Making Things Valuable

Abstract

Studies of worth and valuation have to a large extent been shaped by an implicit division of labour in which economists have dominated discussions of monetary value and sociologists have been occupied with understanding other values such as those with a religious or cultural basis. The book contributes to an emergent strand of economic sociology that challenges this division of labour. The book consists of an introduction and twelve chapters that in combination provide insights into important ‘mechanisms and practices of valuing’ that deserve closer academic examination. It illustrates how practices such as calculating, framing, modelling, searching, institutionalizing, and visualizing are pivotal elements of how things are made valuable. It supports a processual view of valuation that suggests moving the analytical gaze from things towards the network of elements and the evaluative infrastructure that makes them valuable. The emphasis of the contributions is accordingly on the process of making things valuable: through which practices, technologies, and devices are objects e-valuated? How are things commensurated, compared, categorized, and classified? What accounts make some things count more than others? These questions are significant, for it is through valuation practices that the world is ordered, hierarchized, and ultimately valued. The chapters in the book illustrate how this is so in empirical settings as diverse as university ranking lists, ice skating scoring, wind power, insurances, gold, and big data.