|
|
- Experiences of Digitized Valuation
Authors: Francis Lee, Andrea Mennicken, Jacob Reilley, Malte Ziewitz
Pages: 1 - 8
PubDate: 2024-05-02
DOI: 10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2024.11.1.1-8
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 1 (2024)
- Angry Citizens and Black Belt Employees: Cascading classifications of and
around a predictive algorithm
Authors: Lise Justesen, Ursula Plesner
Pages: 9 - 37
Abstract: Over past decades, predictive algorithms have been used extensively as profiling tools in the private sector, but today they are also increasingly entering public sector domains. This article builds on an ethnographic study of the development of a predictive algorithm in a debt collecting public sector organization. The algorithm was designed to profile citizens on the basis of their calculated ‘readiness to pay’ their debt and to guide employees’ case handling according to ‘type’ of citizen. The article examines how the classification of citizens produced by the algorithm was mediated by different visualizations and by organizational actors who superimposed new and different classifications (moral and emotional) onto those provided by the algorithm. The article draws on the concepts of nominal and ordinal classification to identify how intended non-hierarchical classification glides into new hierarchical valuations of both citizens and employees. Classifications were ‘cascading’ – a concept the article develops to account for how classification of and around the algorithm multiplied and had organizational ripple effects. Based on empirical insights, the study advocates an agnostic approach to how algorithmic predictions impact work, organizations, and the situation of profiled individuals. It emphasizes a dynamic and and unstable relationship between algorithms and organizational practices.
PubDate: 2024-05-02
DOI: 10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2024.11.1.9-37
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 1 (2024)
- Digital Valuation: Lessons in relevance from the prototyping of a
recommendation app
Authors: Celia Lury, Sophie Day, Andre Simon, Martín Tironi, Matías Valderrama, Scott Wark
Pages: 38 - 59
Abstract: This article describes the use of a prototype recommendation app to explore how users are included and/or excluded in categories of various kinds of ‘People Like You’. In the study, interviews with users of the prototype app indicate that the experience of receiving personalized recommendations isroutinely evaluated in terms of relevance, that is, as either of interest to them or as beside the point, as accurate or inaccurate, with accuracy often understood as recognition of their context(s). We build on the interviews to develop an analysis which suggests that the capacity of recommendation systems to make relevant recommendations is a function of the parallel projections – from the app on one side and users on the other – that are made as part of an interaction order. In developing this analysis, we reflect on the implications of the interaction order for the inclusion and exclusion of users in categories or kinds of people. We highlight the importance of the temporal formatting of interaction as a continuous present for the relation between belonging and belongings, and thus for the creation of a datasset (Beauvisage and Mellett 2020).
PubDate: 2024-05-02
DOI: 10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2024.11.1.38-59
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 1 (2024)
- Valuing Data: Attaching online data to stakes, selves, and other data
Authors: Susann Wagenknecht, Laura Kocksch, Stefan Laser, Ann-Kristin Kühnen
Pages: 60 - 90
Abstract: As datafication proceeds rapidly, a large, unwieldy amount of data is available online. In this article, we ask: How valuable is this data, how is it made valuable' To answer this question, we study how online data is endowed with worth in virtual collaboration workshops. Our workshops challenged participants to assert and question the worth of online data – a challenge that participants addressed by using a set of techniques of which we describe collage, hierarchy building, and calculation. Data, we show, gains value through attachment. Thinking with attachment, we foreground affect, materiality, and the situatedness of valuing online data. As ethnographers, we study how data, as haphazard as it comes, is attached to the circumstances and stakes at hand, to ourselves and to other data. Our study contributes a conceptual perspective that attends to the shifting boundaries of the personal and the public, tensions between locality and generality, the role of contiguity, and the limits of combinatorial connectivity.
PubDate: 2024-05-02
DOI: 10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2024.11.1.60-90
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 1 (2024)
- Judging by the Rules' The emergence of evaluation practices
Authors: Stacy Lom
Pages: 91 - 137
Abstract: How does evaluation work differently, and how do evaluation practices emerge, in different contexts' Drawing on a mixed-methods study of evaluation in figure skating and classical music, I discuss the divergent evaluative cultures in these settings, especially in terms of how formal and standardized they are, to consider how and why evaluation practices change over time and why different settings use different evaluation practices. I emphasize the importance of organizational structure, including context, competition structure, degree of centralization, and governance structure. My findings suggest that highly centralized settings governed by more powerful organizations and where competitions build on each other tend to use more formal and standardized evaluation practices compared to other settings with fewer constraints. Understanding how evaluation practices develop and what they look like in different contexts is important because in addition to influencing the objects of evaluation and perceived fairness and legitimacy, these practices often affect outcomes, which have significant consequences for participants.
