Unifying Regimes of Value

It may be naïve to think so, but it is possible a practice theoretical approach to value creation allows us agree with Marx that human creative activity is foundational to value; with Simmel that interaction between entities is involved; with much economic anthropology that gift, barter, and commodity constitute and are constituted in regimes of value (Appadurai 1986), as are kinds of the subjects who participate in such regimes; and with Saussure and early Baudrillard (1996) that what constitutes value is fundamentally a matter of distinction. Moreover such an approach may help us develop a model in which two distinct kinds of value prevalent in the literature and exemplified in the contrast that Kjeldgaard and Karababa (this volume) draw between economic exchange value and social value. The former refers foundationally to relative ratios of value however crudely or precisely calculated and ultimately determined by a standard equivalent, i.e., money, and the latter refers to valued end states always (?) imprecisely determined. The practice approach allows us to suggest that human creative activity is at the foundation of value creation, an important twist on Marx’s view that encompasses productive activity in cultural and contexts where is no emic conception of labour. We can agree with Simmel about the role of interaction since as mentioned practice approaches to value creation suggest that the interaction of productive and consumptive moments are key to the realization of use values.

But rather than dissolving kinds of value into a typology as Holbrook (1999) has done and as Kjeldgaard and Karababa review, it might be useful to think in terms of regimes of value creation and the relationships between them. The problem with typological approaches is that they neglect that all values cannot be obtained, or perhaps are not prioritized, through the kind of exchange that predominates in capitalist market economies and to which these typologies are limited. The focus on advanced market economies creates theoretical discontinuities and blinkers. To develop a praxeology of value we might build upon our already existing models of value creation to ask what kinds of value are produced in regimes that we have termed gift, barter, or market. What classes of value are produced in each of these; and how do they vary systematically?

What these regimes all have in common is to produce models of the proper relationships between things and persons, material relations in the former case and social relations in the latter. They also differ systematically. Systems of gift exchange personify things, deny the alienability of both persons and things and embed persons in systems of intergroup relationships, producing these systems as they do so.  Non-equivalence of things especially evident in elaborate system of ranked exchange goods is a watchword; since it is through non-equivalence that social relations may be perpetuated.

Systems of barter by contrast objectify things; things are alienated but not the persons exchanging as no standard unit of production exists and indeed often cannot be known. These systems aim to produce contingent equivalence; that is to define those things exchanged as essentially unities –so much of this is the same as so much of that (Strathern 1992). The issue of social relations is fraught; barter relationships are rarely one-off transactions, as they can only occur if the parties to the exchange have agreed that they are qualified to do so. Nonetheless such exchanges are often fundamentally agonistic.

Finally, as we know in market exchange both things and persons are alienated; people from the products of their labour and from the their labour itself as they are imagined to have a dual existence as sensuous human beings and as mere, essentially equivalent, units of labour power. If as Karababa and Kjeldgaard argue, “marketing is involved in the evaluation of sociocultural differences and the articulation of the economic worth of these differences… marketing can be understood as a practice of configuration of commodified value system potentials rather than a meaning transfer institution.”  This position is consistent with the insight Graeber (2005, p.450) offers to that effect that in advanced consumer culture, the key value or the ultimate use value is the self. The implicit project of consumption is restoring the subject divided by capitalism to unity:

[In consumer culture] Each person is assumed to be unique and thus, by definition, incomparable. If all individuals are values unto themselves [an idea which he traces back to Christian ideas about the value of the immortal soul], none can be treated as intrinsically superior to any other. It is this which has allowed the market, as the sphere of individual self-realisation, to become the hierarchically dominant, highest sphere [of value].

And consequently we might argue that all the many values elaborated by Holbrook (1999) fetishize the quest for the unified sense of being capitalism sunders.

What then of the key or ultimate value in gift giving. If we follow Mauss and his successors we know that the gift is peaceful relations among human groups in the absence of the State, that is, sociality. Contemporary research shows how gift giving still articulates the moral economy and produces the grounds of sociality even within the firm (Alter 2010; Cheal 1988). Unfortunately, the gift-giving literature in consumer culture theory generally focuses on dyadic or monadic gift giving (Belk 2010; Mick and DeMoss 1990; Sherry 1983), and even when cognizing broader social systems (Fischer and Arnold 1990) has not tended to focus on the value, e.g., kin relationships, created through gift giving as it might do. More recent work begins to resituate consumer gift giving within its proper frame as a rhizomatic social system of value creation (Giesler 2006). Weinberger and Wallendorf (2012) is a rare example of intracommunity gift giving research that shows how tournaments of value produce and reproduce a prestige hierarchy. Moreover, this paper addresses the linkages between the market sphere of value creation and the gift sphere insofar as elite members of Mardi Gras Krewes transform market system exchange value into prestige value through the Mardi Gras gifting of spectacle and beads and subtle reciprocal acts of admiration and legitimation.

Recent research leads one to propose that the key value in the barter economy is the reproduction of meaningful boundaries (Humphreys and Hugh-Jones 1992). One can say this because one finds that barter exists at the boundaries of distinctive ecological systems, and once instituted contributes to the elaboration of cultural distinctions around economic specializations (Gell 1992). While noted very much in passing in early work on consumer to consumer exchange networks (Belk Sherry and Wallendorf 1988) one of the few examples of discussion of bartering in consumer culture theory literature is at Burning Man (Kozinets 2002). While we are told that reciprocal exchanges are required among festival-goers, we do not know how the negotiation of equivalence which lies at the heart of a barter system (Gell 1992; Strathern 1992) occurs. We also have tantalizing hints from the Burning Man context that there are linkages between regimes of value creation as when festival organizers grant privileges or status marks to those who have offered compelling performances, but this discussion too is underdeveloped.