A New European Socioeconomic Perspective

Résumé :

Over the past few decades a new associationism and cooperativism

perspective that takes on a broader, civil-society and solidarity-based view of the economy has developed in France. This perspective resonates with the

long tradition of ‘‘reform-economics’’ that France is known for and expresses

an understanding of economic relationships as embedded in non-market and

non-monetary social relationships. Such broadly understood conceptions of

economic activity defy narrow definitions of profit orientation, production

and distribution. Economic activity motives include social and political ones

that link ‘civil entrepreneurs’ in solidarity networks to service recipients and other stakeholders. One of the functional foundations of this new

interdependent notion of the economy is the growing ‘tertiarization’ of

economic activities, that is the ‘‘intensification of social interactions within productive systems’’ (Perret and Roustang 1993: 59 – 60). While the market economy is dependent on the non-monetary economy, the tertiarisation of production activities accentuates the interdependence between the market

economy and non-market economies.

This article seeks to analyze the links between the re-emergence of a civil and solidarity-based economy to the evolution of new forms of public

commitment and the changing structures of productive activities in France. It

further argues for a theoretical perspective that provides an analytical

framework for a more comprehensive approach to the empirical complexity

of social economic considerations consisting of three economic spheres:

the for-profit economy, the public sector economy and the generally locally

based non-monetary reciprocity based economy. Given its ability to link

these three poles the civil and solidarity-based economy can revitalize social and political link and consolidate the social fabric while at the same time creating jobs. Yet despite this potential, its mission cannot be to the problems of unemployment and other failures of the market economy. It is instead to facilitate relationships between paid and volunteer work in a

context that makes users, workers and volunteers the participants in collectively designed services and economic relationships.