Valuation Regimes Research Articles

Limits of bank regulation in financialised capitalism: lessons from the 2023 US banking crisis

ABSTRACT In this article I argue that banks continuously build new business models in financialised capitalism. Market value of these business models is regularly calculated and reported to the investors by investment banking expertise. What the US banking regulators, in their ex-post analysis, declared as unsustainable business models in the three failed banks – Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, and First Republic Bank – in the Spring of 2023, had been promoted by equity analyst expertise as value-maximising ‘niche’ bank business models serving the disruptive technology start-ups after the Covid pandemic. The article argues that bank regulators’ power is severely constrained in financialised capitalism where stock market valuations of banks and equity-based remuneration of the executives are out of regulatory reach. Therefore financial stability mandate of central banks is undermined with significant risk to the society when business models of banks are legitimised by a financialised valuation regime that prioritises shareholder value creation.

Automated office infrastructures and the valuation of work

Popular and academic analyses of automation in work predominantly focus on paid labour, sometimes forecasting how many jobs may be lost or investigating how new types of jobs are being created through such technological change. This article takes a different approach by considering what automation implies for the valuation of work. The starting point is that contemporary office automation is not exclusively aimed at working activities themselves but rather is increasingly directed at the infrastructure that allows work. Two infrastructural elements are identified where office automation is occurring: “tenant experience applications” that aid in the flexible occupation of office buildings, and “productivity tools” that support the organisation of office tasks regardless of location. This shift from automation targeting what work is done to how that work is done raises the question of work valuation. Plural regimes of valuation are at play in contemporary office automation, through which a myriad of interested actors emerge, extending beyond the employer and the worker. The value of flexibility thus occurs not singularly nor even primarily in the production process, but rather is achieved in the financial valuation of various aspects of office performance as well as in the social (re)definition of work.

Listing quality: Chinese journal lists in incoherent valuation regimes

Abstract Lists of endorsed and discouraged scholarly publications recently emerged as an important transition in Chinese journal evaluation. Among the targeted users of these lists are researchers, who are to avoid publishing in discouraged journals and focus efforts on endorsed journals. However, it is unclear how these lists affect researchers’ valuations when choosing publication outlets. This explorative study investigates the reception of such journal lists in Chinese scientists’ research practices. Our findings suggest that three logics interact in respondents’ journal valuations: institutional evaluation regimes, differing epistemic cultures, and the influence of the commercial publishing industry. The reactive effects of both endorsed and discouraged journal lists appear to differ with the ranking status of universities, the seniority of scholars, and research fields. Apart from the new institutional evaluation regimes in this interplay, there appear to be more predominant factors than journal lists that inform publishing choices: quantitative indicators, publishers’ branding, epistemic cultures, and editorial procedures and publishing models.

Justifying employee gatekeeping: A video-elicitation and comparative study on resolving the moral unease of hiring

Hiring is an act of evaluation that comes with much organizational and social responsibility, making it a morally sensitive situation. The way employee gatekeepers come to terms with their selections presents itself as an exemplary case to study the moral dimension of organizational life. Relying on a pragmatist perspective and an economies of worth framework, this article uncovers how employers experience moral uncertainty and justify their choices. Through a comparison of gatekeeping in two employment fields, this study covers new ground on how decision logics and regimes of valuation play out and can be structurally conditioned. Through in-depth interviews, combined with a ranking exercise based on video-elicitation, with recruiters and hiring managers from the corporate (n: 23) and cultural (n: 17) fields in the Netherlands, this paper explores how evaluation processes and selections are justified. The interviews show that a sense of moral unease is common among gatekeepers, but much more prevalent among corporate rather than cultural gatekeepers. Larger organizational size, high market pressure and lower supply of candidates does not translate into moral sterility for corporate gatekeepers. Second, the study reveals that a connexionist logic enters as a powerful justificatory regime, transforming candidate selection procedures into test of confession.

Digital fashionistas: young women, wealth-in-followers and matronage in Yaoundé, Cameroon

AbstractAgainst the background of post-Cold War trade and media liberalization, this article examines how young women living in Yaoundé, Cameroon, share digital images of their crafted styles via WhatsApp. Such sharing is an act of influence usually aimed at building the woman’s name as a digital ‘fashionista’, in that it constitutes a virtual potential for persuading others to copy one’s style. When this potential is actualized among women of status and rank, young women can fashion relations of matronage, opening up avenues of upward social mobility. To reach out to women of status and rank, young women circulate images of their styles to mobilize digital follower networks of peers, kin and strangers, drawing on their skills, status and knowledge. This mobilization in turn relies on the actual and potential benefits that sharing a fashionista image can bring to the follower. Thus, I argue, interdependencies between stylish leaders and their followers are key to making and maintaining a name as a digital fashionista. This article contributes to the literature on fashion and social mobility in West Africa by showing how the circulation of digital images over social media networks generates potentialities for young women living in Yaoundé to fashion matronage relations and social mobility. More broadly, the framing of followers as a form of wealth-in-people provides a critique of the neoliberal market valuation of social media influencers, illuminating alternative regimes of valuation that inform digital influencer economies.

Valuing soccer players: on the valuation dynamics of an online user community

PurposeThis paper studies the interactive valuation discourses of an online user community (transfermarkt.de) that seeks to determine market values for soccer players. Despite their seemingly casual nature, these values have featured in newspapers, transfer negotiations, academic research, and capital market communication – and have thus become reified.Design/methodology/approachThe paper employs netnographic research methodology to collect and thematically analyze a wide range of user entries on the platform. These entries are studied using theoretical insights from the sociology of quantification and valuation.FindingsThe analysis reveals how values are constructed in constant interaction between value-proposing users and value-justifying “experts.” This dynamic form of relational valuation positions players relative to one another as well as to actual transactions on the transfer market. In the absence of authoritative guidelines, it is this possibility and affordance for interaction that enacts a coherent valuation regime. The paper further reveals the platform's response to a disruptive event, which risked bringing the user-expert dynamics to a halt, requiring intervention from the platform to repair its valuation frame.Originality/valueThe paper responds to increased scholarly interests in the valuation of professional athletes. It contributes to the extant literature on valuation, first, by analyzing the dynamic valuation work that feeds into the social construction of values and, second, by studying platform participation and user interaction in a socially engineered online space.

Valuation regimes in academia: Researchers’ attitudes towards their diversity of activities and academic performance

AbstractEvaluation systems have been long criticized for abusing and misusing bibliometric indicators. This has created a culture by which academics are constantly exposing their daily work to the standards they are expected to perform. In this study, we investigate whether researchers’ own values and expectations are in line with the expectations of the evaluation system. We conduct a multiple case study of five departments in two Dutch universities to examine how they balance between their own valuation regimes and the evaluation schemes. For this, we combine curriculum analysis with a series of semi-structured interviews. We propose a model to study the diversity of academic activities and apply it to the multiple case study to understand how such diversity is shaped by discipline and career stage. We conclude that the observed misalignment is not only resulting from an abuse of metrics but also by a lack of tools to evaluate performance in a contextualized and adaptable way.

What’s the Value of a House: Wait, Struggle, and Improvement in a Militia-Controlled(?) Area in Rio de Janeiro

This paper discusses valuation regimes of houses in a militia area in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken during the construction of a highway between 2012 and 2016, we propose considering removal processes as sociological objects relevant to the analysis of informal real estate markets. We show how waiting for the construction challenged residents and community leaders to fill the gaps between memories of the past, an uncertain present, and multiple future possibilities. Offered only three forms of compensation for removing their houses, residents established equivalences between past struggles and prospects for improvement. By exploring the multiple meanings of these categories and different forms of active waiting for the removal, we differentiate the logic and scale of the self-construction of houses from the militia urbanism in the region.

A foundation for ‘ethical capital’: The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board and Integrated Reporting

What purpose does ESG accounting really serve? As the “alphabet soup” of sustainability accounting standards thickens with the growing interest in ESG investing, this article looks beyond the usual critiques of social and environmental accounting to reveal how these new standards are productive for capital. Analysing the work of the SASB and the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC), the article shows that accounting for ESG is more than the smoke-screen or green-washing exercise that critical voices often observe. By mapping, quantifying and coding social, environmental and political issues to be incorporated into capital’s valuation regime, ESG accounting standards establish a technical and rhetorical basis upon which ethical claims can become productive for capital, regardless of whether or not these ethical claims translate into any practical difference in business operations and their socio-ecological impacts.

