The Handbook of Diverse Economies

Abstract

This intriguing handbook is based on scholarly cooperation in the Community Economies Research Network (CERN, almost three hundred members) and thus the fruit of a long-standing engagement with the various articulations of alternative economies in many parts of the world. Overall, sixty-eight authors contributed to the fifty-eight chapters, mirroring not only the thematic variegation but also the international multiplicity of today’s diverse economies scholarship, originating from all continents and ranging from university scholars over community activists to different kinds of practitioners. The admitted predominance of Australasian-based contributors appears only natural given that the diverse economies scholarship emanated from J. K. Gibson-Graham’s pioneering work since the end of the 1990s, leading to its current hubs around the coeditors’ home institutions, that is, the Western Sydney University, Australia, and the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. The handbook is clearly structured into seven parts, five of which are topical and two transversal. The latter include a section on methodological perspectives and specific challenges of diverse economies research as well as a similarly intriguing section that clarifies and conceptualizes the notion of subjectivity in more-thancapitalist economic practices. The topical parts take a sectoral though integrative look at possible thematic perspectives on diverse economies: enterprise, labor, transactions, property, finance. All parts start with a framing essay, elegantly synthesizing the conceptual underpinnings of diverse economies research and practice in the given realm. These essays themselves can both be read as stand-alone conceptual papers building on the state of the art and suggesting research agendas, and can be understood as an introduction into the subsequent contributions dealing with subsectors or with regional case studies. The section on labor, for example, is introduced by a compelling deconstruction of waged labor that seeks to “unravel the fullest set of possibilities for how work is constructed” (p. 126). The framing essay is followed by empirical insights into precarious labor in Russia, informal and unpaid labor in UK households, feminist economic activism related to paid and unpaid labor, care work, informal mining labor around Manila, and migrant women’s labor in Ghana. The section also comprises an inspiring chapter on nonhuman labor, that is, the diverse contributions of Earth Others to planetary livelihood, pleading for overcoming a human-focused perspective on nature, and thus making a clear distinction compared to the notion of ecosystem services. Another section of particular interest for economic geographers is the one on the enterprise. The framing essay opens the reader’s eyes for a look beyond the formal corporation and its market transactions, and hence challenges the capitalocentric framings of many strong theories in economic geography research. The essay deliberately includes various kinds of cooperatives, community economies, and other alternative and hybrid organizations, and it scrutinizes the wider conditions of existence for the enterprise, suggesting a relational ontology that “helps to break down the idea of an enterprise as a single bound unit” (p. 35). The subsequent chapters of this section deal BO O K R EV EW