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Managing the Politics of Value Propositions
Article in Marketing Theory · December 2014

DOI: 10.1177/1470593114523445
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Article
Marketing Theory
2014, Vol. 14(4) 355–375
Managing the politics ª The Author(s) 2014
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of value propositions DOI: 10.1177/1470593114523445
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Hervé Corvellec and Johan Hultman

Lund University, Sweden
Abstract
This article contributes to the ongoing discussion, revived by the service-dominant logic thesis, on
value propositions in service organizations. Against a backdrop of understanding value as a
pluralistic social construct that takes place across different institutionalized practices of valuation
or regimes of value, we argue that value propositions transcend the immediate localness of both
value in exchange and value in use. Correspondingly, we claim that service practitioners may draw
advantages from engaging with a politics of value that addresses multiple regimes of value, whether
commensurable or not. A case study of waste management services in Sweden serves as an illus-
tration of such a politics that combines practical, economic, political, and environmental aspects of
value propositions.
Keywords
Politics of value, regimes of value, service-dominant logic, value proposition, waste management
Introduction
Vargo and Lusch’s (2004) thesis that marketing should abandon a goods-dominant logic for a
service-dominant logic (SDL) has fueled an intense discussion about the nature of marketing. The
SDL thesis has also revived the long discussion among service scholars about the nature of value in
services (e.g., Delaunay and Gadrey, 1992; Gallarza et al., 2011; Gummesson, 1995; Levitt, 2004;
Normann and Ramı́rez, 1993; Williams, 2012). By doing so, it has brought into focus anew the
assertion that service firms can only make value propositions (Ballantyne et al., 2011; Frow and
Payne, 2011; Grönroos, 2008, 2011; Hilton et al., 2012; Kowalkowski, 2011; Kowalkowski
et al., 2012; Michel et al., 2008; Vargo, 2011a; Vargo and Lusch, 2008). This assertion actualizes
the relevance of inquiring about what it means to make value propositions.
Corresponding author:
Hervé Corvellec, Department of Service Management and Service Studies, Lund University, Box 882, SE-25108 Helsingborg,
Sweden.
Email: herve.corvellec@ism.lu.se
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356 Marketing Theory 14(4)
The notion of value proposition (for a history, see Ballantyne et al., 2011) comes from the
conventional view in service management research that services are coproduced by service
providers and customers (e.g., Grönroos, 2012; McColl-Kennedy et al., 2012; Normann and
Ramı́rez, 1993; Payne et al., 2008). Service companies do not endow what they sell with intrinsic
value, as industrial companies have traditionally imagined about their products. Instead, service
companies are value facilitators: They make value propositions to users that may or may not be
realized (Grönroos and Ravald, 2011). The value that stems from their value creation processes
(Gummerus, 2013) is only potential as it can only become real if accepted by users (Grönroos,
2011; Hilton et al., 2012). On this account, the notion of value proposition corroborates that value
is ‘‘phenomenological and experiential in nature’’ (Vargo and Lusch, 2008: 2), can only be appre-
ciated and realized by the customer (Gallarza et al., 2011; Holbrook, 1999, 2006), and should be
defined in use rather than in exchange (Vargo, 2011b; Vargo and Lusch, 2004, 2008).
Our claim is that value propositions are not limited to the here and now of the immediate
exchange and experience of service interactions. We build on the understanding that value
propositions are reciprocal communicative practices (Ballantyne et al., 2011) that take place in
interactive networks (Ford and Mouzas, 2013; Fyrberg and Jüriado, 2009). The stakeholders in
these networks participate in different ways in the service delivery and experience (Frow and
Payne, 2011), and they exchange value propositions (Flint and Mentzer, 2006; Kowalkowski
et al., 2012). Value propositions are therefore not univocal. They address the needs of different
evaluators (Kowalkowski, 2011), and it is a challenge for the party making value offerings to
align (Frow and Payne, 2011) the different views of the parties present. Value propositions are
also endowed with a time dimension (Heinonen et al., 2010) in that they involve sensemaking
processes that are not limited to the immediate interactions between providers and customers;
rather they depend on how these and other stakeholders make sense of future or past service
interactions.
Further, our claim builds on the fact that just like contexts frame service provision (Chandler
and Vargo, 2011), value propositions are embedded in social settings that condition what is
considered good or bad, attractive or repulsive, or legitimate or not. Drawing on economic
sociology (Beckert and Aspers, 2011; Beckert and Zafirovski, 2010; Smith, 1990; Stark, 2009)
and economic anthropology (Carrier, 2005; Wilk and Cliggett, 2007), and more specifically
Appadurai (1986), we claim that organizations make not only one (Hultman and Ek, 2011)
but several value propositions that address different institutionalized activities, processes, or
practices of valuation (Muniesa, 2011), in other words regimes of value. For example, the
municipally owned waste management company that serves as the illustrative case in our study
concurrently makes various value propositions: a practical value proposition to households to
collect waste; a political value proposition to provide the region with a novel competitive
advantage; an environmental value proposition to secure a viable environment for future gen-
erations; and an economic value proposition to its municipal owners to generate enough returns to
finance its own development. Each of these value propositions is evaluated by stakeholders
according to idiosyncratic rules and criteria, and they are hardly commensurable and comparable. particular/measurable
Yet, as our case study shows, the value propositions made to certain stakeholders can be used to
strengthen the value propositions made to other stakeholders. While stakeholders may make use of
idiosyncratic regimes of value, they do understand service propositions made to other stakeholders
who hold other regimes of value.
This finding brings us to our final claim that managers in service companies can engage
innovatively with the pluralism of their value propositions. Drawing on Appadurai’s (1986) notion

