Locating Value

Theory, Application and Critique

Samantha Saville, Gareth Hoskins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138852235
• eBook ISBN: 9781317528692
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book considers the concept of 'value' at the root of our actions and decision-making. Value is an ever-present, yet little interrogated aspect of everyday life. This book explores value as it is theorised, practiced and critiqued from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.

It examines how value is operationalized, endorsed and contested in contemporary society. With international insights from leading scholars, chapters offer a diverse and vibrant geographical engagement with value to showcase its conceptual flexibility. The book explores value's eclectic epistemic foundations; it's 'roll-out' and legitimation across a range of policy fields; and its challenges and opportunities. The book draws on global examples of value in practice: from forest conservation in Indonesia; protected area management in arctic Norway; a state park in the US; certification schemes for biodiversity in the UK; protection of the international night sky; heritage planning in East Taiwan; a re-developed airport site in Norway; a, local food networks in Canada and the UK; a market in the US and urban development in China.

The book will be of interest to human geographers, political ecologists, heritage scholars and practitioners, planners and those working in public policy, as well as practitioners and policy makers interested in how valuation processes work.

1 Locating value

An introduction

Samantha Saville and Gareth Hoskins

This edited volume provides a critical and reflexive consideration of value as it is theorized, applied, and critiqued across a range of disciplinary perspectives, including economic, environmental and cultural geography, heritage and museum studies, political ecology, sociology, and urban and regional planning. The collection explores value’s conceptual utility in a wide range of geographical and institutional contexts.

Value’s rapidly growing currency in social, cultural, and environmental policy is the latest manifestation of our long-running faith in a concept that has been so central to the philosophy of ethics, aesthetics, and economics as developed through Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, and Marx. In a 21st-century world responding to uncertainty and loss with ever-more-elaborate and varied forms of measurement, value is often regarded as something of a panacea. It can be ‘wasted’ in ineffective social programmes, not properly accounted for in poor public auditing, and ‘accrued’ by various techniques of management. This volume examines how value comes to feature in contemporary society and how it is figured, operationalized, endorsed, and contested. It reflects the diversity of value-related critical enquiry that is currently underway in the humanities and social sciences.

Locating Value takes as its starting point the idea that value, whatever else it may be and whatever purpose it serves, is a spatial practice. It is both an abstract form of spacing (by separation, matching, ranking, listing, and grading in comparison on a chart to generate distance and therefore allow exchange through equivalence) and an exercise in physical spacing (a judgement that prompts physical transformation in objects, buildings, places, and landscapes because of the institutional, symbolic, material constellations that judgement generates). Moreover, the act of valuation is “spatially and temporally localized” (Hutter and Stark, 2015, p. 4), and our collective mission is to more effectively locate value: to unpack, explain, and illustrate how value is understood and operationalized. In locating value, we hope to demonstrate the utility of thinking about value geographically. What happens when we think about value as an explicitly spatial phenomenon? What difference does it make to our understanding and theorizing of value if it is recognized as always being located and/or involved in the act of locating? How are certain spaces shaped in the pursuit, or defence, of value and in value’s declaration and articulation, and how do those spaces recursively act back on the systems of measurement to help frame what we understand as good, bad, or indifferent?

Rather than work towards a single unifying logic of value, chapters reflect value’s conceptual elasticity. They outline value’s eclectic epistemic foundations and imperatives; examine value’s rollout and legitimation across a range of policy fields; and sketch the contours of its challenge. The scope and flexibility of value as both a scholarly analytic and a governing technology is indicated through the book’s coverage of precisely where and how value touches down: forest conservation in Indonesia; protected area management in arctic Svalbard; heritage planning in East Taiwan; local food networks in New Brunswick, Canada, and Plymouth, UK; a redeveloped Norwegian airport site; an open-air street market in Chicago; urban development in Jiangsu Province, China; a state park in the mountains of California; certification schemes for biodiversity offsetting in the UK; and protection of the international night sky.

This introductory chapter outlines our own thinking around this concept and the foregrounding influences and works that have contributed to it. These are not indicative of the wide range of perspectives that the collection represents; there is, we believe, ‘value’ in the plurality of views we are able to showcase in this book. Moreover, value has been and remains contentious and contested in how we as coauthors have come to know and employ it. This is not smooth, well-trodden intellectual ground, and we have travelled through plenty of potholes and rough terrain in our ongoing discussions.

Why value?

