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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.