Value

Frederick Harry Pitts & Patrizia Zanoni

Forthcoming in the Encyclopaedia of Critical Management Studies, ed. by O.

Bozkurt et al (Edward Elgar).

Value is an abstract and elusive notion subject to many countervailing interpretations and
definitions (for overviews, see Pitts, 2021, 2022). The study of value as we know it today was
inaugurated with Aristotle. Witnessing the emergence of a society organised around money, he
was the first to enquire after the conditions for distinct objects or activities to be brought into
a relationship of equivalence with one another by means of exchange. Whilst recognising that
value was not material and intrinsic but social and relational, Aristotle nonetheless located in
the labour expended to produce all goods a common element that could explain their
commensurability, and in money the means for this equality to be expressed (Heilbroner,
1983).
The next significant contributions to the theorisation of value relate it the gradual rise of
more complex patterns of trade and industry. These theories tended to conceptualize value as
a substance inherent in specific things, practices, people and places. Mercantilists like Francis
Bacon saw in value a particular substance won or lost in the balance of trade between individual
nations. Physiocrats like Francois Quesnay, meanwhile, saw value as a substance only
produced by labour expended in one particular sector of the economy—agriculture, excluding
all other economic activities. This represented a theoretical defence of the landed aristocracy
against the new means of money-making wielded by the rising merchant classes (Mazzucato,
2019).
The competing claims of different groups and actors to the production and ownership of
value thus became a major theme of much subsequent value theory. Just as mercantilism
represented the worldview of the rising merchant class and Physiocracy that of a declining
aristocracy, the classical political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo gave a
theoretical articulation of the immense capacity for the production of value represented in the
mills and factories owned by nascent industrial capitalists. For Smith, the determination of a
commodity’s value rested in the costs of production, split between labour (wages), land (rent)
and capital (profit). But the inability of this conception of value to explain the initial value of
the costs of production led Ricardo to locate value, as the production of a surplus, in the
expenditure of labour-time embodied in a given commodity (Mirowski, 1989).
To some extent, Karl Marx’s critique of political economy (1976) remained confined to the
object of its critique. It radicalised certain elements of the work of both Smith and Ricardo
work albeit not from the perspective of industry but rather in the name of the nascent industrial
working class. The main advance was that Marx did not see value as determined by the direct
expenditure of labour-time embodied in the production of a particular commodity, but rather
the labour-time socially necessary for its production. Socially necessary labour time refers to
the average amount of time it takes to produce and circulate a good or service, the prevailing
standard being determined through the competition of producers in the market. The wage grants
labour a notional value to reproduce the worker’s labour power—capacity to labour—at certain
historically and socially specific conditions, this notional value being realised in the generation
of a surplus through the successful sale of its product as a commodity.
 In these respects, Marx returned the study of value to its Aristotelian roots in two ways.
Firstly, it reflected Aristotle’s view of value as a social relation, insofar as the central role Marx
awarded to labour helped expose the constitution of a society organised around value in an
underpinning set of antagonistic class relations. Moreover, it echoed Aristotle’s focus on
money as the key medium through which value is expressed. This is because the value posited
at the commencement of production through the payment of a wage is realised only through
the validation of that labour as productive of value in the monetary exchange of its product as
a commodity in the market.
This return to a social, relational and monetary conceptualisation of value enabled Marx to
eventually escape classical political economy and prefigure two of the most influential strands
of twentieth-century value theory. Neoclassical economics, synonymous with marginalism and
utility theory, went much further than Marx in identifying monetary exchange as central to the
determination of the value of a good or service, expressed in price. In this context, it made little
sense to see value inherent in people, practices, places or things, resting instead in the relation
posited between them by price as a measure of subjective appraisal. Its foundational thinkers
the likes of Stanley Jevons and Alfred Marshall, neoclassical economics not only attempted to
theorise an increasingly sophisticated market economy based on consumer demand for new
needs and wants, but also came to structure the way government and society itself was
organised in the twentieth century (Stigler, 1950).
Neoclassical approaches reflected the laissez-faire capitalism of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries by viewing markets as the sole determinant of value, leaving little
room for the state. But institutionalist perspectives resonated with the emergence of stronger
states as the twentieth century unravelled by centering the role of regulatory bodies and other
