In 1995, Nintendo approached videogame development company Rare, Ltd. about designing a game based on the then in-production James Bond film GoldenEye (UK/USA: Martin Campbell, 1995) as a platform-exclusive title for their Nintendo 64 console. While the resulting game, GoldenEye 007 (1997), first appeared to be a routine production, comparable to releasing action figures or other merchandise to accompany a movie release, it would ultimately become a surprise critical and commercial success and a landmark both of film-to-videogame adaptation and of the emerging first-person shooter genre. While its multiplayer mode created the biggest stir, its single-player levels are remembered today not only for their innovative mission objectives, enemy behavior, and level design, but for the way these features worked to create an internally consistent, believable Bond experience.

In 2010, another videogame adaptation of GoldenEye appeared, this time developed by Eurocom for the Nintendo Wii. The motivations behind this re-adaptation have very little to do with any lingering popularity for the then fifteen-year old Pierce Brosnan vehicle—instead, it had been the enduring, nostalgia-enriched reputation of the original game that prompted the return of this particular storyline from the Bond canon. A curious double-adaptation, the 2010 game serves as a case study in the adaptation and mutation of intellectual property, as well as the development of the first-person shooter genre, particularly as a medium for storytelling.

Introduction

The act of doing policy to or imposing policies on citizens is the cardinal sin of policy practice. As the chapters in this volume have illustrated, to avoid this sin the last half century has witnessed a great experiment that has celebrated and promoted neoliberal principles with the ideas of individual freedom and the sovereign consumer citizen at their core, the great deception being that consumer-citizens are free to choose, don't have policies imposed on them and are free from the stifling confines of bureaucratic states. As the chapters have shown, this is by and large a failed experiment but, despite the economic crisis, the laboratory is still open for business. As processes of financialization have invaded increasing aspects of daily life, the evidence from this volume clearly demonstrates that the effect has been to constrain the autonomy of individuals and weaken the ties of community and solidarity. The loss of collective voice has not been counterbalanced by a stronger individual choice. Moreover, the idea of citizenship has been distorted and used against citizens as large corporations have been able to enjoy the rights of citizenship while evading their duties.

In this concluding chapter we focus on the relationship between the foundational economy and new emerging forms of citizenship. Our starting point is the argument that foundational thinking is necessarily underpinned by the fostering of a new and universalistic model of citizenship, a model that views citizenship as more than a status that brings with it a bundle of rights that one possesses qua citizen, but as something that is also a dynamic part of daily life (Barbera et al, 2018). As a number of the contributors to this volume suggest, this perspective moves beyond citizenship as a collection of rights and responsibilities to emphasize the active and social nature of citizenship where people continually work on, engage with, dispute and argue over their rights and duties. Of course, this is easier said than done, and there is a danger of underestimating the depth of the structural and economic crisis and its effects on the capacities of individual citizens. Moreover, this perspective risks converging with the idea of ‘caring liberalism’ (Jessop et al, 2013: 111) and concentrating on the goal of individual ‘activation’ in terms of self-entrepreneurship and human capital as the main, if not the only, horizon for people's wellbeing.

The ‘foundational economy’ encompasses those goods and services, together with the economic and social relationships that underpin them, that provide the everyday infrastructure of civilized life. A nonexhaustive list includes gas and electricity, water, waste and sewerage, retail food supply, telecommunications, health and social care, housing, education and public transport. Since the 1990s, many of these goods and services have been increasingly incorporated within market logics by policies that promote commodification, privatization and financialization. The failure of these policies and their impact on the daily lives of citizens have been documented in a body of work that has applied foundational thinking to a number of substantive areas of social and economic relations and geographic regions (see Bentham et al, 2013; Barbera et al, 2017, 2018; Foundational Economy Collective, 2018).

This edited collection takes this scholarship further using comparative perspectives on the foundational economy in relation to governance, urban life, welfare critical goods and food systems. We extend theoretical and empirical work on the foundational economy to explore its relevance to key policy areas and to civil society. Addressing a range of substantive areas of concern, individual chapters use case studies at different national and regional levels to illustrate the arguments being developed. In so doing we provide a unique perspective on the relationship between civil society, democracy and the foundational economy.

Our aim is to advance foundational thinking in three key areas. First, we set out detailed evidence on the impact of growth-based and financialized solutions on local democracy, citizenship and civil society and explore alternative approaches to citizenship and social justice that are rooted in the foundational economy. Second, for the first time we provide important comparative perspectives on the development of foundational thinking. And third, we document detailed and critical case studies in core areas of economic and social life.

Each chapter addresses different aspects of the foundational economy from a comparative perspective, illustrating key points with case studies. Areas that are considered in detail include the rise of platform capitalism and the so-called sharing economy that extend commodification and value extraction into mundane activities. In contrast, foundational economy thinking can utilize the same technological developments to offer potential alternative forms of social and economic organization through platform cooperativism.

Introduction

This chapter focuses on the relationship between the foundational economy, citizenship, democracy and social justice. Our argument is that the foundational economy approach is rooted in a conceptualization of citizenship rights and obligations that are derived from human needs, needs that are met through intermediate satisfiers that are contextdependent and responsive to sociotechnical system change – that is, they are socially, culturally and place-specific, and require agreement through continuous political negotiation and dialogue over time. A key area that becomes apparent from this approach is that there is an increasing and damaging asymmetrical relationship between the rights and duties of corporations as legal entities and the stratified rights and duties of individual citizens qua citizens. A second and related point is that while economies are zonal, people, households and groups live in places. Citizen wellbeing is therefore based on the contingent, place-based drivers of income, from jobs, pensions and welfare, and infrastructure, including grounded (housing, utilities, health, education and care), mobility (cars and public transport systems) and social (parks, libraries, community centres).

We begin this chapter by examining the scope of the foundational economy, and proceed to focus on the importance of foundational thinking for critiques of capitalist formations that involve financialization and extraction. We then discuss the relationship between the foundational economy and human needs and capabilities before developing the argument for a moral basis to the foundational economy and how this links to citizenship. We consider how an impoverished form of citizenship has developed, and within the literature on citizenship we delineate the links between the foundational and civil society, citizenship and the commons, focusing in particular on the potential for developing democratic governance and public action. We conclude by arguing that foundational thinking provides a means of linking citizenship to attempts to manage the commons. This proposes a citizenship based on universal human needs and rights to intermediate goods and services combined with recognition of heterogeneity and diversity in economic and social relations. If social relations and institutional arrangements vary contextually across space and time, this then requires innovative solutions based on experimentation at different scales.

The decision to prescribe psychotropic medication is always a matter of weighing up potential risks and benefits but at no time is this more difficult than in pregnancy and the post-partum period. This is because the risks do not only relate to the side-effects for the mother but also potential adverse outcomes for the pregnancy and the child who may be particularly vulnerable during fetal development and breastfeeding. In addition, there is often a degree of uncertainty about what added risks medication may bring compared with no treatment.