Corvellec and Hultman 357
of a politics of value, we suggest that service providers can embark on a politics of value pro-
positions that strategically exploits rather than regrets or even denies that their value propositions
are so diverse that they resist being integrated into one value proposition. Our case study illustrates
that such a view is particularly relevant for companies involved in the economic, social, and
environmental dimensions of sustainability.
All in all, our purpose is to redirect the theoretical discussions on value propositions in services
away from seeking to establish the nature of these propositions to investigating why, how, and for
whom service companies make a variety of value propositions. Given this purpose, we align
ourselves with service management scholars who focus on how sociocultural variables affect value
cocreation and the ‘‘valuing activities of subjects’’ (Domegan et al., 2012: 208). Value emerges
from substantial interactions (Ford and Mouzas, 2013) between people, for example, to cope with
problems. It is ‘‘constituted by marketers and consumers in their activities and discourses via an
enacted process, a social construction that takes place prior to, during and after the actual exchange
and use(s) take place’’ (Peñaloza and Venkatesh, 2006: 303). Value also has a collective and
intersubjective dimension and should be understood as value in social context (Edvardsson et al.,
2011). Value creation does not take place in a vacuum; it involves not only the firm and customer
dyad but also others in the customer’s service network (McColl-Kennedy et al., 2012). This is why
externalities are a crucial component of the SDL (Williams, 2012), and the SDL should pay more
attention to the social conditions and cultural meanings essential for value creation (Peñaloza and
Mish, 2011). Central to our claims is the need for service researchers to unfold the practice of value
cocreation (Helkkula et al., 2012; Kowalkowski et al., 2012).
The article is structured as follows. First, we introduce some key tenets of the economic
sociology and anthropology of value. Second, we describe our methodology: waste management in
Sweden and our waste management case company. Third, we analyze how the company calls on
different regimes of value for its value propositions. Finally, we discuss this calling on different
regimes of value in terms of a politics of value propositions and conclude with a call for a plur-
alistic understanding of value propositions.
Theory: A sociology and anthropology of value

Economic sociology (e.g., Beckert and Zafirovski, 2010) and economic anthropology (e.g., Car-
rier, 2005; Wilk and Cliggett, 2007) both have a long tradition of describing the social nature of
value. Emile Durkheim ([1893] 1991), Marcel Mauss ([1902] 2000), and Max Weber (Weber and
Whimster [1921-1922] 2008) tend to be seen as pioneers in this field, while lately scholars have
turned to Gabriel Tarde (1902) to underscore the subjective and intersubjective character of
economic quantification (e.g., Arvidsson, 2011b; Latour and Lépinay, 2009). Recent develop-
ments have demonstrated the ambiguities and uncertainties concerning what is defined as being
valuable as well as the coexistence of different valuation principles (Stark, 2009).
Refuting absolute value

A common claim among these disciplines is that there is no such thing as absolute value. Value is
embedded in the cultural characteristics of societies. Definitions of value are contingent in the
sense of being conditioned but not mechanistically determined (Herrnstein Smith, 1988) and on the
symbolic systems that in any given context define what is important, meaningful, desirable, or
worthwhile (Graeber, 2005). For example, auctions, far from functioning as abstractly as economic
theories assume, determine value according to idiosyncratic characteristics of specific places and

specific points in time, location and history, and tradition and desire (Smith, 1990). Similarly, in
standard markets (e.g., commodities) value is centered on the characteristics of what is exchanged
so that valuation is quite independent of who the actors are; but in a status market (e.g., fashion or
art), value is centered on the relative status of the actors present (Aspers, 2009). The vast economy
of singularities (Karpik, 2010) that is composed of the multiple markets where people exchange
things and services that are unique, specific, peculiar, or simply deeply embedded in culture
illustrates daily the situated character of value determinations. The economy of singularities also
shows that it is not fully possible to distinguish between use value and exchange value, as Marx
suggests (see, e.g. Davis, 2006), since what the buyer is prepared to pay for a value proposition is
an integrated part of the experience derived from this proposition, something already noted by
Veblen ([1899] 2001) in his theory of conspicuous consumption.
Value is an outcome of situated judgments (Frow, 2007). What people in a given society
consider as being of value cannot be reduced to a matter of individual preferences a priori.
Individual preferences are not only conditioned by families and private and public organizations
but also less tangible influences such as political affairs, the arts, social practices, technological
developments, and the natural environment. For example, the rise of intangibles such as brands or
symbols has brought with it a new valuation logic that is more than before dependent on collective
ethical affinity (Arvidsson, 2009) and shared affective investments (Arvidsson, 2011b).
Value derives from how people conceive of the cosmology of their world (Alexander, 2005).
More specifically, value derives from how people conceive of worth and of ends in order to give
meaning to their choices and to give direction to their actions (Corvellec and Risberg, 2007).
From asserting the value of Nature affected by an oil spill, to how connoisseurs agree on the
value of wine, through the worlds of scientific publications, subprime mortgages, or stock
exchanges, value derives from the preferences of market actors. These preferences are sys-
tematically conditioned by the political dynamics of institutional contexts and embedded in the
social psychology of desire and meaning (Beckert and Aspers, 2011). Not least, value in the
technical sense as a measure of worth depends on values in the ethical sense of normative views
of the good (Arvidsson, 2011a).
Value circulates
Social anthropology also shows that as soon as value emerges, it starts to circulate as a construct,
undergoing transformations along time and distance that encompass not only the economy but also
society and the environment as a whole (Mauss, [1902] 2000).
Valuation practices are variable in terms of space. Since there is a spatiality of exchange and of
use, there is also a spatiality of value. The same secondhand item will be assigned different values
depending on whether it is offered at garage boot sale, charity shop, or vintage boutique (Gregson
and Crewe, 2003). The practice of arbitrage is a case in point that prices—the clearest economic
proxy to value—need an encompassing social and technical support to be set across nearly perfect
markets (Beunza et al., 2006), a dimension not taken into account by the Black and Scholes model
(Black and Scholes, 1973), arguably the dominant understanding of arbitrage in economic theory.
And the efforts made in high-frequency trading at leveling off differences in the time that it takes to
pass orders between computers that are immediately near the data centers of stock exchange com-
panies and computers that are a few kilometers away (Patterson, 2012; Yagiz, 2012) show that
even when economic information travels at the speed of electrons, differences in distance mean
differences in profit-making opportunities.