PubDate: 2024-05-02
DOI: 10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2024.11.1.91-137
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 1 (2024)
- Contested Commensuration: The case of a valuation instrument for
historical buildings
Authors: Tineke C. Van der Schoor, Alexander Peine, Harro van Lente
Pages: 138 - 161
Abstract: Environmental values are becoming increasingly important in restoration of historical buildings, while energy interventions can seriously damage historical qualities. Cultural-historical values and environmental values are often considered difficult to commensurate, with energy engineers and heritage experts adhering to widely differing values and relating to different discourses. Valuation instruments are devised to deal with such value conflicts in restoration projects. In this article we study what such instruments perform in the case of assessing historical buildings. We ask how these instruments work, and how they afford, support and guide valuation processes' Furthermore, we enquire what is achieved and what is lost in the reconciliation of values. Theoretically, we start from the notion of commensuration, which allows comparison of values through a shared metric. Empirically, this research note examines the history and use of DuMo, an instrument that aims to reconcile cultural – historical and environmental values and provides a range of sustainable restoration strategies. We find that DuMo indeed performs commensuration of these conflicting values, but also keeps intact the epistemic authority of the two professions. Our claim thus is that valuation instruments can successfully perform commensuration while at the same being contested by involved professionals.
PubDate: 2024-05-02
DOI: 10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2024.11.1.138-161
Issue No: Vol. 11, No. 1 (2024)
- Valuation as a Semiotic, Narrative, and Dramaturgical Problem
Authors: Fabian Muniesa, José Ossandón
Pages: 1 - 9
Abstract:
PubDate: 2023-12-14
DOI: 10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2023.10.1.1-9
Issue No: Vol. 10, No. 1 (2023)
- The Semiosis of Stock Market Indices: Taking Charles Sanders Peirce to a
Trading Room
Authors: Tom Duterme
Pages: 10 - 31
Abstract: Stock market indices are among the signs populating financial markets and allowing traders to support their valuation work. The movements of the Dow Jones and the S&P 500 are constantly monitored, but how are they interpreted' Is this interpretation unique to each trader' Does it depend on how the indices are communicated' Considering these questions, this article aims to illustrate the heuristic interests of Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotics. Peirce’s concepts can elucidate that stock indices assume different semiotic statuses. Depending on the financial context in which they operate, their signification and thus their function for traders will vary. This article demonstrates the usefulness of these concepts through empirical illustrations drawn from the literature, the financial press and a fieldwork in a trading room. Beyond this case study, this article reveals how the Peircian toolbox contributes to the studies of valuation signs.
PubDate: 2023-12-14
DOI: 10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2023.10.1.10-31
Issue No: Vol. 10, No. 1 (2023)
- “What is Design Worth'” Narrating the Assetization of
Design
Authors: Ulises Navarro Aguiar
Pages: 32 - 57
Abstract: This article explores how financial logics and investment rationalities are intersecting with and shaping the expert discourse and practice of professional design. It uses “assetization” as a conceptual category to make sense of recent efforts to account for the value of design in financial terms. Specifically, the article provides a narrative-semiotic analysis of a report on “The Business Value of Design” published by McKinsey & Company, unfolding how design is valued in terms of its capacity to deliver future earnings for shareholders, and thus made to acquire the asset form. The article foregrounds how can the assetization of design be understood not only as evidence of the gradual spread of financialized valuations, but also as an organizing act underpinned by a script that activates characters and defines frames of action around the use of design in firms. It shows how this script entangles the coordinated expansion and monitoring of design activities within firms with the fervor for shareholder value maximization and capital gains, drawing a convenient line of causation between them as a near certainty. The article contributes to our understanding of how the cultural condition that makes the spread of assetization possible is to an important extent established in the ongoing and everyday work of striving to systematize and increase creativity in organizations.
PubDate: 2023-12-14
DOI: 10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2023.10.1.32-57
Issue No: Vol. 10, No. 1 (2023)
- The Emergence of the Academic Candidate: Evaluation as textual dramaturgy
Authors: Julian Hamann, Kathia Serrano Velarde
Pages: 58 - 89
Abstract: Our contribution sheds light on the dramaturgies of evaluation that precede candidate selection in academic organizations. The dramaturgies unfold across committee meetings, reviews, and reports that funnel the pool of candidates into a shortlist of prospective members. Because they are prolonged and not all stages involve copresence, the continuity and consistency of evaluative processes is a central dramaturgical problem. It highlights the constitutive role of written documents for the continuity and consistency of organizational evaluation processes. We marshal evidence from a comparative study on academic candidacy in two organizational settings: grantmakers, who select candidates for funding, and universities, who select candidates for professorships. Drawing on archived records produced in the context of research grant applications and professorial recruitments between 1950 and 2000, we distinguish two regimes of textual agency throughout the processes of evaluation: documents structure the process of candidate selection throughout dramaturgical stages, and they act as relays that transfer assessments of human actors across dramaturgical stages and time. In addition, by focusing on organizational access and showing how organizations make people before even hiring them, we draw attention to the emergence of a highly scripted dramatic figure in academic life: the candidate.
