Electronic Cash and the Virtual Marketplace: Reflections on a Revolution Postponed

By the late 1990s the notion of the `virtual' had become a key term in attempts to render meaningful the changes being brought about by new information and communication technologies on extant forms of enterprise and organizing. Many commentators had already identified the financial services sector as a site where the transformative powers of the new electronic technologies would be most visibly enacted. Drawing upon a two-year ethnographic investigation of a range of financial services organizations, the paper analyses fin de siecle enactments of the `virtual' in terms of three closely interrelated problematics: virtuality as electronic mediation, virtuality as mimesis and virtuality as disposal. The paper uses the case of Mondex—a project to implement a smart card alternative to cash—as a vantage point from which to explore the performance of `virtuality' in social organization.