This chapter reconstructs the ethical ambiguities and popular anxieties that emerged during a spectacular period of coffee smuggling in the 1970s, centered in Chepkube village near the border of Kenya and Uganda. The criminalized trade provided residents with newfound wealth and consumptive possibility; magendo, as it was known, also was a stark challenge to the Ugandan state’s ability to monopolize the valuation of its most important export. However, participants’ unease did not reflect the illegality of magendo. Rather, the excessive and rapid riches acquired through coffee smuggling challenged prevailing ideas of propriety, respectability, and morality. In other words, existing ideas about how proper value should be morally produced—through laborious effort and familial networks—were undermined by the sudden revaluation of coffee. Smuggling is a form of arbitrage, a style of economic action premised on the capitalization on disjunctures of jurisdiction, of measurement, and of appearance. Magendo participants actively worked to produce such differences in order to acquire wealth; yet arbitrage generated an ambiguous mix of desire and disdain. Based on oral histories and fieldwork on both sides of the border, this chapter reveals how the careful orchestration of social relations and material goods is at the heart of valuation, and it emphasizes how popular valuation practices change and conflict with state projects of governing value and defining citizenship.

In 1967, Tanzania nationalized many foreign companies as part of the Arusha Declaration’s effort to create socialism and self-reliance. Among the most important were the dominant British banks that shaped investment and exported capital. Building on transcripts, private diaries, correspondence from Barclays Bank, as well as other sources, this chapter analyses how politically independent Tanzania endeavored to remake finance. Economic self-determination depended, in part, on the negotiations between Barclays and Tanzania over how much compensation government would pay for the 1967 expropriation. At stake was not merely a final price; instead, the struggle for economic sovereignty depended on the ability to determine the accounting protocols through which price would be calculated and even to define the bundle of different assets that would be subject to valuation. It was on these technicalities that postcolonial statecraft depended, meaning formulas and figures were imbued with political importance and ethical significance. Yet, ultimately, Tanzania found its authority to govern value was stymied by the enduring inequalities of the global capitalist order.

This chapter examines the interrelationship between “a market’s materialities and practices” (Geiger and Gross, 2018) by offering an account of how a particular source of energy – wooden biomass – became a perferred energy resource in the Danish energy system. This chapter examines how biomass is qualified, i.e., identified, measured, framed, and, thereby, known. However, the materiality of forests and wooden biomass affords multiple understandings depending on the epistemic equipment – theories, models, and measurements – used. This introduces an epistemic uncertainty in how biomass can be known, providing opportunities for expression and enactment of interests, making policymaking more complex and more contentious. Our analysis highlights the antagonism and power struggles involved in the dynamics of market framing. The chapter concludes with a discussion on how the material ‘unruliness’ of biomass calls for complex accounting methods, leaving biomass incumbents much maneuver room and jeopardizing Denmark’s reputation as ‘a frontrunner’ in energy transition. The chapter contributes to Market Studies research by demonstrating the dual role of materiality in shaping (concrete, situated) interests and valuations while simultaneouly also affecting conditions for future maneuvering/actions. Further, the analysis brings out the politics of valuation.

Commodity items may be singularized and revalorized in markets for second-hand goods. The market for singular goods, often cultural or aesthetic items, depends upon collective assessments of value, where the nature of value is embedded in the cultural community. Exiting studies have concentrated on the work of experts and practitioners within markets as they construct goods as valuable. As research begins to see valuation as a nexus of social relations, so it becomes important to study how valuation practices organize markets that span countries and socio-economic categories. We examine the valorization practices of second-hand bicycle traders in Hungary. These market intermediaries salvage obsolete discarded steel bicycles and reconstitute them into fashionable vintage bicycles: sought-after subcultural fashion accessories and collectors’ prized items. We propose a theory of value bricolage to describe the process of constructing value through the skilful combination of matters at hand, material, social and imaginary: scrap frames, spare parts, online resources, fan websites, and valuation communities.

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.

This chapter operationalises a theory of value formation that suggests processes of valuation have two dimensions: evaluation and valorization. It argues that the value placed on a diamond after the practices of valuation have taken place has been altered by the very act itself – how the valuation has been done, by who and for what the purpose. The grading, pricing and trading of polished diamonds exist within a socialized sphere of interconnected relationships reinforced and impacted by power structures and institutional status at every point in the market. Using the diamond market case study, the chapter demonstrates how the institutions that structure the market are not static but dynamic, constantly challenged by the network of actors within the market. The resulting valuations and exchanges that are therefore both highly performative and hierarchical.

This chapter is concerned with understanding the history and operation of the market for political risk insurance, and the related political risk analysis industry that provides metrics, narratives and pricing prosthetics that are used by insurance brokers and underwriters when they negotiate terms and prices for the cover they provide. These prosthetics include a variety of colour-coded ‘heat’ maps, indices and geographical categorizations (such as ‘Sub-Saharan Africa’, ‘MENA’ [Middle East and North Africa] or ‘Asia-Pacific’), which do not determine the pricing of political risk insurance cover but, rather, act as ‘technologies of the imagination’ (Gilbert 2020a) and spur imaginative effects and particular approaches to valuation. As political risk insurance (PRI) brokers and underwriters would themselves argue, PRI does not lend itself to an actuarial mode that seeks to predict the likelihood of future ‘political risk events’ based on statistical tabulation of past occurrences.

The chapter shows how classical interpolation problems of various types (Schur, Nevanlinna–Pick, Hermite–Fejer) carry over and generalize to the time-variant and/or matrix situation. We show that they all reduce to a single generalized constrained interpolation problem, elegantly solved by time-variant scattering theory. An essential ingredient is the definition of the notion of valuation for time-variant systems, thereby generalizing the notion of valuation in the complex plane provided by the classical z-transform.

Medearis and his two cofounders of Silicon Valley Bank wished to tackle the antiquated banking practices that led to a massive reduction in the number of banks, the disappearance of community banks, and the mergers of Big Banks. Bank regulations and culture prevent banks from embracing tech startups and entrepreneurs as lending clients. The SVB founders knew about Bank of America’s abandonment of its early tech lending, missed opportunities, and bank failures to capture tech startups and entrepreneurs. The old, conservative banking environment during the early days of the tech sector presented the founders with an opportunity.