Trine Pallesen

Valuation struggles over pricing – determining the worth of wind power

ABSTRACT Public policies such as feed-in tariffs have been widely introduced to stimulate the development of renewable energies, and sustain a decarbonisation of the electricity sector. Proponents argue that these governance instruments safeguard public goods such as the climate – yet they are accused of creating political markets, and political prices, here understood as market distortion. This paper studies the ‘politics’ of pricing by following the adoption of the first feed-in tariff in France. Pricing as a way of achieving non-economic ends, such as climate mitigation, brings the values of several public goods into play, all the while prompting a translation of these values into a single price. Following the struggles over the pricing of wind power in the early 2000s, the study illustrates that rather than a pollution of the market sphere by that of politics, a politics of pricing can be observed in four distinct struggles: namely the framing of the public interest; valuation as the articulation of the future; the possible agencies of governance; and role of valuation methods and calculations.

Testing the provoked economy

Chapter 5 of Fabian Muniesa’s new book The Provoked Economy draws on an ethnographic study of consumer testing in the perfume industry. Through the chapter, we learn how potential consumers, equipped with their noses and surveys, partake in carefully orchestrated situations in which new fragrances are weight in relation to others. Economic objects such as perfume, we were told years ago (Callon & Muniesa 2005), are not pre-qualified entities, but are singularized in the specific tests and calculative spaces in which they are located. Similarly, the simulacrum of perfume testing, Muniesa explains, does not measure the inherent preferences of the participants, nor the perfumes’ essence, but it turns the former into measuring devices that subsequently allow the singularization of the latter. A new book, such as The Provoked Economy, obviously is not a new fragrance. And, as Muniesa reminds us in the last paragraphs of chapter 7, academic research should not be confused with a new commodity. But, we could say, now using Karpik’s (2010) terminology, a new book is a singularity; a unique academic and economic object that is made comparable to other results of academic production with the help of different ‘judgment devices’. In the academic publishing industry, most monographs are hardly advertised – or advertising is left in the hands of the authors. But, and beside book reviews, of course, a book’s main singularizing device is its own content; it is on the book’s pages that we normally learn about the author’s quarrels and differences with earlier academic publications as well as what the author believes to be the ground-breaking ideas that make the new publication unique within its own field. This book, however, does not do much of that. Perhaps because of its empiricist stance, The Provoked Economy is written in a sober tone that avoids grand declarations and noisy quarrels. Or, perhaps, like certain luxurious goods such as perfume, the author tried to make this book singular by avoiding any explicit comparison with existing publications. What is the correct answer? We do not know. And it does not really matter. What does matter though is that because of its lack of explicit polemic and self-aggrandizing statements this book might leave the reader wondering about its ambitions. What is this book trying to accomplish? Or, to respect its pragmatism, what is it that this book does? In this review, we rehearse a method to find out. Inspired – or should we say provoked – by the content and style of The Provoked Economy, we have devised three tests that can help us to figure out the singularity of this book. In each of these tests, the reviewed book is placed in a delimited calculative (in the sense given by Callon and Muniesa, and not Karpik) space, together with other existing academic books that we – organizers and subjects of the experiment (we apologize for that, but one calculates better in a calculative space of one’s own configuration, as Muniesa also reminds us) – found suitable for comparison.