Valuation practices are also variable over time. Stevengraphs, small British mechanically
woven silk pictures from the late 1800s and early 1900s, are a case in point of the transient
nature of economic value (Thompson, 1979). Very popular for a while after their launch at the
1879 York Exhibition, they saw their economic value coming close to zero in the following
decades, only to experience a revival as Victorian curiosa in the late 1960s that has lasted
until today, their economic value having been secured by a reappraisal of their aesthetic and
historical value. At the other end of the time scale, the transience of value is corroborated,
again, by high-frequency trading where value creation or destruction is a matter of less than
nanoseconds.
Regimes of value
A reason why value is not absolute is that value is determined, at the same time and across time,
through different regimes of value (Appadurai, 1986). Regimes of value are institutionalized ways
of assessing and communicating value. They are expressions of established understandings of what
matters as opposed to what does not matter. As Frow explains, a regime of value is
a semiotic institution generating evaluative regularities under certain conditions of use, and in which
particular empirical audiences or communities may be more or less fully imbricated. (1995: 144)
Regimes of value are coherent and socially situated ways to establish value (Appadurai, 1986).
They are evaluative frameworks and practices that are embedded in specific social contexts, rely
on specific modes of calculation, and are borne by specific sets of institutions. And as evaluative
frameworks, regimes of values impose themselves on both sides of the traditional divide in service
management theory between the offering side of the service provider and the beneficiary side of
the service customer.
The concept of regime of value expresses a fundamental thesis:
that no object, no text, no cultural practice has an intrinsic or necessary meaning or value or function;
and that meaning, value and function are always the effect of specific (and changing, changeable)
social relations and mechanisms of signification. (Frow, 1995: 145)
Different regimes of value define value differently. One regime can attribute value to something
that another regime considers having no or negative value. For example, a political regime might
attach a particular value to democracy and consider that universal access to a public service is of
key significance, whereas an economic regime attaches more importance to providing users with
good value for the money, and an environmental regime gives priority to the service’s environ-
mental impact. Each evaluative framework is an expression of assumptions, preferences, choices,
modes of calculations, arbitrages, and, more generally, orders of worth (Boltanski and Thévenot,
2006) that condition what this framework points to as being of value.
The concept of regimes of value has one of its grounds in the observation that ‘‘not all parties
share the same interests in any specific regime of value’’ (Appadurai, 1986: 90, italics in the
original). Stakeholders adopt different ways to measure how well the company is serving their
interests. Not that the concept of regimes of value is simply restating the argument that value is
something subjective, in the sense of being personal, preferential, experimental, and situational
(Holbrook, 1999). Instead, the notion of regimes of value underscores that different institutions,
calculative modes, or traditions lead stakeholders with different regimes of value to define value in

different ways. The notion of regime of value expresses that value is determined locally, in dif-
ferent contexts, and by social groups that have different vantage points and employ different
criteria (Frow, 1995).
Politics of value
As Stark (2009) shows, the logic for evaluating worth in organizations is not always clear; multiple
and changing criteria create ambivalent and uncertain orders of worth for the actors. The coex-
istence of regimes of value, the transformation of regimes of value over time so that some grow in
importance while others become obsolete, and the additional fact that regimes of value are not
necessarily homogeneous and can be crossed by conflicts and controversies create a challenge for
value proposers. It is difficult for them to know in advance according to which metrics the value of
their action will be measured.
Moreover, ways to assess value cannot necessarily be measured with the same standard
because they are not necessarily commensurable. Commensuration, expressing characteristics
normally expressed in different units according to a common metric (Espeland and Mitchell,
1998), has its limits. There are not necessarily clear ways to compare and rank value propositions
according to different regimes of value. For example, there is no obvious scale of equivalence or
ordering principles between the political value of democracy, the economic value of efficacy,
and the environmental value of precaution: Organizations that aim to offer services that address
these three regimes of value address incommensurate evaluative regimes (Frow, 1993). Different
regimes of value can even be incompatible and mutually exclusive. For example, education
services offered on a purely commercial basis would transform the value of diplomas so greatly
that they would lose their original value of being a sign of individual merit and competence
(Sandel, 2012). This is why movements across incommensurable value spaces are clearly critical
(Frow, 1995).
This combined instability and incommensurability of a regime of values is not necessarily a
curse for organizations, though. It makes it possible for them to organize their value propositions
according to what Appadurai (1986) calls a politics of value.
The notion of politics of value considers that ‘‘to value’’ as verb is primary to ‘‘value’’ as a noun
(Dewey, 1939). It displaces the focus from the notion of value per se to the pragmatics of valuation
(Muniesa, 2011). Value results from an action of valuation, and this action is ultimately political in
the sense that it involves ‘‘relations, assumptions and contests pertaining to power’’ (Appadurai,
1986: 57). Value emerges from ‘‘relationships amongst people’’ (Harvie and Milburn, 2010) who
are different and therefore of unequal social status (Zafirovski, 2000) and who act within the
specific social order of, for example, markets (Fourcade, 2007).
Further, valuation activities are political in the sense that they produce representations that link
knowledge practices to decision-making practices (Verran, 2011). Valuation ultimately rests on
collective arbitrages between socially conditioned individual variables such as beliefs, desires,
convictions, preferences, priorities, ambitions, and the like. Lacking technical or objective ways
to aggregate these variables, and thus ways of combining the different regimes of value through
which these variable find an expression, organizational members need to learn how to engage with
the kind of things that characterize politics: negotiations, compromises, and trade-offs, but also
programs, moral choices, and public votes. More than value propositions, organizations make
valuation propositions, to reuse Dewey’s (1939) locution (see also Muniesa, 2011), that is,
propositions about how organizational activities should be valued.

