In recent decades managerial discourse and actual business practice has paid increasing attention to
ethics. What was chiefly an academic discussion about business ethics has grown into a virtual
'ethics industry' (Hyatt, 2005), and has been supplanted by a growing focus on corporate social
responsibility and a booming consumer demand for ethical or 'fair' goods. Critical observers, myself
included, have tended to dismiss this focus on ethics as little more than a cynical response to the
new demands put forth by a more networked and better informed public opinion. Together with the
managerial promotion of ideals like 'creativity' or 'self-actualization', such 'ethics-talk' has been read
as part of a New Spirit of Capitalism, in which the critique put forth by the social movements of the
Sixties and Seventies has been incorporated and transformed into a new way of legitimizing the
same old forms of exploitation and capital accumulation (Boltanski & Chiapello, 1999). In this
short piece I would like to try out a different approach. I will suggest, quite provocatively, that the
managerial focus on ethics is more than just a cynical move. Nor is it merely a matter of
benevolence. Rather, it reflects an important structural transformation within the information
society: the growth of a number of strategically central, albeit quantitatively marginal productive
practices: all working according to a logic where value is related to the quality of social relations,
and not to the quantity of productive time, or as Marxists would say, socially necessary labor time.
These diverse practices, which I collectively refer to as 'the ethical economy', are located within the
boundaries of the corporate world, as in the case of new forms of knowledge work. But they also
transpire outside of, or even in opposition to corporate capitalism, as in the case of more purist
forms of Free Software. These processes are generally located at the top end of contemporary value
chains and they have all to do with the production or manipulation of information and affect, like
experiences, events and brand image. As such they have all been significantly empowered by the
spread of networked information and communication technologies. The traversal nature of this
ethical economy means that it is likely that its further growth and consolidation will quite radically
redraw the boundaries of capitalist economy and redefine the field of conflict and compromise on
which it evolves. (This is already visible in intensifying struggles over intellectual property and the
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emergence of powerful hybrid forms like the social entrepreneurship movement, cf. Boyle, 2008.)
The fact that the ethical economy is closely linked to information technology, or, more precisely,
that it emerges out of the extended forms of cooperation that these technologies enable, implies that
the ethical economy is likely to be central to the emerging economic ecology of the information
society. The ethical economy might even become hegemonic to that ecology. Will value in the
information society be conceived of as organized around ethics, just as it was conceived of as
organized around labor in industrial society? That would amount to nothing less than a mutation in
the socially dominant value form, a rare and radical kind of social transformation which has,
nevertheless, occurred before (as when 'labor' and 'self-interest' emerged as central forms of value
and motivation out of the tumultuous transformations of the European 17th century (Hirschman,
1977, Linebaugh & Rediker, 2000)