Building a local currency: elaborating, maintaining, and redirecting values through tensions

By documenting the lifecycle of a French local currency project, we explore the elaboration, maintenance, and rearrangement of values and the role played by tensions in such a process. We draw from a rich, 18-month ethnographic investigation that involved over 400 h of direct participant observation, conducting 23 formal interviews, attending dozens of meetings and events, and collecting emails and online exchanges on the server of the project. Through temporal bracketing, we identified three temporal phases in the development of the local currency: (i) Articulating and sketching out a value-driven organization (May 2013–November 2015); (ii) Framing values through tensions: Two visions at play (December 2015–May 2016); and (iii) Balancing out means and ends: Putting values to the test (June 2016–September 2018). We characterize three forms of values work – <i>Positioning</i>, <i>Convincing</i>, and <i>Rearranging </i>– associated with each of these phases. By examininng how each of this call upon various resources and techniques and are performed by various actors, we show how tensions act as catalysts for values work.