The Business of Cooperation: Efficiency in a Dutch Alternative Currency Enterprise

Abstract

This article explores how efficiency—a seemingly universal economic narrative—traverses through the realm of diverse economies via the efforts of Qoin, a Dutch social enterprise specialised in designing alternative currencies. Such currencies in North-West Europe are, by and large, professionally designed and instituted via cross-sectoral partnerships of private enterprises, public sector organisations, and municipalities. Hence for these alternative currency practitioners, corporate standards have become the backbone whereupon ideals, expectations, and visions of society are articulated. This article focusses specifically on efficiency; although central to neoliberal capitalism, the notion is rarely critically examined in anthropology. The ethnography of Qoin’s alternative currency provides an instance of how the work of economic alterity becomes entwined with, yet not necessarily co-opted by, logics of market efficiency. What emerges is a different ontology of efficiency: rather than being predicated on values of competition, the social efficiency Qoin aims for means cooperation on various levels.