This article is an inquiry into value under construction. By unfolding the context of early-stage impact investing I examine how investors qualify and give value to environmental aspirations. I trace the role of the investor in shaping what a ‘good investment’ is and highlight the close connection between judging value and constructing value. Earlier studies have emphasised how investors spur financialised forms of valuation and impose financial frames onto the companies they engage with. However, more than financial logic is in play when things are made valuable in finance. The findings of this article illustrate how making something valuable is entwined with making something ‘good’. I show how the qualitative and moral judgements of investors shape what is valued of environmental aims in significant ways. The qualifications constrict what is considered environmental solutions and draw boundaries between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ aspirations. The approach contributes a holistic lens onto how things are made valuable in the economy.

This article discusses a concept that institutions from the OECD to the EU increasingly employ in their response to the ecological crisis: The bioeconomy, wherein materials for economic activity would be bio-based and renewable. As a present-day project, the bioeconomy translates the critique of (fossil) carbon into patterns of (material) resource use and (economic) resource allocation, not least through a new valorisation of innovation in the form of public– private partnerships. Yet where literature on the bioeconomy scrutinizes innovation, the concrete link between funders and funded has seldom been subject to focused analytical inquiry. This link is essential to the structure of the bioeconomy project. To broach the arrangements by which efforts to conjure a (bio-)economy underwrite specific patterns of value distribution, this article asks: Which discursive and conceptual resources are deployed to define the worth by which projects are construed as worthy of funding? Drawing on online ethnographic observation at funding events as well as on document analysis, we show how these arrangements are structured by a valorisation of efficiency. We propose to call this bio-efficiency, and relate it to a construal of the world as scarce.

We investigate how temporality matters in processes of valuation. Taking our empirical point of departure in the case of a novel gene therapy that has been the centre of a heated pricing debate, we explore how the ‘goodness’ of such a pharmaceutical good was negotiated by researchers, patients, pharmaceutical companies and regulators, and how these negotiations were shaped by the mobilisation of past experiences and future expectations. Seeking to advance the beginning of an analytical sensitivity to temporality in valuation studies, we develop the notion of ‘temporal layering’. We argue that moments of valuation consist of multiple ‘temporal layers’ where select past experiences and future expectations are rendered visible – or left obscure – depending on how these layers are drawn upon in valuation struggles and by whom. Thus, what is at stake in determining the ‘good’ in particular moments of valuation is not just a contest over certain qualities or ways to evaluate an object, but also over which (particular layers of) pasts and futures come to count. We suggest that such fine-grained temporal analysis can provide new openings to questions of valuation for a wide-ranging array of economic objects, particularly for those situated in contemporary bioeconomies.

What does it mean for a business or industry to be and do good? And who can count themselves within the good economy? This article investigates the justification of goodness in mineral exploration and mining and uses the entwinement between value creation and destruction characteristic of mining to trouble notions of goodness in impactful industries. Based on analyses of indepth interviews, ethnographic fieldnotes, and archival materials, the article follows the ways in which mining industry actors seek to negotiate contradictions between creation and destruction; and does so while using an innovative conceptual framework based in Peircean semiotics to open up justification for analysis of the underlying semiotic machinery that actors rely on to signify goodness. Mobilizing this conceptual toolkit, the article investigates how miners and explorers emphasize certain values, or signs, over others and how values are used to assert that some mines and miners do more good than others.

Over past decades, predictive algorithms have been used extensively as profiling tools in the private sector, but today they are also increasingly entering public sector domains. This article builds on an ethnographic study of the development of a predictive algorithm in a debt collecting public sector organization. The algorithm was designed to profile citizens on the basis of their calculated ‘readiness to pay’ their debt and to guide employees’ case handling according to ‘type’ of citizen. The article examines how the classification of citizens produced by the algorithm was mediated by different visualizations and by organizational actors who superimposed new and different classifications (moral and emotional) onto those provided by the algorithm. The article draws on the concepts of nominal and ordinal classification to identify how intended non-hierarchical classification glides into new hierarchical valuations of both citizens and employees. Classifications were ‘cascading’ – a concept the article develops to account for how classification of and around the algorithm multiplied and had organizational ripple effects. Based on empirical insights, the study advocates an agnostic approach to how algorithmic predictions impact work, organizations, and the situation of profiled individuals. It emphasizes a dynamic and and unstable relationship between algorithms and organizational practices.

This text introduces this issues’ symposium: “A correspondence on (University) Management after Valuation Studies”. The text has two parts. The first introduces the dilemma, the question of whether valuation studies could, besides studying valuation in practice, inform better practices of valuation, and the method of the correspondence, to use situations in which researchers of valuation are also practitioners, namely, the management of quality in higher education, as the starting point to think the correspondence’s problem. In the second part, the author reflects on his own experience in a situation of valuation at work, and proposes three different personae for the student of valuation: the offended native, the anxious scholar, and the useless practitioner.

This article analyzes the formulation of the “weighted average cost of capital” in the manuals of two of the most influential associations of financial analysts. It focuses on the use of the formula as the discount rate to determine the “fundamental value” of listed companies using the “discounted cash flows” method, a cornerstone of the definition of “shareholder value” used in the finance industry worldwide. It shows that the choice of variables and their mathematical relations in the formula mobilize multiple, partly independent and contradictory epistemologies and ontologies. This multiplicity is assembled along political imaginaries concerning the relation between particular notions of the maximizing investor, the efficient markets and the sovereign state. The figure of the investor is considered the only legitimate agent to claim the “free” cash flows of the company, the efficient markets are considered the source of truthful representation of value, and the state is supposed to guarantee both the fair play between investors and a minimum revenue for money owners, to be extracted from the rest of society through the tax system. The formula thus legitimizes and renders self-evident power relations that sustain the global inequalities produced by the finance industry.

Northern Australian pastoral land prices have become higher and more volatile over the last twenty years, raising concerns about the potential implications of the financialization of the industry. These prices are not inevitable results of market forces, but mediated and co-constructed by a range of actors using two valuation devices: the ‘Beast Area Value’, a ‘rule of thumb’ which emerged during the early development of the industry, and the ‘Return on Investment’, a tool widely used to compare financial ventures. The Beast Area Value treats land as a commodity whose value is derived from its physical characteristics, while the Return on Investment treats land as an asset whose value is based on its future income generation potential. This article describes how some pastoral companies are strategically combining these devices to earn capital gains through ‘speculative development’ of properties in ways that do not necessarily increase their productivity. It argues that pastoral land is often developed in ways more reflective of the valuation devices used in the region than of the realities of station management, representing a shift from competing in the sphere of production to competing in the sphere of valuation and implicating these devices in the financialization of Northern Australian land.

Several suggestions on distinguishing between “modes” of valuation practices are found in the literature. In this contribution, valuation practices are moves in a kind of social play that generates its own kind of value. Valuation in the Arts is chosen as an empirical example. Following the model, the Arts are interpreted as a set of games with the same kind of value code, in which artists and producers create performances for engaged and curious spectators. The four kinds of players engage in valuations of objects and other players in their respective games. The broad range of observations in art games demonstrates that valuation is practiced in three modes: attribution, assessment and payment. While practices of attribution and assessment generate and stabilize art-specific value accumulation, paying practices link the attributed and assessed values to the monetary valuation in games of commercial play. The distinctions of valuation practices employed by three recent authors are set into relation to the suggested modes.