Mapping Racial Capital: Gentrification, Race and Value in Three Chicago Neighborhoods

We interrogate the interrelations of race and gentrification in three Chicago neighborhoods of historical significance to Black, Mexican, and Puerto Rican residents. Our previous work indicates that historical legacies of structural racism mean that gentrification works differently in each area, although the extant literature has not directly addressed how race fuels local valuation regimes. For each neighborhood we provide GIS mapping of 30 years of property parcel data and Census block data on race, compared with a parcel level visual scan of material conditions in the built environment. Changes in value at the block level reveal value assigned to whiteness irrespective of material improvement and run counter to standard explanations of gentrification but closely align with a model of racial capitalism. We bridge the gap between qualitative and quantitative research by mapping the everyday life of racial change that is felt and known by residents of color in Chicago.

Re-invent Yourself! How Demands for Innovativeness Reshape Epistemic Practices

In the current research landscape, there are increasing demands for research to be innovative and cutting-edge. At the same time, concerns are voiced that as a consequence of neoliberal regimes of research governance, innovative research becomes impeded. In this paper, I suggest that to gain a better understanding of these dynamics, it is indispensable to scrutinise current demands for innovativeness as a distinct way of ascribing worth to research. Drawing on interviews and focus groups produced in a close collaboration with three research groups from the crop and soil sciences, I develop the notion of a project-innovation regime of valuation that can be traced in the sphere of research. In this evaluative framework, it is considered valuable to constantly re-invent oneself and take ‘first steps’ instead of ‘just’ following up on previous findings. Subsequently, I describe how these demands for innovativeness relate to and often clash with other regimes of valuation that matter for researchers’ practices. I show that valuations of innovativeness are in many ways bound to those of productivity and competitiveness, but that these two regimes are nevertheless sometimes in tension with each other, creating a complicated double bind for researchers. Moreover, I highlight that also the project-innovation regime as such is not always in line with what researchers considered as a valuable progress of knowledge, especially because it entails a de-valuation of certain kinds of long-term epistemic agendas. I show that prevailing pushes for innovativeness seem to be based on a rather short-sighted temporal imaginary of scientific progress that is hardly grounded in the complex realities of research practices, and that they can reshape epistemic practices in potentially problematic ways.

Boundaries of Momentum - Equity and Bond Returns Over the Business Cycle

I first show that taking moving averages of the term spread, the dividend yield, and the Shiller’s CAPE, significantly increases their ability to predict one month and 12-month forward equity market excess returns, and the state of the business cycle. Dividend yield, CAPE and term spread are all measures of value in the financial market, all of which forecast future equity market returns. My main finding is that equity market time-series momentum works well in the middle valuation regimes, but breaks down near historical extreme levels of value, where the direction of the equity market commonly turns. In this sense, the historical extremes of the valuation ratios and the term spread define boundaries for time-series momentum. To examine this idea formally, I normalize the different valuation measures relative to their extreme observations in rolling 10- to 20-year windows to lie between [-1,1]. I then define a variable Boundaries by taking sum of the squares of the normalized valuation measures. Controlling for 12-month equity market return reversals, when the Boundaries variable is high, increases the R2 in a predictive regression of equity market returns by up to 90% and the R2 in a predictive regression of time series momentum returns by up to 400%.

Surplus-value of life and regimes of valuation

Surplus-value of life and regimes of valuation

The Valuation of Online Science Communication: A Study Into the Scholarly Discourses of Altmetrics and Their Reception

Online communication has gained momentum in science. In light of this momentum new forms of quantification have emerged, so-called alternative metrics. What these new metrics signify is still considered unclear and issue of on-going debate. Building upon theories from the sociology of valuation and genre theory, this paper analyzes the discourses embedded in a corpus of over 400 articles from the scientometric community on these new metrics. The results suggest two grand narratives, “societal impact” and “research performance”, in this discourse that both may lead to orthogonal performative effects in stabilizing either established or new valuation regimes.

