Moments of Valuation: Exploring Sites of Dissonance

This book consists of 15 studies in the growing area of valuation studies which look at the way things and ideas that are new or unknown are given value. Before these items gain commercial value they are evaluated by experts, reviewed by critics & compared with earlier successes. Thus "moments of valuation" can determine the success of innovations

Ariane Berthoin Antal, Senior Fellow, WZB Berlin,Michael Hutter, Director, Research Unit 'Cultural Sources of Newness', WZB Berlin,David Stark, Arthur Lehman Professor Sociology & International Affairs, Columbia University

Ariane Berthoin Antal is senior fellow at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, where she currently leads the research stream on "Artistic Interventions in Organizations" in the Research Unit "Cultural Sources of Newness." She is Distinguished Research Professor at Audencia Nantes School of Management in France and honorary professor at the Technical University of Berlin. She earned her B.A from Pomona College, her M.A from Boston University and Dr. phil from the Technical University of Berlin. She has published widely in English, French and German on business and society, organizational learning and knowledge creation, and intercultural management, including the Oxford Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge (with Meinolf Dierkes, John Child and Ikujiro Nonaka). She serves on the editorial board of numerous journals, including Organization Studies, Management Learning, and Gender and Management.


Michael Hutter is research director at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, where he heads the unit "Cultural Sources of Newness." He earned a B.A. in mathematics at Portland State University, an M.A. in economics at the University of Washington in Germany and a doctorate at the University of Munich. From 1987-2008, he held the chair for economic theory at Witten/Herdecke University, and from 2008-13 he was research professor for knowledge and innovation at the Institute of Sociology at Technische Universitat Berlin. He was invited as a visiting scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio (2000), the School of Information Management Systems, UC Berkeley (2002), and the Getty Research Institute (2003 and 2007). His publications include Beyond Price. Value in Economics, Culture and the Arts (co-edited with David Throsby) and The Rise of the Joyful Economy (forthcoming).

David Stark is Arthur Lehman Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Columbia University where he directs the Center on Organizational Innovation. His book, The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life (Princeton University Press 2009) is an ethnographic account of how organizations and their members search for what is valuable. A recent essay on observation theory was published in Sociologica 2/2013, and articles in economic sociology appear in The American Journal of Sociology (2006 and 2010) and the American Sociological Review (2012) With photographer, Nancy Warner, he recently published This Place, These People: Life and Shadow on the Great Plains (Columbia University Press, 2013). Among other awards, Stark is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2002) and an Honorary Doctorate from the Ecole normale superieure de Cachan (2013).