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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.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
Prevailing pharmaceutical value regimes are failing to deliver much needed novel antibiotics. This paper investigates how EU pharmaceutical policy is being recalibrated to fix ‘market failure’, revitalize innovation and instantiate a particular vision of a good pharmaceutical economy.
Paper long abstract
How are pharmaceutical innovation regimes currently being problematized and reordered amidst multiple interpenetrating health crises? To tackle the growing threat of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the EU is attempting to revitalize the R&D ecosystem through novel financial incentives. Few antimicrobial pharmaceuticals have been developed in recent decades due to their relative unprofitability, which has often been articulated as a ‘market failure’. Big pharmaceutical companies have almost entirely left the sector, and the remaining small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have no one to acquire them after they complete the early stages of drug development. This disrupts their usual, financialized business model. Industry representatives, activists, and academics have proposed numerous possible solutions to this innovation drought. In late 2025, the EU has announced the introduction of ‘pull’ incentives – funds awarded to companies that bring innovative antibiotics to market. Pull incentives are generally agreed to be an effective way of revitalizing the R&D ecosystem, but the specificities of their implementation remain hotly contested. Actors have debated how to design an effective incentive that ensures both drug access and responsible antibiotic use. This paper investigates these pull incentives as reconfigurations of the antimicrobial innovation ecosystem following different visions of a good pharmaceutical economy, through a mix of policy document analysis, conference ethnography at pharma industry gatherings, and qualitative interviews. This paper speaks to STS scholarship on valuation and assetization by arguing that the main incentive mechanism the EU ended up choosing stabilizes the financialized mode of drug development while more transformative policy options were discarded.
Paper short abstract
Investigating data-mediation platforms’ valuation practices and normative visions of what constitutes good, responsible, or trustworthy data sharing and reuse, we shed light on how health data is valued within the European health data economy.
Paper long abstract
Health data are commonly framed by industry and policymakers as valuable. Yet the value of health data is not intrinsic or given. We argue that data-mediating platforms, defined here as for-profit companies that connect data producers (e.g., hospitals) and data users (e.g., pharmaceutical companies) to enable data sharing and reuse, play a significant role in configuring health data as valuable and in addition making data part of what is commonly framed as a data economy.
Drawing on fieldwork and interviews with data-mediating platforms in Europe, we aim to understand how these actors actively construct the conditions under which health data acquire visibility, mobility and come to support various types of value generation. This happens, for instance, by assembling datasets across institutions and framing diversity and representativeness of data as sources of worth, by ranking datasets internally according to a hierarchy of data products, or by pricing datasets through matchmaking approaches. Additionally, European data-mediating platforms actively frame both themselves and the markets in which they operate as distinct from the US data economy, foregrounding specifically “European” moral values. By describing valuation practices and normative visions of what constitutes good, responsible, or trustworthy data sharing and reuse, we shed light on how health data come to embody particular types of value within a European health data economy.
Paper short abstract
This study uses assetization to examine discursive and valuation practices of financialized actors in re-shaping healthcare economies. A multimodal ethnography shows how promissory narratives of innovation are instrumentalized, while financial deals, infrastructures and investor logics are obscured.
Paper long abstract
Across healthcare systems, financial, for-profit driven actors are emerging. Relating to the notion of the “value economy” (Asdal & Doganova, 2025), these actors introduce new valuation and discursive practices to healthcare. In this study, we think through the concept of assetization to examine how healthcare entities and practices are reconfigured as capitalized property by mobilizing specific logics, devices and practices. Assetization concerns the contingent processes through which something is (re)shaped into a future revenue stream (Birch et al., 2021). Empirically, we conduct a multimodal ethnography that combines document analysis, interviews, observations and digital materials – including corporate websites, (social) media platforms, policy documents, reports and marketing and PR content – to investigate the various practices at play. We find that these actors instrumentalize promissory narratives, emphasizing societal impact, innovation, technical expertise, ESG-performances, and future-oriented visions of sustainable care to legitimate their intervention. At the same time, the valuation practices and financial infrastructures underpinning these claims and the broader constellation of financial actors and instruments involved tend to remain backgrounded in these narratives. These involve investment deals and exits, corporate restructuring, mergers and acquisitions, data infrastructures and enclosures, and commercial real-estate arrangements. By illuminating how processes of assetization, financial logics and investor rationalities become interlaced with the organization and governance of healthcare, we aim to weave together the threads through which valuation practices unfold that constitute new healthcare economies – both intangible and tangible – encompassing new revenue streams.
