SUPPORT IN THE INFORMAL OR HOUSEHOLD ECONOMY 195
4 SUPPORT IN THE INFORMAL OR HOUSEHOLD ECONOMY Many innovations begin in the informal life of households – a conversation around a coffee, a kitchen table, or a bar. A group of friends or families start living in a new way. Informal associations develop social movements that put pressure on big business or government. Over time what they do may become more formalised and shift into the grant economy and subsequently into the public or market economy. The informal household economy has generally been under-recognised as a source of innovations. But it has played a critical role in fields including the environment and health, usually leading ahead of government and business, and is set to become even more important as issues of ageing and behaviour change become more prominent. In the case of chronic disease, care for young children and the elderly, householders and their networks of support are already the primary source of care. Within the household economy, we can see a number of emergent trends. One is new forms of mutual action between individuals – whether in the form of open-source software, or web-based social networking around specific issues (there are reportedly 18 million cancer related websites, the great majority generated by those affected by the disease). In these instances the innovations are generated outside the market and outside the state, many of them explicitly so. They have had to develop their own protocols and codes of conduct. The implications of collaboration of this kind for many contemporary social and economic issues have only begun to be explored, and prompt the question of whether, and how, such systems of highly distributed innovation and mutual support can be encouraged. How do they relate to the state and the
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