Beyond Longevity
A life-cycle approach to time banks
Haitong Xu1, Althea Sellers 2, Rachel Gass 3, Craig Borowiak 4
1 University of Chicago, Department of Sociology
2 Columbia Law School
3 Bryn Mawr College
4 corresponding author, Haverford College, Department of Political Science,
cborowia@haverford.edu
ABSTRACT
Over the past couple of decades, scholars and activists have devoted considerable energy to
envisioning and enacting alternatives to capitalism through various micro-initiatives. In addition to
being small, many of these initiatives are relatively short-lived, leading critics to consider them
failures. This article challenges the association of success with scale and longevity. We focus on time
banks, a form of community currency organized around labor-time as the unit of exchange. While
time banks have been shown to have myriad benefits for communities, very little attention has been
paid to how benefits and challenges vary as time banks evolve. Rather than treating time banks as
static institutions, we approach them dynamically, as entities that undergo different stages of
development with evolving impacts throughout their lifespans. Drawing on over six years of
qualitative research on US time banks, we model what we call a Time-Bank Life Cycle. Examining
time banks through a life-cycle lens enables us to disassociate success from longevity while garnering
a fuller understanding of the variety of challenges time banks face and the range of material, social,
and ideological impacts they may have over the course of their lives.
KEYWORDS
Time Banks, Life-Cycle Frameworks, Complementary Currencies, Noncapitalism, Longevity, Success
To cite this article:
Xu & Sellers & Gass & Borowiak (2024) ‘Beyond Longevity, A life-cycle approach to time banks,’
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF COMMUNITY CURRENCY RESEARCH – VOLUME 28 (2024);
http://www.ijccr.net; ISSN 1325-9547; DOI – http://dx.doi.org/10.15133/j.ijccr.2024.001
IJCCR 