Paper short abstract
Anonymity acts as a key market device shaping Spain’s reproductive markets. It structures donor recruitment, gamete and embryo circulation, and clinic control, enabling commercialization in egg and embryo donation and supporting new reprogenetic services.
Paper long abstract
Often portrayed as the natural outcome of interactions between supply and demand, markets do not emerge spontaneously: they are socially constructed and stabilized through technological, normative, and organizational arrangements. Building on the concept of market devices (Muniesa 2007), this paper examines how such devices shape reproductive markets by structuring interactions among donors, recipients, clinics, and intermediaries. Market devices encompass not only material infrastructures—databases, matching systems, and laboratory technologies—but also regulatory and ethical instruments such as informed consent procedures and anonymity requirements. Focusing on anonymity, the paper explores its role beyond donor privacy or family‑making norms. While anonymity traditionally protected recipients’ narratives and obscured donors’ contributions, its function as a market‑shaping device has received limited scholarly attention. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in Spain, this paper analyzes how anonymity organizes and sustains reproductive markets by influencing donor recruitment, gamete and embryo mobilization, and the configuration of donor–recipient relationships. Three case studies illustrate these dynamics. In egg donation, anonymity facilitates commercialization by allowing clinics to aggregate, classify, and redistribute oocytes without relational involvement. In embryo donation, anonymity enables clinics to reclassify surplus embryos as “abandoned,” supporting clinical control and potential commercialization, while known embryo donation generates alternative markets mediated by specialized intermediaries. In reprogenetics, anonymity underpins the marketing of Expanded Carrier Screening (ECS) by framing genetic risk assessment as a premium, non‑relational service. Using Science and Technology Studies and feminist perspectives, the paper argues that anonymity structures market transactions, limits recipient agency, naturalizes assisted reproduction, and sustains the profitability of reproductive markets.
Paper short abstract
This paper tracks a ‘worth expansion’: an increase in justifications of energy islands from being green to also enhancing competitiveness and ensuring energy independence. This process may revert to a ‘worth contraction’ in which a singular focus on independence leads to a revaluing of, e.g., coal.
Paper long abstract
In 2019, the Danish government proposed the world's first 'energy island' to connect gigawatts of offshore wind power with the aim of decarbonizing the energy system. By 2026, an agreement was reached, with the Minister for Climate, Energy and Utilities highlighting its role in creating a "safer and more competitive Europe in a time of geopolitical challenges"
We seek to explore this apparent modification of the justifications of energy islands. In doing so, we engage with the notion of the 'good economy', i.e., “value creation that encapsulates the good, and the sustainable too.” (Asdal 2022: 851). We thus trace how energy islands were initially justified (Boltanski & Thévenot 2006) for their sustainability. In recent years, more justifications have been included to maintain the relevance of energy islands. We call this process ‘worth expansion’ and highlight how contributions to competitiveness, resilience, energy security, and independence have been added to the justifications of energy islands. However, this strategy of expanding the kinds of worth ascribed to energy islands may inadvertently modify the issue at stake (cf. Asdal 2015) from matters of sustainability to matters of security of supply. We analyze how the focus on energy independence has reinvigorated energy sources which had previously been branded as worthless: Nuclear and coal. We call this process of re-focusing on a single issue ‘worth contraction’.
Based on the description of this justificatory shift from sustainability to geopolitics, we ask if energy islands still constitute a ‘good economy’ or if a different value economy is emerging.
Paper short abstract
With reference to the role of discounting in IAMs promoting NETs the paper will argue that capital’s return is bound to return as ecological debt. It asks what happens when “natural capital” turns from asset into liability.