Value is now all-pervasive in formal public conversation. Its popularity in policymaking is due in no small part to its discursive flexibility, providing the appearance of scientific objectivity and technical precision while gesturing to outcomes that extend beyond the economic. In this current discursive moment, value is employed, worried over, and increasingly researched. Government, think tanks, consultancies, charity organizations, and research councils refine methods for calculating value’s non-economic expression in terms of nature, health, well-being, heritage, public spirit, and art. The focus of our concern is less about anguished metaphysical questions over what value is ontologically and more about value’s epistemics: how value is defined, standardized, practised, mobilized, resisted and made to function in relation to other values. It is about what value comes to mean and how it is legitimized through “data”, itself legitimized as “evidence”, by those in authority to justify or remove funding. As Helgesson and Muniesa point out, “the performance of valuations are thus not only ubiquitous; their outcomes participate in the ordering of society” (2013, p. 3). Moreover, value is wholly political: “different tropes and deployments of value strike different political points” (Henderson, 2013, p. 34).

Outside policy arenas, value is becoming more prevalent as a form of social critique. Popular books such as Raj Patel’s The Value of Nothing (2011), Michael Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy (2012), and Jerry Muller’s The Tyranny of Metrics (2018) have encouraged us to question how capitalist societies are practising value. We are becoming increasingly used to seeing all manner of companies, charities, institutions, and individuals discussing, declaring, and marketing their values. Since the 2016 UK Referendum on leaving or remaining in the EU, the conversation around what ‘British values’ are has heightened. The search for value is also consuming considerable resources and intellectual energies.

Value has been key in broad developments of economic and political philosophy. Early philosophical discussions and publications include The Journal of Value Inquiry, which has been in print since 1967, and Hartman’s The Structure of Value: Foundations of Scientific Axiology was published in the same year. Values have been a topic of consideration in cultural studies (e.g. Cultura: International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology) and in discussions on behaviour change and attitudes, particularly in the environmental realm (e.g. the Environmental Values periodical). What is interesting is the recent shift from the philosophical to the applied and the related shift from values to valuation. One indication of this trend is the founding of the journal Valuation Studies in 2013, which specifically covers discussions of valuation as a social practice (Helgesson and Muniesa, 2013). To take some UK examples, in 2012 the Leverhulme Centre for the Study of Value was founded and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Cultural Values Project began the following year. This led to further research and eventually a Centre for Cultural Value being established. The Valuing Nature project, funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) initially, ran from 2011 to 2014 and is likewise continuing to be funded by several UK research councils. Both projects aim to identify and understand value in their respective cultural and natural realms and to “capture” these values via evaluative practices, a recognizably challenging task. After all, can valuations be adequately “robust” as Valuing Nature calls for? Can we really effectively and accurately “capture” it? And if so, who and what has the power and authority to define its limits and evaluative criteria? The chapters in Locating Value confront and examine these efforts to capture value. Collectively, we open up the black boxes of often-obscured or unquestioned definitions, assumptions, criteria, and practices that are caught up in such proliferating value practices. First, however, we briefly look at terminology and past works.

Value semantics

Despite the many uses and meanings that “value” is associated with, at the core of value lies the notion of how important something is. Scholars of value concern themselves with how we define what that importance is (Brosch and Sander, 2016). In this vein, Chang proclaims “value is the aim and centre of all human activities and [the] whole [of] human life” (2001, p. 68). While Chang’s claim can certainly be refuted, it raises important questions: What is this value, so central yet slippery in meaning? Is it an exclusively human concept? Value is also an everyday term that can take on more nuanced but often-unexplained and often-uninterrogated meanings.

The muddled ways we use the word “value” provide a telling example (Miller, 2008; Skeggs, 2014). The singular article, “value”, is often connected to, or synonymous with, a monetary equivalence, or at least taken to be something that can be measured and quantified. We might think of “value for money” or “best value” and the various evaluations and quantifications involved in attributing such labels to an item or service. Conversely, the plural of value does not usually mean multiple quantities. Rather, values are more associated with “subjective feelings”, personally held principles by which to live by (Leyshon, 2014) or that which is “held dear” (Lee, 2006; Latour, 2013). Values appear to be qualitative, non-exchangeable and cannot be de-linked from their source, the valuer, or as Miller (2008), describes –in Marxist terminology – values are “inalienable”. However, the phrase “value judgement” usually implies a decision based on personal views or standards and not on quantifiable evidence:

Most people seem blissfully unconcerned with the fact that they use a single term value which can mean both one thing and its very opposite. But what if that is the point? That what value does, is precisely to create a bridge between value as price and values as inalienable, because this bridge lies at the core of what could be called the everyday cosmologies by which people, and indeed companies and governments live?

