Valuation as a social practice
The mission of Valuation Studies is to foster conversations in the new transdisciplinary and emerging field of studying valuation as a social practice. This field is interested in examining practices and settings where the value or values of something are established, assessed, negotiated, provoked, maintained, constructed and/or contested. The journal seeks to provide a meeting ground for studies of valuation emerging in different disciplinary settings, utilising different theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches. The open access policy of the journal and its transdisciplinary agenda facilitate intellectual exchange and debate transgressing disciplinary and geographical confines.
Valuation practices are abundant in modern societies where anything from restaurants to scientific publications may be subject to elaborate and distinct (e)valuations. Many objects, and the valuation practices that they are subject to, have featured in the journal since its first issue that was published in 2013. Examples (randomly drawn by looking at the first article in each previous issue) include: tomatoes (Heuts and Mol 2013), restaurants and online consumer reviews (Mellet et al. 2014), waste, recycling, and urban regeneration (Glucksberg 2014), impact investment (Barman 2015), the Eurovision song contest (Krogh Petersen and Ren 2015) and tropical biodiversity (Foale et al. 2016). The journal’s most recent issue published in December 2016 (http://valuationstudies.liu.se/Issues/contents/default.asp?DOI=10.3384/vs.2001-5992.1642 ) focused on exemplars in classic literature and hip-hop music (Dekker 2016), lean management at a children’s hospital (Hauge 2016), and fiction writers dealing with rejection (Fürst 2016).
The relevance of the journal is also visible in popular valuation metrics for scholarly publication. A vast majority of the articles are, for instance, already cited in scholarly texts published in other academic outlets. The traffic to the journal site is, moreover, large and quickly growing. In the first few months of 2017 (Jan- mid March), no less than 31 of the articles published were downloaded on average more than once a day. Crude metrics as citations and downloads seems to indicate that there is a large and growing interest in the topic of the journal and the contributions published on its pages.
Scientific profile
The journal provides a space for the diffusion and assessment of research that is produced at the interface of a variety of approaches from several disciplines, including: sociology, economic sociology, science and technology studies, management and organisation studies, social and cultural anthropology, market studies, institutional perspectives in economics, accounting studies, cultural geography, philosophy, and literary studies. This broad scope is also manifest in the many disciplines represented among the current Editors-in-chief (Claes-Fredrik Helgesson and Fabian Muniesa), the editorial office (Lotta Björklund Larsen and Amelia Mutter) as well as in the current board of editors (Liliana Doganova, Martin Giraudeau, Claes-Fredrik Helgesson, Hans Kjellberg, Francis Lee, Alexandre Mallard, Andrea Mennicken, Fabian Muniesa, Ebba Sjögren, and Teun Zuiderent-Jerak) and the advisory board consisting of 30+ scholars from a variety of relevant fields. (http://valuationstudies.liu.se/About/default.asp#adv_board )
To encourage interdisciplinary exchange, Valuation Studies refrains from a strong programmatic claim as to how the processes of valuations are to be studied or what specific empirical areas are to be focused. Valuation Studies welcomes papers using or combining a variety of methods, from ethnographic accounts to quantitative appraisal to conceptual interpretation. However, the journal encourages contributors to focus on the pragmatic aspects of valuation activities wherever they take place and to foster dialogue between different approaches working on this broad topic. Although various forms of economic valuation are of central interest to the journal, an overarching idea is that processes of valuation are not always quantitative or economic. Moreover, they regularly involve a number of different concerns and agencies (economic and non-economic, quantitative and qualitative). The journal assembles papers that provide insight into the multiplicity and disputability of valuation practices, metrics and processes and the consequences of valuation practices in terms of how they might resolve, defer or indeed foster conflicts.
Publication process
The standard peer-review of the journal is double-blind. Submitted original articles are first pre-screened by the Editors-in-chief and then assigned to a member of the board of editors as handling editor. Two, or sometimes three or four, reviewers are selected and contacted for each original article. Reviewers are selected among the members of the journal’s advisory board as well as the broader research community. To date, over 80 scholars have been performing peer-review duties for the journal since 2012.
Valuation Studies is only published in electronic form where the entire issue as well as individual articles are made available as downloadable PDF files. Everything is published as full open access from day one and authors retain copyright to their work. The homepage is operated by Linköping University electronic press, which also takes care of archiving the journal. The journal has since the start been financially supported with competitively awarded grants from the Swedish Research Council.
Information about the journal and new issues is disseminated through a variety of channels. There is a journal newsletter, a Twitter feed (@Val_Studies), and a Facebook page, ensuring that work published in the journal is disseminated widely. Moreover, editors of the journal have repeatedly taken initiative to organise conference sessions and streams related to the theme of the journal at relevant conferences. Recent examples include a 7-sessions panel at the joint 4S/EASST conference in Barcelona in 2016 with more than 30 papers and an upcoming sub-theme with 28 papers at EGOS in Copenhagen in July 2017.
Submissions
The journal welcomes contributions of different kinds and origins. Apart from traditional journal articles, the journal welcomes short opinion pieces or research notes, interviews, staged debates, or indeed longer than normal journal articles.
If you wish to submit an article or propose a different form of contribution, please visit the website http://valuationstudies.liu.se/Authors/default.asp or send an email to the journal’s editors editors@valuationstudies.liu.se
