Moments of Valuation

Gazi Islam, Grenoble Ecole de Management/U. Grenoble Alpes ComUE-IREGE and Insper, Organization Studies Taken together, these chapters provide a broad and multi-level overview of valuations as an analytical lens. Reading through the chapters, I was tempted to reframe many current academic issues as problems of valuation; creativity and innovation, institutional work and contradictory logics, identity and role dynamics, sense making and storytelling approaches could all benefit from thinking in terms of valuation activities and devices. The centrality of materials,
aesthetics and practices in performing valuation further suggests a theoretical synergy; indeed, valuation might provide an interesting hook for materiality scholars to hang their hat on. What are the stakes of such a choice, and what would be gained and lost in the process?


Gazi Islam, Organization Studies (SAGE) A remarkable feature of the book is the persistent coexistence of, on the one hand, the vast array of techniques described to establish aesthetic and material bases for valuation, and on the other hand, the centrality of the principle of dissonance, that newness comes not from the success of these techniques but from their perpetual incompleteness.


Wendy Espeland, Professor of Sociology, Northwestern University How do we value? There could hardly be more a fundamental social process. The recent, global resurgence of scholarly interest in valuation suggests that there is not. It has captured the attentions of researchers in fields ranging from accounting to science studies. The idea that value is somehow inherent in things has been taken apart, subverted by the contingencies of context, form, and cultures. But the question of innovation, of how new things, places, or
expertise are deemed valuable, and how the value of old things is revised or re-appropriated has been relatively neglected. Until now. The editors and authors of Moments of Valuation have accomplished much by demonstrating crucial patterns in that which is provisional in valuation: valuing as situated in
time, subjected to translation, testing, demonstration, and genre; sparked by dissonance. John Dewey, I think, would have approved.


Shamus Khan, Associate Professor of Sociology, Columbia University This collection of brilliant essays suggests that a cacophony of work within cultural sociology can be understood more fully and simply within the frameworks of valuation of dissonance. Not only do these works give scholars important ideas to contend with, they suggest a path for more fruitful conversations about our social world.


Noortje Marres, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London Through its focus on moments of valuation, this edited collection radically broadens the range of sites in which the unfolding of value can be observed, from a Chinese art village to Danish pig farms, an AI newsgroup, Berlin restaurants and social housing design. Bringing together key...

Ariane Berthoin Antal is senior fellow at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, where she currently leads the research stream on "Artistic Interventions in Organizations" in the Research Unit "Cultural Sources of Newness." She is Distinguished Research Professor at Audencia Nantes School of Management in France and honorary professor at the Technical University of Berlin. She earned her B.A from Pomona College, her M.A from Boston University and Dr. phil from the Technical University of Berlin. She has published widely in English, French and German on business and society, organizational learning and knowledge creation, and intercultural management, including the Oxford Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge (with Meinolf Dierkes, John Child and Ikujiro Nonaka). She serves on the editorial board of numerous journals, including Organization Studies, Management Learning, and Gender and Management.

Introduction ; PART I: VARIETIES OF AESTHETIC VALUATION ; 2. Moments in the Valuation of Sound: The Early History of Synthesizers ; 3. Paying Attention: What is Tasting Wine About? ; 4. Dissonant Translations: Artistic Sources of Innovation in Creative Industries ; 5. Evaluating Valuation: Connoisseurship, Technology and Art Attribution in an American Court of Law ; 6. An Evaluative Biography of Cynical Realism and Political Pop ; PART II: DEVICES VALORIZING UNCERTAIN AESTHETIC EXPERIENCES ; 7. Playing Nice, Being Mean, and the Space In Between: Book Critics and the Difficulties of Writing Bad Reviews ; 8. Structures of the Tasted: Restaurant Reviews in Berlin Between 1995 and 2012 ; 9. Making Things Precious: A Pragmatist Inquiry into the Valuation of Luxury Perfumes ; PART III: VALUATION IN FIELDS OF PRACTICE ; 10. When Principles of Evaluation Clash: Assessing the Value of a Demonstration in Artificial Intelligence ; 11. Accounting and the Plasticity of Valuation ; 12. Clean and Profitable: Entangling Valuations in Environmental Entrepreneurship ; 13. Reframing Expertise: The Rise of Behavioral Insights and Interventions in Public Policy ; PART IV: VALUATION WITHIN ORGANIZATIONS ; 14. Epistemic Dissonance: Reconfiguring Valuation in Architectural Practicepractice ; 15. Sources of Newness in Organizations: Sand, Oil, Energy, and Artists ; 16. Performing Worth: Shareholder Value and Management Consultancy in Post-Mao China