A sociology of values and value

Skeggs, Beverley and Yuill, Simon (2017). A sociology of values and value. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-852701

Data description (abstract)

The collection consists of transcripts from interviews with project participants, data from their Facebook usage, related advertising and browser tracking as well as survey answers.
There has been a great deal of interest in how capital has intervened in almost every area of life, leading some to propose new forms of capital eg ‘emotional capitalism’, and others to suggest that processes of valuation are now the major method for understanding the social world.

Whilst, no doubt, capital behaves according to its own logic, finding new lines of flight, converting affects into value, making multi-culturalism marketable, generating new forms of bio-capital, and making many of our actions subject to the logic of calculation, this project asks if anything is left behind. Is there anything that cannot be capitalised upon?

Many social theories reproduce the logic of capital. But if we only understand the world from the perspective of this logic what do we miss seeing? Previous research projects have drawn attention to how values are formed beyond value, unnoticed and unseen, producing new ways of being and doing in the world, organised differently through spatial and temporal co-ordinates. This project consolidates and expands this analysis by exploring values (and their relationship to value) through two limit cases that attempt to convert all values to value: modern digital relations and traditional prosperity theology. But do they?

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