VALUE/S UNDERGROUND, COLLECTIVE ETHOS, AND THE CLASSIFICATORY LOGIC OF VENEZUELA’S CAVE SURVEY

ABSTRACT Building on reinvigorated scholarly debates on the concept of value, this paper examines forms of valuation that coexist with and challenge those typically associated with capitalist natures. Based on archival, ethnographic, and interview data, we analyze a historical case of the Venezuelan Society of Speleology (SVE) that since 1967 has been exploring and mapping the country’s caves. Its results are published in a national cave survey that the group manages. Not only is each cave entry the representation and materialization of the group’s volunteer efforts. Each is also part of a relational regime of valuation by which all caves are worth mapping. The survey’s classificatory logic not only transforms underground value, it also acts as boundary object bringing together diverse actors and promoting the SVE’s collective ethos, at least in theory, of valuing all members. The survey is the fulcrum of distinct regimes of valuation, wherein value and values are two sides of the same coin. The spaces where these value/s are enacted matters, suggesting the critical contributions that geographers can make in understanding the spatial qualities that contribute to—or hinder—the materialization of certain regimes of valuation over others.

Something out of nothing: a Bayesian learning computational model for the social construction of value

ABSTRACTThis article develops a formalism for the social construction of value. Using a model based on Bayesian agents, it demonstrates how “something” arises out of “nothing” via the emergence of durable value conventions and shows how the developed framework can be used to investigate socially constructed valuations under a variety of circumstances. The resulting analysis clarifies why assumptions that collectives will converge upon the “intrinsic” (i.e., non-socially originating) value of an object (e.g., market efficiency) may not hold for mixed social and non-social valuation regimes, explains the dependency of socially constructed valuations on early accidents, demonstrates the effects of confident actors on constructed values, and identifies the production of time-dependent ratcheting effects from the interaction of bubbles with value conventions.

Blanchard, A. and Strand, R. (eds) Cancer Biomarkers: Ethics, Economics and Society, Kokstad: Megaloceros Press2017. 149pp ISBN 978‐82‐91851‐04‐4

Blanchard, A. and Strand, R. (eds) Cancer Biomarkers: Ethics, Economics and Society, Kokstad: Megaloceros Press2017. 149pp ISBN 978‐82‐91851‐04‐4

An elusive panacea? The impact of the regulatory valuation regime on insurers' investment behaviour

This paper develops a framework to examine how the interactions between the valuation regime and solvency requirements influence investment behaviour of long-term investors with stable liabilities, such as life insurers. The results contribute to the debate over market-based valuation regimes, and shed light on new hybrid regimes explored in policy circles. We show that solvency requirements based on fair value regime can induce procyclical asset sales, but those based on historical cost valuation encourage insurers to engage in risk-shifting to the detriment of policyholders. A hybrid valuation regime, intended to address these unfavourable outcomes, does not strictly dominate the other two regimes on its own. However, market-based regimes can be made effective, if regulators calibrate their responses to solvency breaches using supervisory information about insurers' asset quality.

An Elusive Panacea? The Impact of the Regulatory Valuation Regime on Insurers' Investment Behaviour

This paper examines how the interactions between the valuation regime and solvency requirements influence investment behaviour of long-term investors with stable liabilities, such as life insurers. Under limited liability, solvency requirements based on historical cost valuation encourage risk-shifting to the detriment of policyholders, while those based on fair value regime can induce procyclical asset sales. A hybrid valuation regime, intended to address these unfavourable outcomes, does not strictly dominate the other two regimes. But both fair value and hybrid regimes outperform the historical cost regime if the regulators can set the penalty imposed on insurers based on supervisory information about their asset quality, even if this information is imperfect.

Classification Situations : A New Field of Research for Valuation Studies?

This conference note adds to recent discussions about the sociological implications of the spread of digital techniques for classifying market actors, specifically with regard to processes of social stratification. We first present some of the contributions to the conference “Classification Situations in Markets” and then discuss their implications for future research in general and the field of valuation studies in particular. We suggest three themes related to the conference that deserve further attention by students of valuation and related social processes: (a) the challenges posed by the rise of big data and algorithmic classifications to the study of classification and valuation; (b) the feedback loops of valuation regimes, in particular their consequences for conceptions of the self; and (c) the relation between classification situations and larger institutional settings, which implies a more explicitly comparative orientation.