(Miller, 2008, p. 1123)

It is those everyday cosmologies that we are interested in. Similarly, Roger Lee brings the terms “values” and “value” closer together by examining “social relations of value”, that how “people engage in consumption and production and condition the ways in which they come to understand their relationship to the natural and social world” (Lee, 2006, p. 419). Likewise, Bev Skeggs argues that it is the relationships between, and production of, value and values that we should focus on rather than defining exactly what it is/they are. Value, then, to those that would study and analyse its workings at least, becomes a practice, a verb (see Cresswell, this volume); valuations are devised with various component parts and actors assembling to construct calculative devices; valuing, or valuation, is something that is done and performs work (Carolan, 2013) – a social practice (Helgesson and Muniesa, 2013).

Value, as it is acted on and practised, can reveal much about how a system is operating (Raz, 2001). Identifying or detecting and tracing value(s) is a necessary step towards analysing the movements, processes, and contingencies of value. The tools, institutions, and methods of assigning and legitimizing value are fundamental. In analysing value, we need to give due consideration to how value is categorized/measured/judged/“qualculated” (because calculations may not always be quantitative or about pricing, this term incorporates both [Callon and Law, 2003]) and what roles material and human “calculative agencies” (Callon, 1998) play in this work.

The trouble with value

Before we proceed, we will reflect on the difficulties, debates, and challenges that accompany an engagement with value as a theoretical lens or object/subject of critique, some of which are aptly expressed by Ginsberg:

Value inquiry has loose ends. It is untidy, restless, imperfect, doubt-filled… . value inquiry offers a model for philosophy as conduct, drawing upon our intellectual impulse to continue, and cautioning against our intellectual impulse to conclude.

(Ginsberg, 2001, p. 4)

A model philosophy that continues to question does not necessarily sound too troublesome, but the difficulties of working with value crops up in the writings of several prominent “value workers”. The literary scholar Barbara Herrstein Smith describes value and value systems as “scrappy” and “discordant and conflictual” (1988, p. 148). George Henderson in his exploration of Marx’s value theory, writes, “value is very difficult to think” (2013, p. 4). More generously, Michael Carolan (2013) prefers to think of value as “wild” and not easily fitting into disciplinary structures. To examine where all this anguish comes from, we take a brief tour around the value landscape.

Value theory, called the labour theory of value, is at the centre of Marxist ideas. David Harvey’s development of this approach is indicative: according to Doel, “everything hinges on value” (Doel, 2006, p. 55), yet value in Marx is an obscure and complex concept (Henderson, 2013; Harvey, 2016). Although Marxism is “indispensable” to political economy in enabling generalizations about capitalism (Christophers, 2014), the focus has been on value production and commodities, with value defined quite specifically through labour. This concentration on production and exchangeable commodities often limits the perspective to the economic arena (Springer, 2014). Christophers (2014) argues that bringing the performativity of the market into contact with Marxist theory of value could recoup Marxism’s explanatory power by including those missing elements of what happens when value is exchanged, consumed, and distributed through markets. Yet capitalist value is thoroughly entangled with social values (Kay and Kenney-Lazar, 2017), and as the chapters within this volume attest to, there are many value frameworks and practices that fall outside capitalist market relations: engaging a strictly Marxist theory of value in exploring our socio-natural world overly narrows the analysis. If we loosen the ties of value theory from the use-exchange economic value paradigm, we can open up to working with other theoretical angles such as vital materialism, assemblage, and actor-network theories (see Fredriksen et al., 2014 for a conceptual mapping review). We can, however, retain a critical approach and the fundamental principle that value is a social relation (Harvey 2016; Skeggs 2014) rather than a thing, making it all the more difficult to track down, because, to use the famous expression, “value doesn’t stalk around with a sign on its head” (Marx, 2010 [1887]).

Baudrillard’s theory of value takes a linguistic turn to posit that values are thoroughly relational in that they rely on opposing terms – for example, beauty and ugliness – to define themselves. Such systems and moral judgements that come with them favour the positive side of the opposing pair: beauty in this case (Clarke, 2010). Therefore, as David B. Clarke argues, there is much that value excludes, and the concept cannot be relied on as a self-sufficient principle, but value is in fact a “conceptual virus” (2010, p. 235), whereby everything has value, which comes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Locating value: An introduction
• Part I Knowing value
• Part II Spacing value
• Part III Practising value
• Index