The “One Team” defined as a gift economy

@Vaguery tweeted:

Someday I would like to explore who “we” is. The company, the team, or the people on it. Saying “all of those” is glib.

Item: a gift economy is one characterized by people giving other people things without knowing or caring when (or perhaps even if) they’ll get something in return, and without assuming that their gifts to person X will eventually balance out with X’s gifts to them. (In the egalitarian portions of society, the closest assumption is that their gifts to All of Us will balance out with the gifts they get from All of Us.)

Item: pre-money economies were primarily gift economies. They were not, as I was taught, barter economies. Barter economies have the same “books must balance” concerns as money economies—they’re just less efficient. Like money economies, barter economies are, uh, instrumental. What matters is the transaction, not the counterparty. That is, when I buy a candy bar from a convenience store clerk, I don’t need a personal relationship with him, nor does the exchange of coins for candy create one—any more than putting those coins in a vending machine would establish a personal relationship with it. In contrast, gift economies are both about moving goods around and also about managing (creating, maintaining) the personal relationships that make up a “We”.

Item: Gift economies still exist alongside money economies. I helped my neighbor with his bike brakes a while back. Did I add that to an “aid to/from the family directly to my east” account? No. If our lawn mower broke, I do expect that Dawn could borrow theirs while ours is being fixed. But it’s absurd to think that I would wonder whether whether he’d now repaid his debt exactly, or if I owed him more help now, or if he still owed me. Only a University of Chicago or GMU economist would think that way, not a normal person.

Item: Teams of people in a workplace typically have a gift economy going on. I’ll go further than that. I’ll define a team—who “We” are—as a group of people who are knit together through a gift economy, particularly the exchange of favors (asked for or unasked for).

Example: Many Agile teams have “refactoring sprints” or the equivalent, where the Product Owner explicitly gives the team time to deal with accumulated mistakes and uglinesses. While (especially the first time) there might be hand-waving about how this cleanup will pay for itself eventually by allowing faster change etc etc blah blah blah, no one keeps any books that are eventually expected to balance. I characterize this as a gift from the Product Owner, who is one of “Us”. He gives this gift because he knows the rest of “Us” will go out of their way to help him someday, probably someday soon.

Example: In a comment on this blog, Daniel Hinz wrote:

The question that keeps getting asked is what value does the customer get from paying back this technical debt? What value does the customer get from simplifying this design? What value does the customer get from cleaning this code? The answer is almost universally none. So, the [product owner] keeps pulling those activities out of the backlog because these are all internal codebase issues, the customer does not see it or realize value from it, at least not directly.

This product owner sees no reason to make a gift to the team, only a transaction that trades quantifiable-ish value for quantifiable cost. He has only weak social ties to the team. He is not part of “Us”.

Conclusion: The people on the team are those who do favors for others on the team for no good, sound, logical, defensible reason.

Disclaimer: I’ve just begun serious reading on gift economies. More research is needed.

7 Responses to “The “One Team” defined as a gift economy”

  1. jeremy6d Says:

    I took an economic anthropology course that centered around the study of gift economies such as the Tlingit (potlatches and all that). It really was more important than any other single lesson in changing the kind of libertarian I was, because suddenly markets weren’t the only hope for peaceful allocation of resources.

    One interesting thing from these gift societies was the way in which they governed the social hierarchy. True, the exchanges were not expected to clear or balance the books. But they were not forgotten; they simply redounded to one’s status. The prestige associated with giving more than one received was the foundation of status within the tribe. This reinforced a social taboo around just taking, never giving that a market economy cannot really approach.

    This is perhaps applicable to your agile team comparison, where people who give more help than they get are more highly regarded and valued in the team.

  2. tomm Says:

    I’ve been thinking a bit on this, and two things occur to me:

    1. Most cultures that I can think of with some sort of gift economy have a higher barrier to entry; perhaps a rite of passage or something similar. I’ll spare everyone the examples, but inclusion in the system, if left to an invisible hand function, will probably come to something similar.
    2. Similarly, gift economies typically haven’t had a fluid system for members coming and going. A gift economy would then have to come to handle our industry’s relatively high attrition rates, which could dilute its potency.

  3. This Blog Needs No Name | May | 2011 Says:

    […] The “One Team” defined as a gift economy – One way to define a team (of developers, for example) is that it's a group of people who have strong enough social ties to each other to do favours to each other, for no particular reason. […]

  4. Exploration Through Example » Blog Archive » The Stance of Reaction Says:

    […] let’s turn again to the quote I talked about in my gift economy post: The question that keeps getting asked is what value does the customer get from paying back this […]

  5. Exploration Through Example » Blog Archive » A common conception of gift economies (that is wrong) Says:

    […] Gift economies have a place in software lore. Eric Raymond used them to explain how open source works. Corey Doctorow built a non-monetary economy in his Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. […]

  6. Exploration Through Example » Blog Archive » Business value as a boundary object Says:

    […] Earlier, I claimed that one of the distinctions between a money economy and a gift economy is that, in a money economy, it is the transaction that matters. The person with whom you’re transacting is, in principle, irrelevant: That is, when I buy a candy bar from a convenience store clerk, I don’t need a personal relationship with him, nor does the exchange of coins for candy create one—any more than putting those coins in a vending machine would establish a personal relationship with it. In contrast, gift economies are both about moving goods around and also about managing (creating, maintaining) the personal relationships that make up a “We”. […]

  7. Exploration Through Example » Blog Archive » My “pay me what you think I was worth” tour Says:

    […] like strange ideas and relationships more personal than transactional, so I’d like to do this too. Here’s what I’m […]

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