This study deals with the building of a specific set of economic valuations throughout the work of French telephone engineers between 1880 and 1938. In so doing, it contributes to our understanding of the complex interplay between economization and valuation. Tracing the changing practices that facilitated a shift from valuation aimed at minimizing force losses to valuation aimed at assessing and enhancing subjective utility, economizing is considered as an epistemic process, through which managers, engineers and workers are exploring, representing and transforming the world. From saving work and minimizing losses to creating value, engineers went from evaluating (telling what is worth, within an economy of force, optimizing the ratio of losses over total work) to valorizing (framing value as possibly produced and not only saved, the production of utility). This new concern for valorization points to the development of new ideas on what could create economic value. In this process, the very acts of measuring, optimizing and calculating, appeared as both “subversive” and “subverted”.

This article analyses a series of negotiations of how to measure welfare and quality of life in Sweden beyond economic indicators. It departs from a 2015 Government Official Report that advanced a strong recommendation to measure only objective indicators, rather than relying on subjective indicators such as life satisfaction and happiness. The assertion of strictly objective indicators falls back on a sociological perspective developed in the 1970s, which conceived of welfare as being measurable as 'levels of living', a framework that came to be called the 'Scandinavian model' of welfare research. However, in the early 2000s, objective indicators were challenged scientifically by the emerging field of 'happiness studies', which also found political advocates in Sweden who argued that subjective indicators should be an integral part of measuring welfare. This tension between subjective and objective measurements resulted in a controversy between several actors about what should count as a valuable measurement of welfare. As a consequence, we argue that these negotiations can be understood as the creation of valuemeters, devices that both measure and value various aspects of society.

Marketplace exchange is implicitly both economic and social. Participants in marketplace encounters assemble into multidimensional categories of familiarity and difference, both through the material culture object for sale and through the interaction between vendors and clients within their transactions. This paper brings attention to the latter through microanalysis of one example from a corpus of recorded marketplace interactions of Moroccan diasporic visitors from Europe with marketplace vendors. This example illustrates a repeatedly observed bargaining strategy: to explicitly or implicitly claim the category of ‘a son/daughter of this country’ (weld/bint el-bled) as an argument to lower prices. While vendors did not straightforwardly refute this category of ‘descendant’, they often did respond by introducing other–sometimes seemingly contradictory–categorical differentiations they found relevant to finding a price. This article explores how vendors and diasporic customers negotiate these categories, and how categorization become significant for the emergent value of the goods under negotiation. Through turn-by-turn analysis, I demonstrate how interlocutors engage with ideas of ‘Moroccanness’ beyond ethnonational discourses of belonging, in that ‘doing being Moroccan’ while bargaining becomes a negotiation of being ‘Moroccan’ geographically, socially and economically, as resident in or out of Morocco.

As economic and budgetary scandals reached Danish front pages in 2014 over the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) held that year in Copenhagen, many bystanders questioned the sense of the event, proclaiming it a massive waste of public money. In this article, we introduce the concept of “potlatch” to explore the valuation and values of this event, seeing it as a “total social phenomenon” in which more than merely economic matters are at stake. Framing Eurovision as a cross-sectoral innovation project, we show how a wide array of actors from the public and private sector collaboratively sought to turn the event into “much more than a song contest.” This “much more” is investigated by describing the partnering actors’ arduous work to create value through different project logics. Where other valuations of the event put little work into bringing forth values which transgress the realm of the economic and quantifiable, we argue that a more caring engagement enacts non-economic event outcomes usually made invisible or, at best, perceived as “intangible.”

The paper explores how valuing devices and verification mechanisms such as user-generated content (UGC) websites partake in performing placeness. The findings are based upon a corpus of data including a case study at the offices of the largest user-generated travel website, TripAdvisor, a longitudinal netnographic approach and a conceptual review. Originally inspired by theorists of space we treat places as sites of becoming that are performed through everyday practices. In claiming that places become meaningful only in and through practices we stress the importance of treating rating and ranking mechanisms as generative, rather than merely reductive algorithmically produced representations. By juxtaposing traditional enactments of traveling, we are discussing how placeness has been transformed and how this has fueled a series of further revisions to valuing tourism. We conclude the paper by appreciating the multiplicity of performativity as being implicated in the algorithmic configurations on contemporary valuing devices and enacted as we read, interpret, write, imagine. It is suggested that although earlier valuing devices have evoked place-making in various ways, the rise of UGC websites has converted the travel experience into a constant negotiation process whereby both the value of places and the value of valuing devices are contested.