Case study: A Swedish municipal waste management company

Method
We will apply these insights about value propositions, regimes of value, and the politics of value to
a case study of waste management services in Sweden. This will allow us to provide a concrete
understanding of a politics of value propositions that takes place across practical, political, legal,
environmental, economic, and social regimes of value. Waste management is a service-providing
infrastructure. As such, its value propositions are critical for a functioning society.
The case study concerns a municipally owned waste management company, NSR (Nordvästra
Skånes Renhållnings AB, in translation Northwest Scania Recycling Ltd; see below for a
presentation). The study is part of a 4-year research project on the organization of critical
infrastructural services (see acknowledgments). The fieldwork for this particular case study has,
as suggested by Star (1999) in investigations of infrastructure, followed a multimethod,
ethnographic design. It has combined qualitative interviews, discussions between researchers and
practitioners, practitioner meetings where researchers have been observers, workshops where
research results have been communicated to practitioners, and the study of company documents,
including service marketing and accounting material. Data collection took place between 2009 and
2013. Thus, the argument presented here is the result of an extensive case study, well suited to ana-
lyze policy-driven processes that undergo transformations and change on a continual basis
(McCann and Ward, 2012; Peck and Theodore, 2012), as is the case with waste governance.
For the purposes of this case study, we have used 5 semi-structured interviews with company
management of the 18 interviews that we have conducted within the research project. These inter-
views lasted between 60 and 100 min, were recorded, fully transcribed, and manually coded. This
coding has served to capture how company management expresses their value propositions in rela-
tion to their own services, waste management, and waste research. We also attended six meetings
where representatives presented the activities and value propositions of the case company. These
observations were documented by taking notes, and this material was coded according to the same
themes as the interviews.
Furthermore, we have conducted document analyses of the NSR 2010 and 2012 owners’
directive, annual reports for the past 10 years, communication brochures, and the NSR Web site.
The material was manually coded. This coding served to capture how proposition are commu-
nicated to internal and external stakeholders by the company in the context of its service offerings.
This specific fieldwork has been backed up by extensive fieldwork within the Swedish waste
management community and has enabled us to contextualize the data specifically collected for this
study. It includes attending four 1-day trade conferences organized by a national trade journal and
one 2-day yearly assembly of Swedish Waste Management (Avfall Sverige), the association of
municipally owned sanitation and waste management companies. This fieldwork has given us
access to a wide range of presentations about innovative waste management services, as well as
numerous talks with waste managers and politicians. We have toured the facilities of three waste
management companies. We have also interviewed the head of Swedish Waste Management
(Avfall Sverige), administrative officials at the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (Natur-
vårdverket), and consultants involved in waste management.
Finally, the data and results specific to this study have been continuously validated through
contacts between researchers and representatives of waste management companies. Previous
versions of the argument have been formally presented for managers and members of the board at
two waste management companies, one of which is the case company in this analysis. These

presentations have prompted important feedback and discussions. Likewise, from the start of the
research project we have had an informal dialogue with the chief executive officer of the case
company about value creation in waste management. These contacts have shown that represen-
tatives of waste management companies consider the presented argument, inclusive of the notion
of ‘‘regime of value’’, as relevant to their operational and strategic work with value propositions.
Waste management in Sweden

About two-thirds of the waste generated in Sweden as measured by weight is produced and
processed by the mining industry, mostly through landfills. A privately run system of extended
producer responsibilities (EPR) answers for the collection and processing services for specific
waste streams such as packaging, end-of-life vehicles, electrical and electronic equipment, and bat-
teries. Municipalities have the responsibility for the collection and processing of household waste
that is not encompassed by the EPR system. The collection and processing of industrial and hazar-
dous waste from industries are deregulated, market-based activities (Avfall Sverige, 2012).
Municipalities can handle their responsibility for household waste in three different ways:
through municipal departments, municipally owned waste management companies that they own
either solely or together with other municipalities, or public procurements. Municipalities tend to
proceed in different ways for the different stages of waste management: first the collection services
and then the treatment of waste. Three municipalities out of four have chosen public procurement
to organize the collection of waste from households, including transfer and transport. But nearly all
municipalities answer for the treatment of waste (e.g., storage, segregation, incineration, com-
posting, production of biogas, material recovery and recycling, and disposal at landfills) through
municipally owned waste management companies (Avfall Sverige, 2012).
Municipally owned companies thus hold a key position on the treatment stage of waste man-
agement in Sweden. This is largely due to a legal statute that endows them with a monopoly on
household waste within the jurisdiction of their municipal owner(s), but also allows them to tender
bids made by municipalities that cannot handle their waste themselves and need to procure waste
services. Swedish municipally owned companies can even compete with private waste manage-
ment companies for contracts to handle waste from commercial and industrial customers, and they
can import waste from foreign countries, for example, to secure their delivery of energy to district
heating systems.
Waste management at NSR

NSR is a solid waste management company co-owned by six municipalities in the region of North-
west Scania in Southern Sweden, and as such it answers for waste collection and waste treatment
services in the region. NSR is an advanced waste management company. It is one of the major
biogas producers in Sweden, a producer of biofertilizers, and, more generally, a company with
unique competence in biological treatment, waste characterization, recycling, and landfill research
(NSR, 2013).
From the perspective of the municipalities that own NSR, the company makes it possible to
fulfill their legal responsibility, as decreed in the Swedish environmental code (SFS, 1998: 808,
Chapter 15), to ensure that household waste generated in the municipality is recycled or removed.
More precisely, the municipal owners’ directive (Helsingborg Stad—Kommunfullmäktige, 2012)
states that NSR should develop a waste management that preserves the environment, serves the
regional business community, and offers services to the community (waste reduction, recycling,

