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- Convenors:
-
Kristin Asdal
(University of Oslo)
Béatrice Cointe (Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation (CSI))
Bård Lahn (University of Oslo)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
This panel invites empirically grounded papers on value and valuations. We ask how valuation practices may make up a new ‘value economy’ and are interested in its relations to other value-oriented approaches, such as 'the good economy’, ‘ecologization’/‘environmentalization’ and assetization .
Description
For more than a century we have lived with the ‘marginalist revolution’ in economics, where value came to be defined as subjectivist and decided by individual preferences and willingness to pay for a market good. Is this neo-classical take on value now about to give way to a more heterogeneous value landscape? Does it perhaps make up a distinct and new ‘version of economization’? Are attempts at greening the economy and ‘environmentalizing economics’ making a mark? Or are we rather seeing an economy dominated by the valuation approaches and methods of finance, asset ownership and management? If we are seeing the contours of a new ‘value economy’, at which sites and in which materials and practices can we observe it? Which frictions and tensions does it bring out? Can we perhaps see a value economy as a form of critique? In STS and beyond, we observe a sustained but also a renewed interest in value. One of our journals, STHV, carries value in its name. Valuation Studies has emerged as a subfield, and ‘worth’ is at the core of the sociology of justification of Boltanski and Thevenot. This panel is organized in conversation with ongoing work to explore ‘The Value Economy’ (forthcoming with Mattering Press 2026, edited by Asdal and Doganova) and the already heterogenous value economy the contributors to this volume display. The panel invites empirically grounded papers that investigate value and valuations as they unfold in offices, documents, markets and other sites. We are curious about how a (possible) value economy relates to other value-oriented approaches, such as ‘the good economy’, ‘the moral economy’, and ‘ecologization’/‘environmentalization’. We ask how value relates to governing and also its sometimes related forms, such as assetization, financialization and care. We ask if it performs a new ‘version of economization’ and if so, how it can be described and understood as that.