Paper long abstract
Scholars in STS and political economy showed that capitalist return expectations systematically obstruct effective climate protection by privileging fossil over green investments. This talk will show how hegemonic climate economics often reinforces this problem. By calibrating the discount rate used in climate models according to the observed rates of return on capital, they respond to market failure with an orientation on the failing market. Rather than offering a merely normative critique of this move, the talk analyzes its structural effects. It will argue that capital’s return is bound to return as ecological destruction. Global heating is the eternal return of capitalist return as collective ecological debt. I will elucidate this point with reference to the way Negative Emissions Technologies are cast in Integrated Assesment Modells and the role that discounting plays in creating their appeal. In addition, I will show that in a time of carbon and temperature overshoot much of what ecological economists have called and calculated as “natural capital” turns from asset into liability.
Paper short abstract
The paper examines energy governance through an empirical investigation of a valuation process within decarbonation public action. The little-known entanglements between energy governance and value economy are analysed in light of different governance problems and points to democratic challenges.
Paper long abstract
What does an analysis of energy governance through the lens of valuation processes offer, and how should it be carried out? This paper draws on a qualitative investigation conducted since 2024 in France, focusing on the mobilization of valuation practices and instruments in public action overseen by the regulatory authority and electricity network operators. Together with market actors and local authorities, they shape administrative, market-based, and technical devices to capture "flexibility reserves."
Analyzing this dynamic grounds two key insights. First, the paper identifies a vernacular value economy stabilized by a hierarchy of instruments appropriate to each energy governance problem. This observation helps to explain the coherence of governance over the long term: new administrative intervention modalities remain subordinate to market valuations, consistent with the governance established over two decades of liberalization. Second, the paper highlights the contingency of value hierarchies when an instrument values other objects and respond to different governance problems. The contrast between the system balancing and the minimization of investment costs in the networks shows that this contingency, through its effects on longstanding principles, must be considered extensively.
These observations lead to highlight some democratic challenges posed by these little-known entanglements between energy governance and valuation. One should grasp the optimism commonly associated with resilience, a notion close to flexibility, without losing sight of its other meaning: the capacity to cancel, to forget, to dismiss stabilized ways of living-together in order to cope with shocks; furthermore, while these are considered outside of democratic intervention.
Paper short abstract
Based on a case of rental ban of dwellings with low energy performance in France, this paper investigates a public policy of reconfiguring values and goods in housing markets. It shows the importance, for the value economy, to account for the entanglement of goods in multiple market agencements.
Paper long abstract
Is value destruction a legitimate and suitable means of government to achieve environmental objectives in contemporary market society? This is the unanticipated question that appeared in the public conversation in France in 2023 as a public policy rental ban of the most energy inefficient dwellings entered into force. Intended to spur retrofitting of low quality housing and overcome the 'landowner-tenant' dilemma, the regulation turned out to remove dwellings from the rental market, increase the housing crisis and drive down prices of these dwellings in the property market. The paper adopts the pragmatist empirical approach of ‘valuation studies’ with a case on ‘making good’ in the economy by getting rid of the ‘bads’. It shows how a valuation scale of energy and carbon performance, namely the energy label for building, was designed with a built-in concern for appraising both the ’good dwellings’ (the top of the scale) and the ‘bad ones’ (the bottom of the scale). It then describes how the scale and the rental ban on which it is indexed has played out in practice. Economics ’bads’ that could have been restored into goods through renovation spilled out on the capital value of properties. They turned out being moveable assets rather than ecologizeable dwellings. Highlighting how housing can be alternatively qualified as a good, a bad or an asset, this paper contributes to the theoretical inquiry on the value economy by suggesting that the entanglement of goods in multiple market agencements is key to its operation.
Paper short abstract
The paper studies a 2024 auction for a wind power subsidy in Norway. Market design was employed as a means to insert competitiveness in the awarding of a state subsidy for green industry. Multiple ideas of what a “market” is and how it may function for the greater good were simultaneously at play.
