Time Bank and Dynamics of its Metamodel

Abstract

The concept of Time Banks developed over many decades. Eventually, it formed itself into an approach utilizing the dormant aspects of human activities that cannot be sold on the traditional labour market. Time Banks need to be considered as socio-economic systems, which in contrast to monetary systems are based on equality and reciprocity. Time Banks belong to the sphere of complementary economic systems which are one of the traits of postmodern society. They appeared as a reaction to various economic and societal failures, filling the empty spaces mainstream economy leaves behind. But equality and reciprocity are not the only ones on the list of properties that ought to be monitored and carefully considered when the nature of Time Banks is investigated, and ways in which they can be implemented in practice are explored. This paper exemplifies identified attributes and provides a description of their meaning, significance and outlines their mutual interrelationship. Alphabetically ordered, the list starts with Accessibility, Adaptability, or Affordability and ends with characteristics such as Tailorability or Transparency. As is well known from the systems theory, capturing the mutual relationship among attributes and the development of appropriate structure enable the so-called metasystem to be created. Mostly, metasystems are described regarding their structure. The challenge that this paper accepts is to sketch the possibility of capturing its behaviour in terms of system dynamics. For this purpose, diagrams used in this discipline are applied. The systemic features are organized into a Causal Loop Diagram which illustrates how they are connected and influenced by each other. As a result, graphs showing development of systemic features in time are presented and interpreted.