Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T17:26:46.710Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 14 - Valuation in the Market for High-End Audio: Hunting ‘Monsters’ in Analogue Discs

from Part III - Valuation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 November 2024

By
Tsutomu Nakano
Edited by
Susi Geiger ,
Katy Mason ,
Neil Pollock ,
Philip Roscoe ,
Annmarie Ryan ,
Stefan Schwarzkopf  and
Pascale Trompette
Susi Geiger
Affiliation:
University College Dublin
Katy Mason
Affiliation:
Lancaster University
Neil Pollock
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
Philip Roscoe
Affiliation:
University of St Andrews, Scotland
Annmarie Ryan
Affiliation:
University of Limerick
Stefan Schwarzkopf
Affiliation:
Copenhagen Business School
Pascale Trompette
Affiliation:
Université de Grenoble
Get access

Summary

High-end audio systems aim to reproduce the original sound of music performed in physical spaces. They are an intersection of aesthetic art and emotions, a culture of listening to music in ones’ preferred genres and a system of components or machines that are designed by technologists of acoustics, electrical engineering and material science. There is an abundance of scientific research on sound and acoustics from engineering and physics that discusses the engineering of good sound on the basis of quantitative, parametric measures for the human cognition of listeners (Pinch and Bijserveld 2012; Powell 2010). There is a dearth of research on how hi-fi aficionados determine what really counts as ‘hi-fi’, however. This chapter empirically investigates the high-end audio equipment market. It applies perspectives from the pragmatist literature of valuation to probe the valuation practices of actors and agents using data from field interviews and observations, and archive and online documents.

Keywords

valuationhi-fisocio-technical monsterstastingaudiophiles
Type
Chapter
Information
Market Studies
Mapping, Theorizing and Impacting Market Action
 , pp. 222 - 236
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Aspers, P. (2006) Markets in Fashion: A Phenomenological Approach. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Becker, H. S. (1982) Art Worlds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Berger, P. L., and Luckmann, T. (1966) The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Anchor Books.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, P. (1993) The market of symbolic goods, in The Field of Cultural Production. Cambridge: Polity Press, 112–141.Google Scholar
Callon, M. (1998) The embeddedness of economic markets in economics, in Callon, M. (ed.), The Laws of the Markets. Oxford: Blackwell, 1–58.Google Scholar
Callon, M. (2017) Afterword: the devices of attachment, in Cochoy, F., Deville, J., and McFall, L. (eds.), Markets and the Arts of Attachment. Abingdon: Taylor & Francis, 180–195.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Callon, M., Millo, Y., and Muniesa, F. (eds.) (2007) Market Devices. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Callon, M., and Muniesa, F. (2005) Peripheral vision: economic markets as calculative collective devices. Organization Studies, 26(8), 1229–1250.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cochoy, F., Deville, J., and McFall, L. (eds.) (2017) Markets and the Arts of Attachment. Abingdon: Taylor & Francis.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dewey, J. (1939) Theory of Valuation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Geiger, S., Harrison, D., Kjellberg, H., and Mallard, A. (eds.) (2014) Concerned Markets: Economic Ordering for Multiple Values. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hennion, A. (2001) Music lovers: taste as performance. Theory, Culture & Society, 18(5), 1–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hennion, A. (2004) Pragmatics of taste, in Jacobs, M. D., and Hanrahan, N. W. (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture. Oxford: Blackwell, 131–144.Google Scholar
Hennion, A. (2015) The Passion for Music: A Sociology of Mediation. Aldershot: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Heuts, F., and Mol, A. (2013) What is a good tomato? A case of valuing in practice. Valuation Studies, 1(2), 125–146.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hutter, M., and Stark, D. (2015) Pragmatist perspectives on valuation: an introduction, in Antal, A. B., Hutter, M., and Stark, D. (eds.), Moments of Valuation: Exploring Sites of Dissonance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1–14.Google Scholar
Kjellberg, H. (2017) Acquiring associations, in Cochoy, F., Deville, J., and McFall, L. (eds.), Markets and the Arts of Attachment. Abingdon: Taylor & Francis, 162–179.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kornberger, M., Justesen, L., Madsen, A. K., and Mouritsen, J. (eds.) (2015) Making Things Valuable. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Latour, B. (1986) The powers of association, in Law, J. (ed.), Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge. London: Routledge, 264–280.Google Scholar
Latour, B. (1988) The Pasteurization of France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Law, J. (1991) Introduction: monsters, machines and sociotechnical relations, in Law, J. (ed.), A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination. London: Routledge, 1–23.Google Scholar
McFall, L. (2009) Devices and desires: how useful is the ‘new’ new economic sociology for understanding market attachment? Sociology Compass, 3(2), 267–282.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacKenzie, D., Muniesa, F., and Siu, L. (eds.) (2007) Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Muniesa, F. (2011) A flank movement in the understanding of valuation. The Sociological Review, 59(S2), 24–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Muniesa, F., and Helgesson, C.-F. (2013). Valuation studies and the spectacle of valuation. Valuation Studies, 1(2), 119–123.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pinch, T., and Bijserveld, K. (eds.) (2012) The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Podolny, J. (1993) A status-based model of market competition. American Journal of Sociology, 98(4), 829–872.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Powell, J. (2010) How Music Works: The Science and Psychology of Beautiful Sounds, from Beethoven to the Beatles and Beyond. New York: Little, Brown.Google Scholar
Roscoe, P., and Loza, O. (2019) The –ography of markets (or, the responsibilities of market studies). Journal of Cultural Economy, 12(3), 215–227.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schwarz, O. (2013) Bending forward, one step backward: on the sociology of tasting techniques. Cultural Sociology, 7(4), 415–430.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Teil, G. (2021) Amateurs’ exploration of wine: a pragmatic study of taste. Theory, Culture & Society, 38(5), 137–157.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trébuchet-Breitwiller, A.-S. (2015) Making things precious: a pragmatist inquiry into the valuation of luxury perfumes, in Antal, A. B., Hutter, M., and Stark, D. (eds.), Moments of Valuation: Exploring Sites of Dissonance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 168–186.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
White, H. C. (1993) Values come in styles, which mate to change, in Hechter, M., Nadel, L., and Michod, R. E. (eds.), The Origin of Values. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 63–91.Google Scholar
White, H. C. (2002) Markets from Networks: Socioeconomic Models of Production. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Zelizer, V. A. (1978) Human values and the market: the case of life insurance and death in 19th-century America. American Journal of Sociology, 84(3), 591–610.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Zelizer, V. A. (1994) The Social Meaning of Money: Pin Money, Paychecks, Poor Relief, and Other Currencies. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×