organisations in shaping value. This took forward the insights of both Aristotle and Marx that
value was the product and subject of processes of political, social and legal contestation. Its
key thinkers including Thorstein Veblen, Werner Sombart and John Commons, institutionalists
saw monetary value in Aristotelian terms as an inherently unstable category in constant need
of institutional support in order to ensure that processes of valuation can be reproduced and
regulated (Nitzan and Bichler, 2009).
Emerging from a similarly ‘social’ theory of value, an increasingly influential approach
across the social sciences, including management, is a sociological and cultural perspective
represented in work by the likes of Michel Callon. Its central insight is that value is constituted
in a series of materially, spatially and temporally specific interactions between things, objects
and devices. The strand of ‘valuation studies’ that results from this work has given rise to a
dedicated journal (Valuation Studies) and a string of articles within management and
organisation studies outlets, many of which examine the role of financial industries and
instruments in organising the calculative logics that govern value (e.g. Callon & Muniesa,
2005; Beunza et al, 2006).
Such micro-level discursive and object-oriented perspectives on the study of economic life
have been criticized by scholars concerned for their failure to adequately account for macro-
level economic dynamics and social antagonisms in the wake of the long period of political
contestation and financial instability following the 2008 crisis (Prichard & Mir, 2010). In
particular, these voices call for a re-engagement with Marx’s critique of political economy as
a means to recover and renew the study of value in critical management and organization
studies. Such a return to Marx spans both old and new approaches to the critical study of
organisations inspired by some of the most penetrating insights of the critique of political
economy. Many of these approaches have tended to focus on the relationship between what
Marx called the valorisation process—the overall pursuit of expanded value from that
invested—and the labour process as the site where labour-power is expended in the production
of goods and services.
 Within strands of management and organisation studies informed by Labour Process
Theory (Thompson, 1989), paleo-Marxism (Adler, 2007), autonomist Marxism (Harvie &
Milburn, 2010) and postworkerism (Beverungen et al, 2015), scholars have used the concept
of value to explore the relationship between financialisation and the intensification of labour
(Cushen & Thompson, 2016); the role of the valorisation process in structuring bureaucratic
systems of scientific management in manufacturing (Adler, 2004); the struggle over how value
is measured in settings as diverse as education (De Angelis & Harvie, 2009), cities (Frenzel &
Beverungen, 2015) and restaurants (Dowling, 2007); and, finally, the expansive terrain of value
and valuation opened up by the centrality of branding, creative industries, coproduction and
social media to contemporary capitalism, and the forms of ‘free labour’ they incubate
(Beverungen et al, 2015, Arvidsson, 2010, Willmott, 2010). One of the most interesting and
important theoretical contributions to come out of this revival of Marxian value theory in
critical management and organization studies (Harvie & Milburn, 2010) uses the influential
work of Diane Elson (1979) to conceptualise Marx’s approach not as the Ricardian ‘labour
theory of value’ advocated in conventional accounts, but instead as a ‘value theory of labour’
wherein value organises labour.
By cracking open value as a qualitative social category, such a conceptualisation holds the
potential to broaden out the study of value to a much wider array of organisational phenomena
and practices. This is reflected in the post-crisis popularisation of new approaches to Marx’s
critique of political economy, which provide potential new routes for critical management and
organization studies scholarship on the topic of value. New readings of Marx’s value theory
(Bellofiore & Riva, 2015) have been used to understand how workplace measurement mediates
between the notional value posited in the wage and the value realised in market exchange (Pitts,
2020); the limitations of left-wing critiques of capitalism that focus on the problem of value’s
distribution rather than its production and so pose the redistributive state as the solution
(Hagglund, 2020); and the roots of both antisemitism and antiblackness in a truncated critique
of capitalism based on conspiracy theories about groups and forces seen as unproductive of
value (White, 2020).
Meanwhile, other strands of contemporary Marxism, like Black Marxism (Robinson,
1983), Social Reproduction Theory (Bhattacharya, 2017) and ecological Marxism (Foster and
Burkett, 2018) have used the concept of value to illuminate the differential value or
productiveness ascribed to diverse gendered and racialised embodiments of labour-power and
paid and unpaid work (Zanoni, 2019; Chen, 2013); the centrality of unfree, informal and slave
labour to the social constitution of capitalist value (Sorentino, 2019); and the varied ways in
which waste and the ‘metabolic’ labour that processes it are valued across global faultlines
(Salleh, 2010). Returning to the unfinished and fragmentary work of the theorist most
associated with the modern study of value—Marx—these emergent research agendas chart a
number of fascinating future courses for the study of value in critical management and
organization studies.

