These nonmonetized labors represent an important part of the economy, and may constitute half of the work done in the United States.
[1] Collective efficacy refers to the effectiveness of informal mechanisms by which residents themselves achieve public order.
These informal mechanisms are what Cahn calls social capital, a public good provided by citizens who participate to build up their communities (from raising children and taking care of the elderly to volunteer work).
This model reduces or eliminates the involuntary dependence that comes with the market economy's strict division of labor.
It also focuses on alternative distribution mechanisms to pricing, using instead normative considerations like need, fairness, altruism, moral obligation, or contribution.
[1] Collective efficacy and social capital are central to two very successful examples of civic-based, non-monetary economies: time banks and local exchange trading systems (LETS).
[3] These are things that family or friends might normally do for each other, but in the absence of supportive reciprocal networks, the time bank recreates those connections.
[6] More than a decade later, household work continues to provide a key source of foundational support to the domestic economy.
There may be a closed household economy, where a specific (perhaps familial) group of individuals benefits from the work performed.
Food, clothing, toiletries, and basic necessities were often shared or exchanged amongst war-torn, impoverished families in East Europe post-communism.
Nurturing can take two forms, in terms of raising children and nursing the sick, elderly, and infirm, both still usually expected from women and girls.
Acknowledging a non-monetary economy may change the ways in which the unemployed, poor, women, and other stigmatized persons’ work is valued.
[15] This concerns individuals who agree with a participant of the monetary economy to exchange goods or services (reciprocation) or to receive them without any obligation (genuine gift.)
Examples of individuals: This is a case of mutualism (see macroeconomies below) embedded in the monetary economy and restricted to intellectual labor.
Typical examples are posting questions and answers on an internet forum, the production of open-source software, and the development of articles on Wikipedia.
Categories of such contributions are Commons-based peer production, Open source, Creative Commons license, and so on.
The UK in particular has been targeted by the government since the New Labor administration of the mid-1990s onwards—the social economy has been developed as a means of delivering effective public services, and mobilizing active citizenship.
[3] However, by and large current policy does not reflect the implications of a system that does not validate actions that transmit community values, provide support, generates consensus, etc.
These actions in the past were subsidized by cheap or free labor derived from subordinate groups, like women and ethnic or racial minorities, who as a result of entering the workforce to receive monetary validation negate these positive public goods.
An exchange platform that is designed for use of the broader community, and not specifically for a charitable class, may not be considered a tax-exempt activity for a 501(c)(3) organization.