Making Things Valuable

What if value is neither an intrinsic quality of an object nor a reflection of a subject's preferences - but rather something that is organized and brought into existence through mechanisms, technologies and practices of valuation?

This edited book addresses the question of valuation theoretically and through empirical analyses of diverse objects of valuations, such as university ranking lists, ice skating scoring, wind power, insurances, gold and big data. The theoretical inspiration is interdisciplinary and the volume brings together scholars from economic sociology, accounting, organization studies, and science and technology studies with the aim of understanding through which practices and processes things are made valuable.

Valuing is understood as a plural activity where 'pricing' things is just one way of signifying value. Socio-economic reality is constituted through different 'orders of worth' that are grounded in the way people 'praise' and 'prize' things.

The book is arranged around five concerns that underpin the debate about making things valuable. These concerns are: calculating/economizing; commensurating/switching; visualizing/hiding; modelling/tracing; and knowing/disciplining.

Martin Kornberger, Professor, Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School,Lise Justesen,Associate Professor, Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School,Jan Mouritsen,Professor, Department of Operations Management, Copenhagen Business School,Anders Koed Madsen,Assistant Professor, Techno Anthropology Research Group, Dept. of Education, Learning and Philosophy, Aalborg University Copenhagen

Martin Kornberger is professor of Strategy and Organisation at Copenhagen Business School and visiting professor at the WU Wien. He received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Vienna, followed by a decade at the University of Technology, Sydney where he worked last as associate professor for design and management and research director of the Australian government's Creative Industry Innovation Centre. Next to articles in scholarly journals such as Organization Studies, Accounting, Organization and Society, Strategic Organization and others he is author of Brand Society. How Brands Transform Management and Lifestyle (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and has co-authored two textbooks, one on strategy and one on organization behavior.


Lise Justesen is Associate Professor at the department of Organization at Copenhagen Business School She has an MA in philosophy from Copenhagen University and a PhD from the Doctoral School of Managing Technologies, Copenhagen Business School. She is particularly interested in the intersections between organizing, management technologies and non-financial accounting practices. Her work is inspired by actor-network theory.

Jan Mouritsen is professor at Copenhagen Business School. His research is oriented towards understanding the role of Management Technologies and Management Control in various organisational and social contexts. He focuses on empirical research and attempts to develop new ways of understanding the role and effects of controls and financial information in organisations and society. He is interested in translations and interpretations made of (numerical) representations (e.g. as in budgets, financial reports, non-financial indicators and profitability analysis) throughout the contexts they help to illuminate. His interests include Intellectual Capital and Knowledge Management, Technology Management, Operations Management, New Accounting and Management Control. Jan Mouritsen is currently editorial board member of 22 academic journals in the various areas of management and business research including accounting, operations management, IT and knowledge management.

Anders Koed Madsen is Assistant Professor at Aalborg University Copenhagen, where he is part of the Techno Anthropoligy Reseach Group. Drawing on his background in philosophy, new media studies and organizational theory, Anders does research on the way new forms of digital data and analytical software set new conditions for the production of knowledge in public and private organizations as well as in academia. In order to explore this question, he is simultaneously engaged in experimenting with digital methods and anlyzing organizations working with similar techniques. Theoretically Anders is inspired by various strands of Science and Technology Studies as well as different versions of pragmatic theory.