Paper long abstract
In March 2024, the Norwegian Ministry for Oil and Energy organized an auction to award a subsidy of up to €3 billion euro to produce electricity from wind power on the Norwegian continental shelf. This paper aims to study and contextualize the many-layered processes of valuation and ideas of what makes a market good that were involved in this auction. On a micro level, the consultancy firms carrying out the auction mobilized conceptualizations of markets as devices that would uncover truths. Both about the appropriate level of state subsidy, and about which of the profit-oriented consortiums participating in the auction that would be able to utilize the resource in question most efficiently. On a macro level, the auction was inscribed into ambitious political attempts of instigating an active industrial policy with the aim of combatting climate change and ushering in a green transition – justified specifically with references to how markets could not fix climate change “on their own” (Innset, 2024). Ultimately, however, market design was utilized in order to achieve a stated goal of breaking with market-based policies. The auction sought to create both private value in terms of profit, and common value in terms of electricity and a green transition. The paper addresses recent notions of “the good economy” (Asdal, 2022) and also fits into a stream of research in market studies about the organization of markets for collective concerns (Ossandón et al, 2019), and the “multiple markets problem” which has been identified therein (Frankel, 2019).
Paper short abstract
This paper argues that highly speculative crypto markets enact a value economy as critique. Focusing on pump.fun, it shows how valuation is organised through “negligible futures”: futures that are knowingly thin, ironic, and disposable, yet still generate attention and coordinated exchange.
Paper long abstract
This study addresses the panel’s question, “Can we perhaps see a value economy as a form of critique?” by arguing that we can, and that one place to observe this especially clearly is in meme-coin worlds. Focusing on pump.fun and related cryptocurrency environments, it examines how valuation unfolds in settings where long-term projects, credible roadmaps, and future-oriented narratives are not simply absent, but actively displaced.
I develop the concept of “negligible futures” to describe futures that are knowingly thin, ironic, disposable, or non-binding, yet still generative of attention, coordination, and exchange. In these spaces, value is produced less through utility or stable expectations than through apparent “nonsense”, practiced in the form of ironic play and cynical distancing. Visibility, rankings, and chat practices together form a valuation infrastructure that enables actors to engage without meaningful commitments to the future.
I argue that these practices should not be read merely as degraded finance or cynical speculation. Rather, they enact a critique on valuation practices within conditions of contemporary political-economic uncertainty. By elevating absurdity, disposability, and unseriousness into operative principles of valuation, meme-coin cultures render explicit how all economic value and valuation practices ultimately depend on attention and coordinated belief.
This study contributes to STS debates on valuation, economisation, and financialisation by showing how value can be organised through the circulation of futures that participants themselves treat as irrelevant. It thereby approaches valuation not only as an economic practice, but as critique immanent to the value economy itself.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how Polish startup market participants contest the logic of assetization. Through IDIs and observations, it reveals how actors invoke alternative regimes of justification to reclaim agency and subjectivity against the arbitrary structural power of VC funds.
Paper long abstract
Extensive literature on the startup market positions it as a domain par excellence of valuation driven by fictional expectations (Beckert, 2019), forcing participants to adopt the logic of assetization (Birch & Muniesa, 2020). Due to fundamental uncertainty - stemming from a lack of financial history and the novelty of business models - startup valuation processes rely on the projected ability of entities to generate future rents.
Drawing on 15 in-depth interviews (IDIs) with Polish startup ecosystem participants and 5 participant observations at industry events, I argue that market actors regularly contest the logic of assetization through their discursive practices. This resistance manifests primarily in the invocation of alternative regimes of justification (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006), such as ecosystem relationship-building, the social agency of proposed solutions, or the strategic bending of market participation rules.
By situating valuation studies within micro-social interactions, I interpret the recourse to non-market justifications as a practice of contesting the structural power inherent in Venture Capital markets (Cooiman, 2024). Expanding on the concept of reflexive expectations (Birch, 2023), I demonstrate that awareness of the arbitrary nature of market rules can manifest not only in the instrumentalization of the "game" to gain a competitive edge but also as an attempt to reclaim agency and subjectivity within the market space.