PubDate: 2023-12-14
DOI: 10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2023.10.1.58-89
Issue No: Vol. 10, No. 1 (2023)
- Interpellating Finance – a dramaturgical model for green bond
pricing
Authors: Alessandro Maresca, Giulia Dal Maso, Aneil Tripathy
Pages: 90 - 117
Abstract: Global financial governance is turning green. Attempting to tackle climate change, financial elites seem to swing confusingly between hesitant and action aimed at relieving the contradictions that led to the crisis, and opportunistic co-optation of critical discourse. Drawing on the work of Althusser, Laclau and Butler, we describe the historical emergence of this green financial apparatus and the related proliferation of green labels and signifiers. Green labels serve as the malleable ground on which a diversity of meanings and positions are articulated and temporarily fixed. Labels are the names through which financiers are interpellated and constituted as green ideological subjects. Through an analysis of the mechanisms of green bonds pricing, and of the actors involved in a green bond boot camp, we contend that the added value of green financial instruments, called the greenium, cannot merely be attributed to the performativity of models and formulas for risk engineering. Rather, it is the material effect of a subjectivation apparatus attuned to the existing relations of production. Ultimately, the greenness which becomes encrypted in the greenium is a process of translation of language of capital valorisation, performed through the tendency of capital to reproduce relations of exploitation in transitional time.
PubDate: 2023-12-14
DOI: 10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2023.10.1.90-117
Issue No: Vol. 10, No. 1 (2023)
- Performing Nature’s Valuation: The art of natural capital accounting
Authors: Sylvain Maechler, Valérie Boisvert
Pages: 118 - 147
Abstract: Accounting for nature as capital is touted as a promising way of aligning environmental conservation with global capitalism by valuing nature like economic assets. Both its proponents and detractors speculate on what its promises might achieve if they were fully realized, i.e., if nature were actually accounted for, capitalized or commodified. There is, however, an enduring disjunction between vision and execution in this field: the promises simply do not materialize. Economizing nature proves to be extremely complex, raising not only technical hurdles but also intractable conceptual and ontological issues. We suggest taking a critical realist approach to natural capital accounting, acknowledging the inherent resistance of nature to being treated as capital. We consider the arenas dedicated to natural capital accounting as the sites of singular dramaturgical performances, whose effects extend beyond the integration of nature into economic decision making. Drawing on documents, interviews and observations at events dedicated to natural capital accounting, we highlight their theatrical character and reveal the effects they produce. This article aims to contribute to the investigation of environmental governance arenas by emphasizing their significance as venues for symbolic performance and achievement, extending beyond the traditional emphasis on regulatory and hoped-for environmental transformations.
PubDate: 2023-12-14
DOI: 10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2023.10.1.118-147
Issue No: Vol. 10, No. 1 (2023)
- Valuation through Narrative Intelligibility
Authors: Patrycja Kaszynska
Pages: 148 - 166
Abstract: Narrative intelligibility is central to making sense of valuation. Narrative intelligibility is a framing device that combines empirical observation and situated interaction with teleological, purpose-oriented, normative inquiry. Thus understood, narrative intelligibility provides a useful analytical frame to explain how the phenomenon of valuation is practised. At the same time – and on the level of research – it bridges synthetically different traditions of thought, including actor–network theory’s descriptive accounts of valuation practices and humanities-grounded, normative theories of value. As such, narrative intelligibility offers a way of avoiding the alleged weakness of overstating the agency of devices and material actors in actor–network informed approaches, without however seeking to relocate analysis into the ‘ineffable’ realm of purely theoretical constructs, the way some humanities scholars are said to have done. The argument shows that the humanities-derived understanding of values, approached in terms of standards of justification and norms of criticism, can be combined with the vernacular concepts of valuation from actor–network theory in a way that promises a unified research agenda going forward.
PubDate: 2023-12-14
DOI: 10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2023.10.1.148-166
Issue No: Vol. 10, No. 1 (2023)
- Design and the Polysemy of Value: On a problem within the language of
valuation studies
Authors: Johannes Coughlan
Pages: 167 - 197
Abstract: Value and valuation are notoriously difficult terms, because they mean very different things in different contexts for different scholars. This problem can be described in linguistic terms as “polysemy”. In this article, I propose to reformulate the problem of value through the lens of polysemy as a problem within language. I offer an alternative to approaches that either narrow down value to one particular definition or disregard it altogether, turning value into a container concept for a variety of concerns. I seek thereby to avoid the twin risks of fragmentation or smothering. Following the lead of ordinary language philosophy, I distinguish between three different “grammars of value”. Scholars address value differently depending on their grammar. This shows best in the ways they present value as an intuitively intelligible phenomenon, and in the ways in which they challenge such intuitive understandings of value in their studies. To illustrate these grammatical distinctions, I refer to ethnographic studies of design practices, including excerpts from my own research in a German architecture office.
PubDate: 2023-12-14
DOI: 10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2023.10.1.167-197
Issue No: Vol. 10, No. 1 (2023)
|
Open Access journal
