In this paper a recent type of social and economic organization to appear in the United Kingdom—the local exchange trading system—is examined. From comparative research based on interviews with coordinators of six systems the motivation for involvement, the nature of the local money, and the relationship to business and state regulation are explored. The internal coherence of the systems and the relevance of the ‘local’ is assessed. Contextualized by debates on the nature of economics, where the notion of embeddedness of economic life in social relations is gaining ground, the concept of an active ‘re-embedding’ is introduced in order to explore the significance of local exchange trading systems.
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