Theme Call. Valuing Sustainability in Technoscientific Capitalism

Call for Contributions

Title: Valuing Sustainability in Technoscientific Capitalism 

Editors: Cornelius Heimstädt (Humboldt University of Berlin), Tanja Schneider (Technical University of Denmark)

The concept of sustainability is ubiquitous in contemporary economies, yet actors invoke it to describe a wide range of practices and processes—often with divergent, sometimes contradictory, implications. An electric car manufacturer may call his new factory sustainable, despite it being constructed in a water conservation area. A start-up helping polluting industries (e.g. petrochemical, meat, aviation) offset carbon emissions may do so in the name of sustainability. Meanwhile, an organic farmer may cite sustainability to explain the elevated price of her carrots.

Rather than trying to tame this bewildering variety of coexisting versions of sustainability, most social scientific research in the area, if anything, feeds into it by adopting sustainability as a normative analytical concept, adding new versions to the already dizzying list out there. While this kind of research is helpful in describing how specific actors might improve their pursuit of sustainability, it provides limited guidance for navigating the multiple and often conflicting versions of sustainability already shaping contemporary societies, economies, and natures.

Some researchers, working (explicitly or not) in the tradition of valuation studies, have taken a different approach and begun to explore the different vernacular interpretations that actors have of the concept of sustainability. These studies seek to empirically unpack the “theories of value” and “theories of action” (Doganova, 2024) that are inscribed into vernacular versions of the concept of sustainability, and, where necessary, criticize them—a form of critique that operates not by debunking these theories a priori as ‘false’, but through a meticulous empirical dissection of their inherent assumptions and, hence, their politics (see Latour, 2004). An illustrative example of such sustainability research and critique is the work of Susanne Freidberg (2013; 2014; 2023), examining the value assumptions implicit in a device developed in the 1970s (i.e. life cycle assessment, or LCA) by which multinational corporations attempt to calculate, and thus govern, the sustainability of their supply chains. Another example is the research of Liliana Doganova and Brice Laurent (2016; 2019), which explores how sustainability as a quality of goods is built into European market infrastructures through specific regulatory instruments (i.e. sustainability-oriented policy directives), and how these instruments reconfigure the boundary between policy and markets. A further example is Doganova’s (2024) already cited sociological-historical monograph on the “discounted cash flow” (DCF) formula and how the valuations it generates today in the name of sustainability are at odds with some of the valuations implicit in the original concept of sustainability as it emerged in early eighteenth-century German forestry (Hölzl, 2010).

Drawing a tentative bottom line, we can learn at least two important things from these studies. First—analogous to Fabian Muniesa’s (2017) astute observation that a critique of finance can be more effectively formulated without analytically relying on the “political vernaculars” (e.g., “value creation”, “true value”, “financial crisis”) that emanate from the “limited” world of “financial imagination” (Ortiz, 2014)—it might be more effective to try to formulate a critique of sustainability that dispenses with the concept of sustainability as an analytical term. Second—more of a methodological hunch than an irrefutable learning—it should be possible to make more generalized statements about the specific version of “the good economy” (Asdal et al., 2023) that unfolds around the concept of sustainability in economic activity, based on a collection of situated analyses of vernacular interpretations, formalizations, and performances of this concept by actors “on the ground” (Latour, 2018). It is empirical analyses of this kind that we aim to bring together in this special issue.

Therefore, with this call we invite papers that empirically examine valuation practices related to sustainability within or at the margins of past, present, and future economic activity. Possible guiding questions that we would like to offer interested authors as orientation include, but are not limited to:

  1. How is the concept of sustainability interpreted by actors seeking to value it? Do the actors’ interpretation of sustainability remain the same over time or do they change? If so, what are the drivers of this change? What tensions emerge or get resolved through changes in valuation? And how, if at all, does the valuation of sustainability give rise to what might be referred to—inspired by Langley’s (2007) concept of “financial subjectivities”—as “sustainable subjectivities”?
  2. What “valuation devices” (Doganova, 2020)—i.e., instruments, tools, methods, technologies—do actors who seek to value sustainability in economic activity rely on? How do these devices shape actors’ valuation practices and vice versa? What are the “political qualities” (Doganova, 2024) of these devices and how do they matter (i.e., what objects and practices do they help to generate)?
  3. How do the valuations of sustainability carried out by the actors under study “perform”—whether in the Austinian (1962), Goffmanian (1956), or yet another sense—not only the value of isolated subjects or objects, but more generally how do they perform (successfully or not) a version of “the good economy” (Asdal et al., (2023) that revolves around sustainability? In short, how do they perform what might be called a “sustainability economy”?