reuse, and environmentally reliable treatment). It mandates that NSR should create the conditions
for the development and creation of waste management and recycling methods that strengthen
growth and increase resource efficiency in the region. It also mandates that NSR should follow the
European model of waste hierarchy according to which the best waste policy is minimization,
followed by reuse, recycling as material, recycling as energy, and in the worst case, landfilling.
Among other things, NSR is to provide the region with waste management services that limit the
diffusion of hazardous substances, is cost-efficient, and is flexible enough to meet the new
demands that will come in the future. In sum, NSR is a service provider expected by its owners
to deliver a complex mix of value propositions to a great number of stakeholders.
In a service delivery sense, NSR offers a series of waste collection propositions to households.
The company has developed a multifraction neighborhood collection system that provides
households with the possibility to separate and recycle food, packaging, and newspapers at the
sidewalk or in a garbage room. This is an ‘‘extra service’’ (NSR, 2011a) compared with the need to
go to an off-site recycling center or recycling depot. In some municipalities, NSR offers the service
of collecting batteries and smaller electronic goods from households up to six times per year (NSR,
n.a.). NSR also offers multifamily properties the service of cleaning waste containers on-site for a
fee (NSR, 2011d). The company states that ‘‘by developing our customer service and improving
collection and sorting operations we can increase efficiency in waste treatment and recycling’’
(NSR, 2007: 2).
Similarly, NSR offers tailored services to companies. Larger companies or companies with
environmental ambitions are offered ‘‘a comprehensive waste management contract, with personal
contact, proximity to services, and an overview of the waste management situation’’ (our trans-
lation, NSR, 2011b). The service consists of an in-depth analysis of the customer’s internal waste
producing processes, custom waste prevention, separation and collection solutions, and informa-
tional material. Smaller companies are offered ‘‘effective management of waste streams with
custom waste collection and proximity to efficient service’’ (our translation, NSR, 2011c). The ser-
vice consists of an analysis of the type of waste produced, waste prevention advice, custom waste
separation, and collection solutions and informational material. Moreover, NSR offers to act as a
consultant to businesses throughout the region for hazardous waste, ‘‘offering the services of its
chemists and safety advisers in the classification and handling of all categories of hazardous waste,
with the exception of radioactive waste’’ (our translation, NSR, 2007: 11).
Analysis: Addressing multiple regimes of value

Multidimensional value propositions at NSR
NSR’s activities illustrate that waste management companies make more than one kind of value
proposition. This trait of waste management services is noted in the waste literature. Effective
waste management systems are known for creating social, economic, political, technological, and
environmental value (Zaman and Lehmann, 2011). Correspondingly, their activities open the way
for discussions about their impact on the environment, business economies, local economies,
aesthetics, infrastructure robustness, pedagogic ability, health, and social cohesion (Söderberg and
Kain, 2006).
First, NSR makes value propositions to a broad range of stakeholders. The company offers
households and industries the value of getting rid of their waste on-site, that is, to remove some-
thing that is considered to have no or negative value. At the same time, NSR offers municipalities

the value of fulfilling their public service mission of collecting, transporting, and treating waste
within their jurisdictions. It offers the region the attractive argument to provide cost-effective
waste management solutions to local businesses, and, more generally, it offers to develop
Sweden’s ecological modernization. NSR also makes a consequential value proposition to the
environment. The company recycles 95% of the waste that it collects (NSR, 2013), if waste incin-
erated for energy recovery is included. The safe management of hazardous waste prevents environ-
mental hazards; the recovery of plastic, metal, paper, cardboard, and other materials replaces the
use of virgin resources; the production of biogas and the recovery of methane from landfill replace
significant amounts of fossil fuels; and the production of biofertilizer gives back to the Earth large
amounts of nutrients that agriculture has extracted from it.
Second, NSR makes several different but intertwined types of value propositions. Public health
concerns are always close at hand in waste management (Ross, 2011), and one may consider that
the first service offering of an efficient waste management system is to safeguard the population
from poisoning and epidemics. NSR’s recycling activities offer a considerable amount of envi-
ronmental value as we have just described. In addition, businesses and households are offered
obvious practical value from NSR’s removal of what they do not want to keep and wish to be rid of.
Moreover, as Swedish Waste Management (Avfall Sverige [Swedish Waste Management], 2011)
claims, efficient waste management companies generate innovation, new companies, and eco-
nomic growth. Thus, owner municipalities are also offered the symbolic and therefore political
value to assume their legal responsibilities for waste with economic and environmental efficiency.
And NSR may even be offering moral value: By providing waste producers with the possibilities to
recycle their waste in an environmentally responsible way, the company offers industries a
greening of their activities (Fuchs and Mazmanian, 1998) and customers with a possibility of
easing a potentially guilty conscience for overconsumption (Åkesson, 2005).
Third, NSR’s value propositions unfold across various temporal and physical scales. Waste
collection is a service that answers to the here and now of production and consumption. In this
respect, its value is localized and immediate. But even if waste collection is the most visible part of
NSR’s activities for a large majority of waste producers, it is only a small part of the company’s
activities. A large share of these activities consists of waste processing and marketing activities
(Corvellec et al., 2012), and these have a considerable reach across temporal and physical dis-
tances. Managing waste means moving things along (Gregson et al., 2007). Waste is something
eminently mobile. The geography of waste (Moore, 2012) is as varied (Jewitt, 2011) as it is global
(Crang et al., 2013; Scheinberg et al., 2010), and it should be understood all the way down to the
end of life of waste (Gregson et al., 2010).
As shown by the short dialogue below, the export of recycled material to foreign countries
inscribes NSR’s value propositions within the global flows of economic production and exchanges
and the political economy of waste (O’Brien, 1999).
Interviewer: But as the European Union waste policy is implemented, will waste become more mobile
[across national borders]?
Respondent: Yes. And I don’t think that is strange because we speak of free mobility for goods and
services / . . . / and we [Sweden] have a need for heat and electricity. Lands like Italy, Spain,
France—they have not developed this kind of heating system because there is no need in the
southern countries. But instead they have a big problem with waste. So you can see an export of
waste up here where we need the heat. (Head of marketing, NSR, our translation)

Likewise, waste is a permanent reminder of the durability of the material world (Edensor,
2005). NSR has developed techniques to take care of the leachates and methane (a gas with strong
global warming potential) that its decommissioned landfills still emit, well ahead of the National
Waste Plan’s (Naturvårdverket, 2012) recommendation to municipalities and waste management
companies to actively address the risks of old landfills to public health and the environment. The
creation, or destruction, of value by waste management companies is both transnational and
transgenerational.
A balanced scorecard (NSR and A2 A/S, 2010) that the management of NSR uses to
communicate with the company’s board of directors illustrates an awareness among NSR man-
agers that the company offers different kinds of value to different stakeholders over various
temporal and physical scales. NSR’s various value propositions are depicted through a
comprehensive array of performance indicators, listed not only under headings such as market,
environment, or finance but also transportation, biogas, landfill, installations and recycling centers,
and research and development. Some of these indicators are traditional industrial ones such as
tonnage, turnover, or financial ratios; while others are more innovative indicators of impact such as
the number of satisfied customers and their degree of satisfaction, the percentage of transportation
powered by renewable energy, the volume and quality of leachates, the number of scientific
publications in which NSR participated, or the percentage of recycled materials generated. Using a
multidimensional tool for performance measurement is a way for NSR’s management to under-
score for its owners the pluralism of the company’s value propositions.
What is crucial is that these various value propositions are not necessarily in harmony with each
other. Different environmental value propositions might enter in conflict:
Respondent: But one thing has increased tremendously in all this you have seen today, and that is
transportation.
Interviewer: It is an incredible amount of movement [of waste].
Respondent: / . . . / If you take in 500,000 tons of waste and put it in a single heap there [points], well,
then you have no transportation. But the heap grows. It’s a long way to heaven. But the heap remains.
[Recounts an imaginary dialogue]: ‘‘But what have you done? We have said that we should not have
this large heap! We are supposed to put this there, and that there, and this there, and that there!’’ And
we wash and sort, and sort and bundle, and sort and crush. And it is cars hither and thither all the
time. And it is outbound transports all the time. And the material we send out goes to another
industry where they sort again. And send it out again to the next industry. So we have something we
call waste tourism. (Production manager, NSR, our translation)
The respondent makes it clear how moving waste around is necessary to sustain economic and
environmental value propositions, but the mobility of waste simultaneously entails a destruction of
economic and environmental value that goes against the efficacy of these propositions. By so
doing, our respondent points to the inadequacy of unidimensional or essentializing understandings
of a waste company’s value propositions. As Stark (2009: 27) points out, ‘‘It is the friction at the
interacting overlap of multiple performance criteria that generates productive recombinations by
sustaining a pragmatic organizational reflexivity.’’ The case of waste management illustrates that
value propositions are dynamic and context-based, and to render the richness of the company’s
value propositions, one needs to address the contextual dynamics of these propositions.

Addressing coexisting regimes of value

NSR’s multiple value propositions demonstrate the insufficiency of grounding an understanding of
value propositions in services in a value-in-exchange view or value-in-use view of value. Concern-
ing a value-in-exchange view of value, the NSR case shows that measures of economic exchange
such as waste handling fees or the company’s sales of energy and recycled products provide only a
partial expression of the value propositions of waste management companies. Because these
companies offer a service with a decisive role for public health (Ross, 2011) and sustainability
(Scheinberg et al., 2010), there is more to their value propositions than what can be expressed
by their commercial transactions on the markets for waste, energy, or recycled products. The value
creation of waste management companies cannot be reduced to their share of the gross national
product.
Neither is it sufficient to adopt an experience-based value-in-use view, claiming, as Vargo and
Lusch do, that ‘‘[v]alue is perceived and determined by the customer on the basis of value in use’’
(2004: 7). NSR’s value propositions involve a greater number of stakeholders than the households
and industries that see their waste disappear out of sight. A focus on the actors directly involved in
the collection and treatment of waste is insufficient since most individuals and companies who
consume waste services are nonspecialists who are ignorant of what should happen and what actu-
ally happens with their waste, how it is processed, and how it reenters the economy. The experi-
ential view of waste management services by the customers of municipal waste companies covers
only a limited part of waste management systems as a whole. A value-in-use view of value that is
grounded in the limited tempospatial experience customers have of the service is therefore too
narrow to express the multisidedness of waste management value propositions.
There is a need to transcend the immediate here and now localness of service interactions to take
into account service offerings of different kinds that involve stakeholders removed in time and
physical distance. Starting from a Nordic service school view of value ‘‘as created throughout the
relationship by the customer, partly in interaction, between the customer and the supplier or service
provider’’ (Grönroos, 2000: 24) has clear limitations. The case of waste management companies
illustrates that value propositions are better understood as part of a constellation of relationships
(Harvie and Milburn, 2010) among stakeholders (Frow and Payne, 2011)—service providers,
service users, and others (Normann and Ramı́rez, 1993; Patrı́cio et al., 2011)—who exchange value
propositions (Flint and Mentzer, 2006; Kowalkowski et al., 2012), under the gaze of various
evaluators (Kowalkowski, 2011) who produce diverging judgments. To take fully into account
Vargo’s (2008) claim that value, and thus value propositions, should be understood in context, one
needs to adopt a context-sensitive view of value propositions and take into account that value has a
collective and intersubjective dimension (Edvardsson et al., 2011) and that the understanding that
actors have of value cocreation is framed by micro-, meso-, and macro contexts (Chandler and
Vargo, 2011) and cultural meanings (Peñaloza and Mish, 2011).
Appadurai’s (1986) notion of regime of value addresses these concerns. A regime of value
refers to intersubjective and institutionalized standards of evaluation that are specific to a com-
munity, a perspective, a time, or a place. Simply put, different stakeholders, at different points in
time or space, and with different foci or priorities, will mobilize different criteria, scales, referents,
and procedures to assert the value of any given value proposition. Regimes of value can succeed
each other, complement one another, or compete.
Gille (2010) shows how regimes of value can succeed one another. She illustrates how Hungary
has gone through three different value regimes for waste: A metallic regime (1948–1974) where

