Experiences of Digitized Valuation

Francis Lee; Andrea Mennicken; Jacob Reilley; Malte Ziewitz

doi:10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2024.11.1.1-8

Authors

Francis Lee Chalmers University of Technology https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7206-2046
Andrea Mennicken London School of Economics and Political Science
Jacob Reilley University of Groningen https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5587-9388
Malte Ziewitz Cornell University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2024.11.1.1-8

Author Biographies

Francis Lee, Chalmers University of Technology

Francis Lee is Associate Professor of Technology and Social Change and senior researcher at the unit for Science, Technology and Society at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. His research focus lies on the politics of information infrastructures and knowledge production. Of particular concern for Lee is how information infrastructures – such as AI, algorithms, or big data – shape science and society. For instance he is interested in how disease outbreaks are constructed with algorithms, how AI is reshaping research practices of the biosciences, or how risky people are constructed and tracked using different types of information infrastructures. His webpage is available at https://francislee.org.

Andrea Mennicken, London School of Economics and Political Science

Andrea Mennicken is Associate Professor of Accounting at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Co-Director of the Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation. Her work has been published in Accounting, Organizations and Society, Financial Accountability and Management, Foucault Studies, Organization Studies, Sociologie du Travail, amongst others. Her research interests include social studies of quantification and accounting, auditing, governance and regulation, processes of marketization, standardization, and public sector reforms. Lately, she completed an international research project exploring the changing relationships between quantification, administrative capacity and democracy in healthcare, correctional services, and higher education. Recent publications include “What’s New with Numbers: Sociological Approaches to the Study of Quantification” co-authored with Wendy Espeland, Annual Review of Sociology 2019, and The New Politics of Numbers: Utopia, Evidence and Democracy, co-edited with Robert Salais, 2022, Palgrave Macmillan.

Jacob Reilley, University of Groningen

Jacob Reilley is an Assistant Professor of Accounting at the University of Groningen. His research focuses on processes of quantification and digitization in non-profit organizations. He is currently researching how risk and quality are digitized in hospital management systems; more recently, he has also examined how impact is accounted for in NGOs. His work has been published in Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, Financial Accountability and Management, and Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal.

Malte Ziewitz, Cornell University

Malte Ziewitz is Associate Professor at the Department of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University. An ethnographer and sociologist, he studies the changing role of governance and regulation in, of, and through digitally networked environments. His recent work has looked at the lived experience of credit scoring subjects, the search engine optimization (SEO) industry, and attempts at algorithmic regulation. At Cornell, he directs the Digital Due Process Clinic, a clinical research program that helps ordinary people cope with, understand, and challenge automated decision systems.

References

Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckman. 1967. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Board of Editors. 2020 “Towards a Reformulation.” Valuation Studies 7(1): 1–2.

Desjarlais, Robert. 1994. “Struggling Along: The Possibilities for Experience among the Homeless Mentally Ill.” American Anthropologist 96(4): 886– 901.

Espeland, Wendy N., and Michael Sauder. 2007. “Rankings and Reactivity: How Public Measures Recreate Social Worlds.” American Journal of Sociology 113(1): 1–40.

Fourcade, Marion. 2016. “Ordinalization: Lewis A. Coser Memorial Award for Theoretical Agenda Setting 2014.” Sociological Theory 34(3): 175– 195.

Fourcade, Marion, and Kieran Healy. 2013. “Classification Situations: Lifechances in the Neoliberal Era.” Accounting, Organizations and Society 38(8): 559–572.

Gitelman, Lisa. 2013. “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron. Boston, MA: MIT Press.

Hennion, Antoine. 2007. “Those Things That Hold Us Together: Taste and Sociology.” Cultural Sociology 1(1): 97–114.

Hennion, Antoine. 2017. “Attachments, You Say? How a Concept Collectively Emerges in One Research Group.” Journal of Cultural Economy 10(1): 112–121.

Ihde, Don. 2009. Postphenomenology and Technoscience: The Peking University Lectures. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Jay, Martin. 2005. Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Kornberger, Martin, Dane Pflueger, and Jan Mouritsen. 2017. “Evaluative Infrastructures: Accounting for Platform Organization.” Accounting, Organizations and Society 60: 79–95.

Lee, Francis, Andrea Mennicken, Jacob Reilley, and Malte Ziewitz. 2022. “Digitizing Valuation.” Valuation Studies 9(1): 1–10.

Liberman Kenneth. 2014. “The Phenomenology of Coffee Tasting: Lessons on Practical Objectivity.” In More Studies in Ethnomethodology, 215– 166. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Ossandón, José. 2022. “(University) Management after Valuation Studies: Carving a Practice between the Offended Native, the Anxious Scholar, and the Useless Practitioner.” Valuation Studies 8(2): 61–72.

Rahman, Hatim A. 2021. “The Invisible Cage: Workers’ Reactivity to Opaque Algorithmic Evaluations.” Administrative Science Quarterly 66(4): 945–988.

Schutz, Alfred. 1967. The Phenomenology of the Social World. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Scott, Joan W. 1991. “The Evidence of Experience.” Critical Inquiry 17(4): 773–797.

Shapin, Steven. 2012. “The Sciences of Subjectivity.” Social Studies of Science 42(2): 170–184.

Stenner, Paul. 2008. “A.N. Whitehead and Subjectivity.” Subjectivity 22(1): 90–109.

Verbeek, Peter-Paul. 2005. What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Vindenes, Joakim, and Barbara Wasson. 2021. “A Postphenomenological Framework for Studying User Experience of Immersive Virtual Reality.” Frontiers in Virtual Reality 2: 1–15.

Ziewitz, Malte. 2017. “Experience in Action: Moderating Care in Web-Based Patient Feedback.” Social Science & Medicine 175: 99–108.

Ziewitz, Malte. 2019. “Rethinking Gaming: The Ethical Work of Optimization in Web Search Engines.” Social Studies of Science 49(5): 707–731.

Ziewitz, Malte. Forthcoming. “On STS and Valuation.” In The Routledge International Handbook of Valuation and Society, edited by Anne K. Krüger, Thorsten Peetz, and Hilmar Schäfer. Abingdon; New York, NY: Routledge.

Ziewitz, Malte, and Ranjit Singh. 2021. “Critical Companionship: Some Sensibilities for Studying the Lived Experience of Data Subjects.” Big Data & Society 8(2): 1–13.