Time against Time: Normative Temporalities and the Failure of Community Labour in Local Exchange trading Schemes

Why did Local Exchange and Trading Schemes (LETS) fail to realise their promise in 1990s Britain? This article argues that a core reason was the inability to make community labour, a concept at the heart of LETS logic, function as a self-perpetuating dynamic, in which community bonding would encourage trade and trade in turn would build community. In exploring reasons for this failure, the article focuses on the centrifugal pull of two contrasting temporalities: community time and labour-market time. And in understanding why these two, normative, temporal orders were unable to combine, cohere or simply to coexist, the article addresses three factors: failure in design; individual member responsibility; and wider temporal pressures.