waste was hailed as free material to be mobilized for the fulfillment of the economic development
plan; an efficiency regime (1975–1984) that viewed waste as a cost of production to be reduced in
order to increase efficiency; and a chemical regime (1985–present) where waste is seen as a useless
and even harmful material category.
Of relevance to our argument is that regimes of value coexist. This coexistence in turn rests
upon the coexistence of different social agreements on what constitute relevant measures of worth
(Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006). A legal regime of value depends on how well value propositions
comply with the legislation, for example, on public health or public procurement. The key measure
in a political regime of value is the votes by electors. In an economic regime of value it is the
creation of wealth, for example, measured in employment, whereas in a management regime of
value it is often profit. An environmental regime of value stresses the control of hazardous
substances, climate change mitigations, or material efficiency. A given regime of value can
accommodate different and competing measures of worth, which is yet another source of diversity.
This coexistence of different regimes of value explains why the same activity can be understood
as different value propositions. For example, the offer to collect 12 waste fractions (e.g., paper,
cardboard, glass, metal packaging, plastic, and yard waste) at the curbside represents a practical
value proposition to residents since such a system implies that they no longer need to bring their
common recyclables to recycling centers. At the same time, in a complementary mode, this service
represents an environmental value proposition made to residents, politicians, and future genera-
tions since, as our respondents have noted, offering to recycle packages at people’s doorstep
significantly increases the rate of material recovery.
Regimes of value can also be in conflict with each other. The value propositions made by
incineration will be valued differently if approached in economic or in environmental policy terms.
Incineration can stand as an attractive waste treatment solution in term of profitability, especially if
the incinerating company can deliver heat in addition to electricity. It is valued as much less
attractive in the environmental policy terms of the European waste hierarchy model (2008/98/EC)
according to which incineration, even with energy recovery, is valued higher than landfill but
considered inferior to recycling, reuse, and waste prevention, in an increasing order of priority.
Views about the value propositions made by incineration depend on the regime of value that one
adopts: Whereas any reduction of waste volume is a success for the waste hierarchy model, it
becomes a problem for waste management systems contractually bound to deliver certain quan-
tities of electricity to the power grid and heat to district heating systems (Corvellec et al., 2013).
Regimes of value underscore that evaluation modes are socially determined and therefore
changing, coexisting, competing, or collaborating. Regimes of value can concur, such as when
better environmental value is represented as resulting in better economic value (Hultman and
Corvellec, 2012). Regimes of value can come in conflict, such as when the economic rationale of
transporting waste offsets much of the environmental benefits of recycling. Or regimes of value
can be relatively autonomous. A public health regime of value is only indirectly concerned with the
economic value of the materials that waste management companies recycle. Each mode of
coexistence orders the different ways to appreciate value in specific and changing constellations.
What is considered as ‘‘of value’’ is contingent (Herrnstein Smith, 1988) on who is asked, when,
where, how, and why. This contingency is not a matter of subjectivity. Regimes of value refer to
stabilized (although changing) and institutionalized (although by different institutions) social
modes of evaluation. And by underscoring the social contingency of value, it makes clear that
instead of addressing the nature of a value proposition per se, the social conditions of valuation
made to this proposition need to be addressed.

As exemplified by NSR’s balanced scorecard (NSR and A2 A/S, 2010), the core of our
argument is that waste management companies make value propositions to stakeholders—for
example, households, industries, and the region—who have different interests in mind and belong
to different regimes when they engage with and recognize the value of the company’s services. The
company addresses different regimes of value at the same time, and this brings us to our next point:
The need to develop a politics of value propositions that matches and possibly exploits the fact that
the company addresses disparate regimes at the same time.
Discussion: The politics of value propositions

The need for managers to engage with a politics of value (Appadurai, 1986) derives from the fact
that managers who make value propositions are facing a variety of valuation practices (Muniesa,
2011) that belong to a variety of orders of worth (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006). They cannot
predict the outcomes of these valuation processes simply or with certainty. Faced with multiple,
changeable, and incommensurable regimes of value, managers need to engage in intricate framing
and negotiation processes.
Making value propositions is a political activity in the sense that it involves comparing
incommensurable variables or arbitrating between equally important, but possibly conflicting,
goals. Different value regimes allow different evaluative frameworks to coexist, and these fra-
meworks can be used in many ways to conceive of the value (Frow, 2007) that a service offers.
Households and companies producing waste have frameworks of their own to assess the value
propositions of waste management companies, the Swedish Chemicals Agency that supervises
toxic waste have other frameworks, municipal owners of waste management companies yet others,
and so on. These frameworks change and evolve over time (Thompson, 1979). For an organization
to enact a politics of value propositions is not simply to acknowledge and imagine a series of
subjective points of view upheld by stakeholders who occupy diverse roles or positions; it is
instead to fully acknowledge that all these views about their value propositions coexist, side by
side, and must eventually be taken into account since one never knows in advance which stake-
holders are going to vote and how they are going to vote.
Making value propositions is a political activity also in the sense that the value that is offered
has consequences for the wider society. Value propositions reflect trade-offs and priorities that are
not purely technical. They are products and producers of a social order (Aspers, 2008; Fourcade,
2007) in the sense that they express institutionalized preferences, opinions, affects, and judgments
based on ethical options, vested interests, political goals, and ideological options (Alexander,
2005; Arvidsson, 2011b; Beckert and Aspers, 2011). Value propositions are epistemic practices
(Verran, 2011) that point to what is to be considered as being of worth (Graeber, 2005). They are
enabling, but they also define controlling limits on what stakeholders can decide.
Value propositions by waste management companies stand as an example of political con-
structions that are contingent (Herrnstein Smith, 1988) on variables such as the state of scientific
knowledge, the opinionated interests of the parties involved, institutionalized organizational
practices, societal trends, and individual judgments (Frow, 2007). These constructions are all
legitimate in the eyes of those who support them. Different regimes of value produce singular
(cf. Karpik, 2010) understandings of the value propositions of waste management, and singular
understandings lead to different priorities of actions. Therefore, ranking the value of value pro-
positions, or simply choosing one value proposition instead of another, is inevitably an expression
of judgment derived from political choices and trade-offs.