Impact investing-investment with the intentional expectation of social or environmental impact alongside financial return-constitutes one of a growing array of “concerned markets” where economic exchange is employed as a means to pursue financial and social or environmental value. Drawing from the pragmatist turn in valuation studies, this article attends to the valuation work that took place in the formation of this new market, examining how market proponents as evaluators recognized, defined, and negotiated the presence of value complexity in impact investing. I frame the market of impact investing as a case of market design complete with experiments, one in which advocates produced a valuation infrastructure so as to address investors’ difficulty in ascertaining the social and environmental value - as a distinct regime of value from financial value - of an investment. These experimenters extended judgment devices from mainstream finance to construct calculative tools in this setting that permitted the social or environmental value of investments to be brought into being and to be made calculable for investors without being assigned a financial value. The study contributes to literature that theorizes the conditions underlying evaluators’ mediation of the multiple registers of value at work in the making of markets.

This article looks at well documented processes of urban regeneration and community displacement in the inner-city through an innovative anthropological perspective focused on concepts of waste and value. Using the notion of symbolic devaluation of the working classes developed by Skeggs (1997; 2004), it traces their exclusion from recycling practices while at the same time the estates they live on are being regenerated. Raising questions about the parallels and contradictions between regeneration and recycling, it shows how symbolic devaluation of specifi c areas and their inhabitants are necessary precursors of the physical demolition and removal that characterize regeneration processes. Through an ethnographic approach, the deep connections between people and their waste, and people as waste, are exposed and questioned, showing how valuable middle class selves are produced through appropriate waste management procedures, i.e. individualized recycling, while inner-city, estate dwellers are remade into uncaring, unworthy citizens who cannot take part in this value-producing circuit.

This article examines the promise of market democratization conveyed by consumer rating and review websites in the restaurant industry. Based on interviews with website administrators and data from the main French platforms, we show that review websites contribute to the democratization of restaurant criticism, which first started in the 1970s, both by including a greater variety of restaurants in the reviews, and by broadening participation, opening restaurant reviewing to all. However, this twofold democratic ambition conflicts with the need to produce fair and helpful recommendations, leading review websites to seek compromises between these two dimensions.

This discussion note provides a perspective on valuation studies by a group of PhD students. Based on impressions from the Valuation as Practice workshop at The University of Edinburgh in early 2014 we were inspired by the example of Kjellberg et al. (2013) to debate how we see, understand, and are inspired by the field of valuation studies. It is the hope of the editors that sharing the concerns of early-stage researchers starting out in a field in flux, may be of use to, and perhaps spur, senior contributors to further develop this emerging research landscape. Using the workshop experience as a springboard, we argue that the domain of valuation studies still relies heavily on influences from the study of economics, with a strong emphasis on processes of quantification and calculation. With apparent pragmatism within the field, concern as to what might be lost by this narrower perspective is raised. Additionally, we call for the exploration of the possibility of a common language of valuation, to better define shared features, and identify as well as manage conflicts within the field.

This paper examines counterfactual display in the valuation of carbon offsetting projects. Considered a legitimate way to encourage climate change mitigation, such projects rely on the establishment of procedures for the prospective assessment of their capacity to become carbon sinks. This requires imagining possible worlds and assessing their plausibility. The world inhabited by the project is articulated through conditional formulation and subjected to what we call “counterfactual display”: the production and circulation of documents that demonstrate and con!gure the counterfactual valuation. We present a case study on one carbon offsetting reforestation project in the Democratic Republic of Congo. We analyse the construction of the scene that allows the “What would have happened” question to make sense and become actionable. We highlight the operations of calculative framing that this requires, the reality constraints it relies upon, and the entrepreneurial conduct it stimulates.