Keywords: Assetization, Startups, Structural Power, Fictional expectations
Paper short abstract
Gaming houses organise the valuation of esports players through metrics, visibility, and training infrastructures. This paper examines how these spaces transform play into a calculable and investable asset within the emerging value economy of esports.
Paper long abstract
Recent work in science and technology studies and valuation studies has emphasised that value is not an intrinsic property of goods but the outcome of situated valuation practices (Birch and Muniesa, 2020; Muniesa et al., 2017). This paper examines these processes in the esports industry by focusing on the role of gaming houses as infrastructures through which players' value is produced and stabilised.
Drawing on qualitative research on the European esports ecosystem, the paper investigates how gaming houses assemble architectural arrangements, digital metrics, streaming infrastructures, and organisational routines that render players visible and comparable. Within these spaces, players are evaluated not only through competitive performance but also through metrics of productivity, audience engagement, and brand potential. These calculative devices enable esports organisations to frame players as assets whose future value can be cultivated and circulated.
Building on recent work on assetisation (Birch and Muniesa, 2020; Callon, 2025), the paper argues that gaming houses function as sites where play is reorganised into a governable form of labour and where players become objects of valuation oriented toward future revenue and investment. In this sense, gaming houses operate as socio-technical infrastructures that align competitive performance, affective commitment, and market visibility.
By examining the everyday practices through which player value is enacted and negotiated, the paper contributes to STS debates on valuation, economisation, and assetisation. Esports provides a revealing empirical site for analysing how emerging digital industries transform play into assets within an evolving value economy.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how market research knowledge becomes valuable in institutional practice. Drawing on interviews and observations, we show how insights are framed, defended, or rejected, enacting a heterogeneous value economy shaped by organizational demands and epistemic norms.
Paper long abstract
Market research has long occupied a central role in the “intelligence ecosystem” of corporations, producing representations of customers as a service to inform decision-making. Yet in an era of digital data abundance and AI-driven analytics, its epistemic authority and economic relevance are increasingly contested. Drawing on qualitative interviews with market researchers and ethnographic observations at industry events in Austria, this paper investigates how market research knowledge is valued, contested, and circulates across organizational settings.
Building on Valuation Studies and STS approaches to performativity, we conceptualize market research as a site where a heterogeneous “value economy” is enacted. Our empirical material shows that market research knowledge acquires multiple, partly conflicting values: a substantive value (in the form of insight into customer behaviors and markets), an instrumental value (as legitimation or argumentative resource), and a symbolic value (e.g., signaling innovation through the use of AI). Valuation does not only concern results, but also methods, formats, and presenters. Storytelling, gendered forms of authority, and the “right” framing for specific decision-makers shape whether findings are incorporated into corporate decision making, ignored, or methodologically discredited.
We argue that these practices constitute a distinct mode of economization, in which knowledge circulates not merely as information but as a relational and reputational asset. By examining how market research knowledge is packaged, defended, and occasionally rejected, the paper shows how a specific “value economy” of knowledge is enacted: one that combines academic epistemic conventions with organizational demands for actionable and strategically mobilizable insights.
Paper short abstract
This paper studies how AI-based tools to produce natural capital accounts 'value' non-human environments and processes.
Paper long abstract
In 2021, the UN has adopted the revised System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA), aiming at the integration of natural capital and ecosystem services into official National Capital Accounts. To facilitate the implementation, several AI-based digital tools have been developed, developed by publicly funded research centers as well as private companies. Drawing on global data and models, they promise both government agecies and investors the rapid production and low-cost monitoring of natural capital accounts of landscapes even in data-scarce countries. But how do these tools ‘value’ natural entities and processes, and through which practices and based on which ‘values’ is natural capital in this case produced? Which contridictions arise between different valuation schemes present in this approach, i.e. ecological, climate-related or economic forms of valuation, and how are they addressed? Studying AI-based tools to value natural capital from a perspective of political ecology, STS and valution studies, I trace the production, dissemination and application of one of these tools in two different contextes, asking which logics and forms of valuation they are based on, how they relate to processes of assetization and financialization of non-human environment and which forms of governing landscapes and natural entities they bring forward.