Journal of Institutional Economics, 15: 207–233, available at https://doi.org/10.1017/S1744137418000334.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hyde, L. (2013), The Gift. Edinburgh: Canongate.Google Scholar
Laidlaw, J. (2002), ‘A Free Gift Makes No Friends’, in Osteen, M. (Ed.), The Question of the Gift, Abingdon: Routledge, (pp. 45–66).Google Scholar
Lainer-Vos, D. (2013), Sinews of the Nation, Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar
Lerner, J. and Tirole, J. (2002), ‘Some Simple Economics of Open Source’, Journal of Industrial Economics, 50: 197–234.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martelaere, A. d. (2000), ‘Personal Obligations in Personal Relations’, in Vandevelde, A. (Ed.), Gifts and Interests, Leuven: Peeters, pp. 209–225.Google Scholar
Mauss, M. (2002), The Gift, Halls, W. D. (Translator), London: Routledge.Google Scholar
McClain, N. and Mears, A. (2012), ‘Free to Those Who Can Afford It’, Poetics, 40: 133–149.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mirowski, P. (2001), ‘Refusing the Gift’, in Cullenberg, S., Amariglio, J. and Ruccio, D. F. (eds), Postmodernism, Economics and Knowledge, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 431–458.Google Scholar
Moody, M. (2008), ‘Serial Reciprocity: A Preliminary Statement’, Sociological Theory, 26: 130–151, available at https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9558.2008.00322.x.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nelson, J. A. (1993), ‘The Study of Choice or the Study of Provisioning? Gender and the Definition of Economics’, in Ferber, M. A. and Nelson, J. A. (eds), Beyond Economic Man, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 23–36.Google Scholar
Oxford University Press (1996), Oxford Compact English Dictionary (Thompson, D., ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Parry, J. (1986), ‘The Gift, the Indian Gift and the “Indian Gift”’, Man, 21: 453–473.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Power, M. (2004), ‘Social Provisioning as a Starting Point for Feminist Economics’, Feminist Economics, 10: 3–19, available at https://doi.org/10.1080/1354570042000267608.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Riggs, F. (1993), ‘Social Science Terminology: Basic Problems and Proposed Solutions’, in Sonneveld, H. B. and Loening, K. L. (eds), Terminology: Applications in Interdisciplinary Communication, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Sahlins, M. (1974), Stone Age Economics, London: Tavistock.Google Scholar
Sayer, A. (2004), Moral Economy, available at https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/resources/sociology-online-papers/papers/sayer-moral-economy-political-economy.pdf (accessed 10 June 2019).Google Scholar
Silber, I. (1998), ‘Modern Philanthropy: Reassessing the Viability of a Maussian Perspective’, in James, W. and Allen, N. J. (eds), Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute, New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 134–150.Google Scholar
Testart, A. (1998), ‘Uncertainties of the “Obligation to Reciprocate”: A Critique of Mauss’, in James, W. and Allen, N. J. (eds), Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute, New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 97–110.Google Scholar
Titmuss, R. (1997), The Gift Relationship, New York: The New Press.Google Scholar
Waldfogel, J. (1993), ‘The Deadweight Loss of Christmas’, American Economic Review, 83: 1328–1336.Google Scholar
Zelizer, V. A. (1996), ‘Payments and Social Ties’, Sociological Forum, 11: 481–495.CrossRefGoogle Scholar