Expressions of interest shall be submitted in the form of an extended abstract (about 1.000 words) by email to the editors by March 31, 2025. Selected authors will then be invited to submit full papers for peer review by October 1, 2024. Please address queries and expressions of interest to Cornelius Heimstädt cornelius.heimstaedt@hu-berlin.de and Tanja Schneider tansch@dtu.dk. 

Valuation Studies sets out to offer an academic platform for research and debate on the problem of valuation. Valuation indeed stands as a crucial problem for the social sciences and the humanities today, in more than one way. Understanding the tensions, determinants, contexts and effects of valuation practices appears indeed as a decisive requirement for the understanding of how our world is constructed, transformed or fractured. An interdisciplinary approach is required in order to investigate the technical cultures, the political imaginaries, the historical processes, the methodological problems and the institutional settings that shape the ways in which things are valued, and to identify relevant shifts, controversies and struggles. Sociological, anthropological, cultural, political, semiotic, historiographic, legal, institutional, critical, organisational approaches to the study of valuation phenomena are needed in order to establish tractable, actionable interdisciplinary knowledge on valuation as a problem. Submissions to Valuation Studies respond to broad calls for contributions curated by the journal’s editorial board. This is to ensure focus and debate, while offering the space to address each call’s purpose from many possible angles and in reference to various forms of evidence and demonstration. The journal assesses incoming manuscripts using double-blind peer review involving at least two reviewers. Accepted manuscripts are published as PDFs with full open access and authors retain the copyright to their work.

Important dates

  • March 31, 2025:                                                                           Extended abstracts due
  • April 15, 2025:                                                                              Notification of authors
  • October 1, 2025:                                                                          Full papers due (for peer review)

References

Asdal, K., Cointe, B., Hobæk, B., Reinertsen, H., Huse, T., Morsman, S. R., & Måløy, T. (2021). ‘The good economy’: A conceptual and empirical move for investigating how economies and versions of the good are entangled. BioSocieties, 1-24. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41292-021-00245-5

Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Clarendon Press.

Doganova, L., & Laurent, B. (2016). Keeping things different: coexistence within European markets for cleantech and biofuels. Journal of Cultural Economy, 9(2), 141-156. https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2015.1110530

Doganova, L., & Laurent, B. (2019). Carving out a domain for the market: Boundary making in European environmental markets. Economy and Society, 48(2), 221-242. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2019.1624071

Doganova, L. (2020). What is the value of ANT research into economic valuation devices? In A. Blok, I. Farias, & C. Roberts (Eds.), The Routledge companion to actor-network theory (pp. 256–263). Routledge.

Doganova, L. (2024). Discounting the future: The ascendancy of a political technology. Princeton University Press.

Freidberg, S. (2013). Calculating sustainability in supply chain capitalism. Economy and Society, 42(4), 571-596. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2012.760349

Freidberg, S. (2014). Footprint technopolitics. Geoforum, 55, 178-189. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2014.06.009

Freidberg, S. (2023). Metrics and mētis: Work and practical knowledge in agri-food sustainability governance. Agriculture and Human Values, 40(1), 245-257. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-022-10351-0

Goffman, E. (1956). The presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday.

Hölzl, R. (2010). Historicizing sustainability: German scientific forestry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Science as Culture, 19(4), 431-460. https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2010.519866

Langley, P. (2007). Uncertain subjects of Anglo-American financialization. Cultural Critique, (65), 67-91. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4539797

Latour, B. (2018). Down to earth: Politics in the new climatic regime. John Wiley & Sons.

Markard, J., Raven, R., & Truffer, B. (2012). Sustainability transitions: An emerging field of research and its prospects. Research Policy, 41(6), 955–967. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2012.02.013

Muniesa, F. (2017). On the political vernaculars of value creation. Science as Culture, 26(4), 445-454. https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2017.1354847

Ortiz, H. (2014). The limits of financial imagination: free investors, efficient markets, and crisis. American Anthropologist, 116(1), 38-50. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.12071