Valuation practices and the cooptation charge: Quantification and monetization as political logics.

Abstract

Market-like devices that enact quantification and monetization processes (QM) underpin a growing number of valuation practices, but the widespread take-up of QM has given rise to the ‘cooptation charge’: for all the good intentions and results produced by those who deploy QM, they are complicit in reinforcing problematic neoliberal tendencies. A political discourse-theoretical perspective, combined with a pragmatist scholarship that has made significant advances in our understanding of QM, suggests that the cooptation charge relies on an overly simplified picture of both QM and neoliberalism. However, while we acknowledge this as an important advance, we argue that the normative, political, and ideological significance of QM remains surprisingly underspecified. We still lack a convincing theoretical framework that provides a more rounded multi-dimensional critical perspective within which to navigate the evaluative dilemmas produced by these increasingly widespread techniques, including cooptation worries. Drawing on the logics approach of the Essex school of political discourse theory, we develop a framework that brings together the strategic, normative, and ideological dimensions that otherwise tend to be treated separately in the literature, allowing a fuller assessment of such technologies.