6th LATIN AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN MEETING ON ORGANIZATION STUDIES
Viña del Mar – Chile 6 – 9 April 2016.
Call for Papers: Sub-Theme #12 The organization of Multiple and Contested modes of Valuation
Economic sociologists, anthropologists of markets, organization theorists, accounting scholars and others have brought the notion of value (back) on the agenda (Antal et al. 2015, Beckert & Aspers 2011, Kornberger et al. 2015). In this context value is not understood as a noun but as a specific social and material practice: rather than trying to define value as essence, the focus is on valuation practices and technologies of valuing. Here it becomes central to follow the trials (experiments, sales, revenue lists) and devices (rankings, ratings, surveys) that make things (firms, consumers, goods) comparable, accountable, rankable, in short: valuable.
The sub-theme continues discussion initiated at the successfully stimulating Sub-theme 12 of the fifth LEAMOS Colloquium in Havana (“Valuation devices and processes of organizing”). This time – and responding to the colloquium’s aim: “to share empirical and theoretical research on the multiplicity of logics that shape current forms of organizing in and beyond Latin American and European societies” – we invite scholars to reflect on the co-existence of multiple modes of valuation in organizational settings. The sub-theme aims to provide space for conceptual and empirical papers, mobilizing different theoretical resources and / or practical cases. We welcome papers reflecting on some of the following issues:
– Case studies dealing with friction (e.g. Stark 2009) caused by the co-existence of different valuation criteria in single organizational settings
– Comparative analyzes of different modes of valuing (for instance, quantitative and ordinal lists, e.g. Guyer 2010)
– Comparative studies about similar valuation devices used to assess different entities (firms, markets, industries, non-profit organizations)
– Comparative studies of ‘fair value’ assessing practices
– Controversies where social movements, consumer or affected groups contest or produce alternatives modes of valuing organizations or economic goods (e.g. Dubuisson-Quellier 2013)
– Strategies used to skillfully deal with or avoid annoying metrics (e.g. Kreiner 2012)
– Studies about rankings that fail
– Comparisons of different conceptual and theoretical approach to valuing (e.g. McFall & Ossandón 2014)
– Reflections about the impact in existing conceptual approaches of paying attention to simultaneous and multiple objects of valuation (e.g. Frankel 2015).
Deadlines:
Abstract submission: November 10, 2015
Notification of acceptance: December 10, 2015
Submission of full paper (6.000 words): March 10, 2016
Abstracts of about 1000 words should be submitted through the website form at www.laemos.com The abstracts should be in English, including the name and email address of the author(s)
References
Antal, A. B., Hutter, M., & Stark, D. (Eds.). (2015). Moments of valuation: exploring sites of dissonance, Oxford University Press.
Beckert, J., & Aspers, P. (2011). The worth of goods: Valuation and pricing in the economy, Oxford University Press.
Dubuisson-Quellier, S. (2013). A market mediation strategy: How social movements seek to change firms’ practices by promoting new principles of product valuation. Organization Studies, 34(5-6), 683-703.
Frankel, C. (2015). The multiple-markets problem. Journal of Cultural Economy, (ahead-of-print), 1-9.
Kornberger, M., Justesen, L., Mouritsen, J., & Madsen, A. K. (Eds.). (2015). Making Things Valuable. Oxford University Press.
Kreiner, K. (2012). Organizational Decision Mechanisms in an Architectural Competition, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 36, 99-429.
Guyer, J. (2009). The eruption of tradition? On ordinality and calculation. Anthropological Theory 10 (2): 123-131.
Mcfall, L. & Ossandón, J. (2014). What’s new in the new, new economic sociology’ and should Organisation Studies care? in The Oxford Handbook of Sociology, Social Theory, and Organization Studies: Contemporary Currents, eds P. Adler, P. Du gay, G. Morgan & M. Reed, Oxford University Press, pp. 510–533.
Stark, D. (2009). The sense of dissonance: Accounts of worth in economic life, Princeton University Press.