References and selected further readings

Adler, P. (2007), The Future of Critical Management Studies, Organization Studies, 28(9), pp.1313-
1345
Adler PS (2004) Skill Trends Under Capitalism and the Socialisation of Production. In C. Warhurst, I.
Grugulis, E. Keep (eds.). The Skills That Matter. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.242-260
Arvidsson, A. (2010), The ethical economy: new forms of value in the information society?
Organization. 17(5), pp.637-644
Bellofiore, R., and Riva, T.R. (2015), The Neue Marx-Lektüre. Radical Philosophy, 189, pp. 24-36
Beunza, D., Hardie, I. and MacKenzie, D. (2006), A price is a social thing: towards a material sociology
of arbitrage. Organization Studies, 27(5), pp.721-745
Beverungen, A., Böhm, S., Land, C., (2015), Free Labour, Social Media, Management. Organization
Studies. 36(4), pp.473-489
Bhattacharya, T. (2017), Social Reproduction Theory. London: Pluto.
Callon, M. and Muniesa, F., (2005), Economic markets as calculative collective devices. Organization
Studies, 26(8), pp.1229-1250
Chen, C. (2013), The limit point of capitalist equality. Endnotes, 3, pp.202-23
Cushen, J., and Thompson, P., (2016), Financialization and value. Work, employment and
society, 30(2), pp.352-365
De Angelis, M., and Harvie, D., (2009), Cognitive Capitalism and the Rat-Race. Historical Materialism.
17, pp.3-30
Dowling, E., (2007) Producing the dining experience. Ephemera, 7(1), pp.117-132
Elson, D., (1979), Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism, London: CSE Books
Foster, J.B., and Burkett, P., (2018), Value isn’t everything. Monthly Review. 70(1), pp.1–17
Frenzel, F., and Beverungen, A., (2015), Value struggles in the creative city, Urban Studies, 52(6),
pp.1020-1036.
Hagglund, M., (2020), This Life. New York: Anchor,
Harvie, D., and Milburn, K., (2010), How organizations value and how value organizes. Organization.
17(5), pp.631-636
Heilbroner, R. L., (1983), The Problem of Value in the Constitution of Economic Thought. Social
Research, 50(2), pp.253-277
Marx, K. (1976), Capital, Vol. I, London: Penguin
Mazzucato, M., (2019), The Value of Everything. London: Penguin
Mirowski, P., (1989), More Heat than Light. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Nitzan, J., and Bichler, S., (2009), Capital as Power, Abingdon: Routledge
Pitts F.H. (2020) Measuring and managing creative labour: Value struggles and billable hours in the
creative industries, Organization. doi:10.1177/1350508420968187
Pitts, F.H., (2021), Value. Cambridge: Polity.
Pitts, F.H., (2022), Marx in Management & Organisation Studies: Rethinking Value, Labour & Class
Struggles. Abingdon: Routledge.
Prichard, C., and Mir, R., (2010). Organizing Value. Organization, 17(5), pp.507-515
Robinson C (1983/2000). Black Marxism. University of North Carolina Press
Salleh, A., (2010), From Metabolic Rift to “Metabolic Value”. Organization & Environment, 23(2),
pp.205–219
Sorentino, S.M., (2019), The Abstract Slave. International Labor and Working-Class History, 96,
pp.17-37
Stigler, G.J. (1950), The Development of Utility Theory I. Journal of Political Economy, 58(4), pp.307-
327
Thompson, P., (1989) The Nature of Work. London: Macmillan
White, H., (2020), How is capitalism racial? Fanon, critical theory and the fetish of
antiblackness. Social Dynamics, 46(1), pp.22-35
Willmott, H., (2010), Creating ‘value’ beyond the point of production. Organization. 36(4), pp.517-542
Zanoni, P., (2019), Labor market inclusion through predatory capitalism?, in S. Vallas, A. Kovalainen
(eds), Work and labor in the digital age, Bingley: Emerald, pp.145–164.