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Unsettling issues: valuing public goods and the production of matters of concern

What are public goods – of any kind – worth? How are they valued, and made valuable? What expertise is involved in their production? Questions over the value of public goods – a sporting championship, the arts, scientific advances, or quality of life – figure prominently in our public and political discourse, as politicians and administrators struggle to manage the often competing claims of instrumental, economic reason and intangible, cultural evaluations. We must decide not only what characteristics and ‘goods’ to value, but how to value them, sometimes in the less than fully realised knowledge that modes of valuation are performative (Austin 1978) of worth. This themed section considers the making of value and negotiations over what matters – over worth – in the case of a diverse selection of public goods: the scientific knowledge embodied in clinical trials, expertise in government oversight of ‘culture’, and regulations for sustainability. Following the ‘turn to value’ (Stark 2011) and the growing ‘valuographic’ literature (Dussauge et al. 2015), we treat valuation as a process and a practice dependent upon actors, materialities, and multiple ontologies; we recognise the plurality of orders of worth to which all of these actors can appeal (Boltanski & Thevenot 2006); and that the settling, or performing, of a good as valuable is as important as, and often contiguous with, valuation itself. Our papers contribute to the empirical literature on value making and seek to de-naturalise the assumptions of the substantial academic literature on the economic evaluation of public goods, which assumes that agents’ preferences may be extrapolated through inferred, hedonic, and contingent valuation methods (Kahneman & Knetsch 1992; Ledyard 1997). More broadly, we provide further theoretical and empirical support for the recognition that valuation is a distinctive sociological phenomenon worthy of attention (Stark 2011). Our contributions follow a Latourian injunction to discover the production of ‘matters of concern’. Latour’s project seeks to emancipate political discourse, and those who consume it, from what he calls ‘prematurely naturalised objective facts’ (2004, p. 227). We should, he argues, consider the ongoing and politically charged negotiations that produce matters of fact to be just part of a much broader expression of concerns. He writes: