Emotions and Valuations: Notre-Dame de Paris on Fire as a Case Study for Axiological Sociology

The emotional reactions aroused by the fire that partly destroyed Notre-Dame de Paris in April 2019 can be analyzed as “valuations” in the light of the pragmatic sociology of values, since they provide empirically grounded material allowing for the description and modeling of the actual implementations and effects of valuations. After a quick summary of the recent history of the pragmatic turn in sociology as related to the sociology of valuation, and a short reflection on the relationship between emotions and values, the fire of Notre-Dame de Paris is used as a case study in the light of “axiological sociology”, a model built on value judgments observed in various contexts, including the display of emotions. This article intends to demonstrate both empirically and theoretically how important it is for the social sciences to consider values as an autonomous issue, deserving to be treated as “axiological facts”, as any other kind of social fact.

Three Modes of Valuation Practices in Art Games

Several suggestions on distinguishing between “modes” of valuation practices are found in the literature. In this contribution, valuation practices are moves in a kind of social play that generates its own kind of value. Valuation in the Arts is chosen as an empirical example. Following the model, the Arts are interpreted as a set of games with the same kind of value code, in which artists and producers create performances for engaged and curious spectators. The four kinds of players engage in valuations of objects and other players in their respective games. The broad range of observations in art games demonstrates that valuation is practiced in three modes: attribution, assessment and payment. While practices of attribution and assessment generate and stabilize art-specific value accumulation, paying practices link the attributed and assessed values to the monetary valuation in games of commercial play. The distinctions of valuation practices employed by three recent authors are set into relation to the suggested modes.

Valuation Constellations

The focus on situated practices in current valuation studies becomes an obstacle when situations are too narrowly defined, when moments of valuation are treated as isolated events and especially when the interconnectedness of moments across situations and social fields is neglected. In order to overcome these limitations, we propose the concept of valuation constellations (Meier et al. 2016). Based on the literature on valuation the concept distinguishes positions and their relations, rules, and infrastructures. We present these three components of constellations and demonstrate the potential of the concept regarding three analytical puzzles of valuation analysis: historical change of valuation processes, the definition and solution of valuation problems, and the legitimacy of valuations. Each of the puzzles is illustrated with an empirical case, i.e. dating platforms and apps, higher education, and amateur reviewing. Going beyond situationalism, the valuation constellations perspective is key to understanding interconnected valuation processes.

‘It’s not like any survey I’ve ever seen before’: Discrete Choice Experiments as a Valuation Technology

This paper unpacks what happened when members of the local community were invited to design and test a valuation tool – specifically a discrete choice experiment – to find a valuation for New Zealand’s Otago Peninsula. We argue that the assumptions that lie within a discrete choice experiment are revealed when we look closely at how community participants react to the discrete choice experiment survey they have helped design. These assumptions, usually unnoticed, include the necessity of making trade-offs; what actions are possible; the ‘reality’ of one’s preference structures; the need for abstraction; and the importance of big picture patterns. We also argue that how these assumptions are negotiated in practice depends on complex power relationships between researchers, participants, and the technology itself. While we might seek to ‘empower’ the community with knowledge of economic processes and valuation practices, this might not be the empowerment they seek. Participants find ways to be active negotiators in the face of valuation technologies.

Ecologies of Valuation

When used consumer goods are exchanged, valuation proceeds differently than in markets for new goods. Many studies emphasize the social or socio-technical nature of valuation processes. This article outlines the difficulties inherent in these approaches when it comes to understanding valuation of used goods. These approaches, somewhat paradoxically, obscure the greater situatedness of contextualized “moments of valuation” in material flows and in relation to production processes. The ecological approach developed here shows that moments of valuation are never divorced from temporally and spatially prior and subsequent moments of valuation and waste production, and cannot be fully understood if not considered alongside the conditions in which the goods being valued are produced. The subtractive logic of ridding is crucial in the processes of production and valuation of used goods. This article draws on ethnographic and interview data from fourteen months of fieldwork in England to show how used books are valued in an ecology that stretches across connected moments and sites.

Dis/Assembling Value

In this text, we offer a vision of waste as integral and immanent to valuation practices and argue that engaging with waste materials can thereby significantly contribute to the field of valuation studies. We lay special emphasis on the intertwined practices and processes of assembling and disassembling value and waste. Creating value is a process of joining together: classifying, grouping, combining, making, re-forming. Yet it is also a process where persons, things, parts of bodies, or landscapes are disentangled, abandoned, dismissed, or corrupted. The notion of disassembly attracts attention not only to the center of the action of valuation but also to its peripheries—to things and materials which are cast aside, to spaces which accommodate that which has been disassembled, and the ambiguities and potentialities opened up by processes of disassembly. Thinking with waste also pushes us to think about how various regimes of value are connected and how they coexist and/or compete. As such, waste is not a coherent thing, but rather one that gets displaced and transformed in valuing practices which coexist in various ways.

From Trash to Treasure

The paper, based on an ongoing research project conducted in Finland, examines voluntary dumpster diving as a practice of valuation. Its main questions are: How is voluntary dumpster diving intertwined with the question of value? And, conversely, what can dumpster diving teach us about practices of valuation more generally? The article proceeds via three steps. First, in order to emphasize the creative side of dumpster diving as a practice of valuation, we draw on Georg Simmel’s theory of value, supplementing it with the concepts of actuality and virtuality, as elaborated by Gilles Deleuze. Second, we look more closely into the practicalities of valuation evident in dumpster diving. It involves a particular orientation to the urban environment that we call the scavenger gaze. Third, the informants also value the practice itself in relation to its societal relevance. They think about dumpster diving as a way of doing good and as part of an ecologically sound form of life. All in all, as value does not reside inherently in waste or would simply be merely the product of subjective judgment, the analyst must attend to multiple modes of valuation evident in the practice, among which there is no self-evident hierarchy.

Sorting, shredding and smelting scrap

The global economy of e-waste recycling has received much attention in recent waste studies literature. This article gives an account from the inside of two different sites within a leading high-tech recycling and smelting company in which such e-waste is assessed; and discusses the valuation of electronic waste in the course of its industrial processing. Based on a two-month long ethnography by way of an internship, the article examines how the recycler manages to distinguish and separate out valuable ‘scrap’, in contrast to valueless ‘waste’. The article subdivides the inquiry into two questions. What practices are involved when transforming e-waste into scrap and waste? And how can we appreciate differences in how they are configured? The study of two different facilities in operation next to one another provides additional leverage to the inquiry since the valuation practices involved when assessing the incoming e-waste differ between them. Differences are tied to specificities in how the electronics are sorted out, shredded, and smelted. The article shows how these processes of deformation are linked to the valuation practices and the accounting system of the company. Calculations, it is argued, succeed only because things are literally broken.

Communicating Credibility by Expert Service Workers

One of the fastest-growing occupational groups in the US is expert service workers: knowledge workers who sell their expert knowledge and services on the free market. In this paper, we offer a comparative case study of how expert service workers, whom are hired for their professional evaluations, navigate the tensions of the expert service-client relation in a specific but critical way: How do they convince others that their professional recommendations are credible? Specifically, we draw on two disparate cases of expert evaluators, book reviewers and management consultants, and document two communicative patterns that these professional groups use to build the credibility of their professional recommendations: (i) transparency and (ii) distanciation. Similarities in the credibility tactics of these two sets of expert service workers from two very different worlds, the Arts and business, suggest their generalizable value. Hence, we conclude by discussing how our findings offer a general approach we call, the evaluative triangle, for studying the credibility tactics of expert claims across multiple worlds of work.