The case of waste management services further illustrates the observation made by Appadurai
(1986) that there is a constant tension between ways of framing value (see also Frow, 2007;
Graeber, 2001). The company’s value propositions circulate (Mauss, [1902] 2000) among stake-
holders with different status (Zafirovski, 2000) and potentially contradictory and conflicting
interests and concerns. The tensions among social, economic, and environmental dimensions of
sustainability are one illustration. Other examples are conflicts between local and global interests
or between the immediate and remote future. And releasing such tensions involves political
decisions. For this reason, value propositions always equal political actions, and service research
needs to acknowledge this in order to understand the practical implications of the contextual nature
of value propositions for service organizations.
Engaging with the politics of value propositions is not simply a matter of deconstructing, for
analytical purposes, the valuation practices (Dewey, 1939) of stakeholders. It is a matter of
recognizing the capacity of services to appeal to more than one experience, of engaging
pragmatically with value propositions as a pluralistic social process, and of communicating one’s
preferences and choices clearly to one’s stakeholders and society in general to create a dynamics
based on being active within several regimes.
Swedish municipally owned solid waste management companies provide an illustration of this
in that they have learned to combine being active on four different but related markets (Corvellec
and Bramryd, 2012): A political market on which their legitimacy as an organization is deter-
mined; a material economy market that determines their access to waste as a process input; a
technical market on which these companies choose what waste processing technique to use; and a
commercial market where they market their products. The success of waste management com-
panies depends on an ability to articulate the interrelationships among these markets, each with a
logic of its own, so that the perception of how these companies perform according to one regime of
value reinforces the perception of their performance according to other regimes. Communicating a
proposition of environmental value to private or corporate customers who are primarily interested
in the practical removal of waste, and alerting politicians of the systematic environmental com-
munication to these customers, as NSR does, illustrates how a company can create a dynamic
between regimes of value by taking a strategic advantage from the fact that it makes multiple value
propositions that evade one-dimensional evaluative frameworks. Making a value proposition to a
stakeholder that has been designed for another stakeholder, alone or in combination with other
value propositions, is to open a way for innovative strategic initiatives.
The purpose of a systematic politics of value propositions is to develop a richer and fairer
accountability of the social dynamics of value propositions, and beyond that, value creation. To
transcend a narrow understanding of value propositions in terms of the here and now of value in
exchange or in use, organizations need to acknowledge and learn to exploit the fact that they
simultaneously and all the time offer different kinds of value, over different temporal and spatial
scales, for different stakeholders.
Concluding remarks
Waste management companies have developed a strategic capacity to combine multiple value
propositions that illustrate the relevance of a multisided valuation approach to service value
propositions. These companies may be considered as special cases because waste management is a
public service activity operated by municipal organizations. However, neither this public service
mission nor the fact that most waste management companies in Sweden belong to the public sector

are conditions of our argument that value propositions should be understood as political constructs.
For-profit companies, from banks to restaurants through accounting firms or airline companies,
and nonprofit service organizations—such as the Red Cross or Médecins Sans Frontières—all
make multiple value propositions. Waste management is simply an illustration of how service
companies make multiple value propositions and then strategically engage with the dynamics of
this multiplicity, for example, by making propositions to one stakeholder originally developed for
another stakeholder, thereby combining value propositions.
Our contribution to the theory on value propositions, and beyond that the theory of value
cocreation and the SDL thesis, is based on Appadurai’s (1986) concepts of regimes of value and
politics of value: Value propositions should be seen as a pluralistic construct that cannot be framed
in a single and static manner. It is better understood as an ongoing multivocal and political con-
struction. This brings us to a final practical suggestion.
From a practical perspective, we agree with Stark (2009) that ambiguity and uncertainty about
what is valuable and the co-existence of multiple principles of evaluation provide managers with
sizeable opportunities for innovative ventures when they make value propositions. The case of
Swedish municipally owned waste management companies shows that service organizations have
much to gain from understanding how their value propositions can combine different regimes of
value, even incommensurable ones. As Appadurai (1986) aptly notices, differences between how
stakeholders define value do not necessarily prevent them from communicating about value and
trading the objects of value. Even incommensurable regimes of value can be connected and setting
up such connections in value propositions opens unexploited innovation potentials.
Acknowledgments
We are most grateful to our respondents at NSR for the careful attention that they have shown
us. We are also grateful to Richard Ek, Katja Lindqvist, Lars Nordgren, Sumi Dahlgaard-Park,
and Patrick Zapata together with CF Helgesson and his colleagues at ValueS research group
in Linköping for their comments on previous drafts. Finally, Patricia Zukowski deserves a
special mention for her invaluable editorial help.
Funding
This work is part of Organizing Critical Infrastructure Services—a case study of waste research
project under the Winning Services Research Program financed by Vinnova, the Swedish Govern-
mental Agency for Innovation Systems [Grant (diarienr): 2009-01696].
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Hervé Corvellec is a professor of business administration in the Department of Service Management and
Service Studies, Lund University, Sweden. His field of research is organization theory, with a research focus
on risk, business ethics, and infrastructure services (e.g. power supply, public transportation, and waste man-
agement). He often works with narrative and argumentation analysis. He recently edited What is Theory?
Answers from the Social and Cultural Science (2013). His articles on waste services, several of them coau-
thored with Johan Hultman, have been published in the Journal of Cleaner Production, Environment and
Planning A; Waste Management; Waste Management and Research; and Journal of Organizational Change
Management. Address: Department of Service Management and Service Studies, Lund University, Box 882,
SE-25108 Helsingborg, Sweden. [email: herve.corvellec@ism.lu.se]
Johan Hultman is a professor of human geography in the Department of Service Management and Service
Studies, Lund University, Sweden. He investigates issues of sustainable development in service societies. He
writes about how social and economic aspects of sustainability relate to each other in the contexts of waste
management, coastal fisheries, and rural development. He has recently published in Society & Natural
Resources and Culture Unbound, as well as, together with Hervé Corvellec, in Environment and Planning
A; Journal of Organizational Change Management; and Waste Management and Research. Address:
Department of Service Management and Service Studies, Lund University, Box 882, SE-25108 Helsingborg,
Sweden. [email: johan.hultman@ism.lu.se]

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Managing the Politics of Value Propositions

Article in Marketing Theory · December 2014

Hervé Corvellec Johan Hultman

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Hervé Corvellec and Johan Hultman

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Theory: A sociology and anthropology of value

Refuting absolute value

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Case study: A Swedish municipal waste management company

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Waste management in Sweden

Waste management at NSR

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Analysis: Addressing multiple regimes of value

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Interviewer: It is an incredible amount of movement [of waste].

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Addressing coexisting regimes of value

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Discussion: The politics of value propositions

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