This territorial question is also important in heritage conservation, where citizens are more likely to become engaged in and support local projects (Guesmi et al. 2015). Other studies that have looked at the motivations that drive Internet users to participate in and back projects also demonstrate the importance of afective and identity-based ties, and of supporting a cause which matches one’s own values (Ordanini et al. 2011; Gerber and Hui 2013). Giudici et al. (2013) extend this work, concentrating on the factors that determine the probability of a project’s success. They concentrate on the social capital of project creators, distinguishing their ‘individual’ social capital (which is exclusive and is measured by their presence on social networks) from their ‘territorial’ social capital (distributed locally, and measured by their geographical proximity to contributors). Their results suggest that individual social capital has a significant positive efect on the likelihood of achieving fundraising goals, whereas geolocalized (territorial) capital does not. In fact, the latter can act to the detriment of the crowdfunding campaign, for it marginally weakens the efects of ‘signalling’ in relation to individual social capital. They nevertheless indicate that, in favourable local conditions, good quality projects can easily raise funds without recourse to these platforms.
Plan of the Book
The present volume takes up a number of questions raised in the aforementioned literature. But it is distinct both in terms of the resources it draws on and the ways in which it approaches crowdfunding platforms. Looking beyond their functions and their functional logic, and past questions of success and optimizing participation, it takes a critical socio-economic approach to the study of cultural crowdfunding platforms. Our hypothesis is that the development of these platforms, and the discourses that accompany them, are indicative of a capitalist ideology marked by the logics of ‘ecosystems’, of ‘project-based’ value creation, and of an outsourcing of tasks, which attempt to conceal the forms of labour and the social and financial apparatuses driving them. Beyond the diferent models represented by crowdfunding platforms, the ecosystem they claim to be a part of and the economic relations in which they are embedded are characterized by systematic outsourcing of tasks. They therefore fall under the paradigm of what Vincent Mosco (2016) calls the ‘new Internet’. Along with the ‘cloud’ and ‘big data’, which denote intensified logics of control and surveillance, crowdfunding platforms confirm the transfer of value production to external entities.
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Cultural Crowdfunding: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization