Moral Money? LETS and the Social Construction of Local Economic Geographies in Southeast England

Abstract

Local exchange employment and trading systems (LETS) have spread rapidly throughout the United Kingdom during the 1990s. Like all economic geographies, they are socially constructed and are more than a simple response to social exclusion. The economic activity generated by and conducted through LETS is based upon direct forms of social relations and a local currency which facilitate locally defined systems of value formation and distinctive moral economic geographies. Nevertheless, LETS take on some of the class and gender characteristics of the wider economy. Furthermore, the ways in which LETS are represented—not least in the media—may serve to stereotype them as exclusionary and marginal to the needs of those most in need and so to distance them from those excluded from the formal economy.