The Performativity of Value: On the Citability of Cultural Commodities addresses the increased commodification of language in the U.S. cultural economy. The marketing of cultural commodities in formats such as websites, videos, movies, books, online games, or television episodes—as distributed across a wide range of technological devices—means that language is moving across situational contexts to an unprecedented degree. Just as authors quote or paraphrase sources in the construction of a text, subjects “cite” the commodified words, images, and works of others as they construct their social identities. Steve Sherlock discusses how consumer citational practices generate demand for those cultural commodities which align the self with particular subcultural groups. By “re-citing” the exchange value frame within which language itself has acquired an economic worth, consumer citational practices have become performative of the U.S. cultural economy. In order to describe this process, the book extends the work of Judith Butler on the performativity of gender to the performativity of exchange value, as well as to the performativity of subcultural values. The book also develops a critique of the increasing commodification of language in the contemporary economy. Sherlock follows Butler in developing a model of performativity based on Jacques Derrida’s work, particularly regarding the citability of language into new situational contexts. Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence in Western philosophy and culture is extended toward a critique of the assumed presence of exchange value in the cultural marketplace. The book also incorporates the work of the Bakhtin Circle into this framework—especially their insight into how everyday utterances, which “report on” the words of others, become a site for the re-negotiation of values between self and others. The re-citational process used in contemporary identity construction can thus either re-cite the current cultural economy, or resist it. The Performativity of Value contributes to themes examined in social theory, social psychology, literary theory, continental philosophy, and cultural studies, and thus will be of interest to students and scholars working in those areas.

In the nineteenth century, copyright law expanded to include performances of theatrical and musical works. These laws transformed how people made and consumed performances. Exploring precedent-setting litigation on both sides of the Atlantic, this book traces how courts developed definitions of theater and music to suit new performance rights laws. From Gilbert and Sullivan battling to protect The Mikado to Augustin Daly petitioning to control his spectacular 'railroad scene', artists worked with courts to refine vague legal language into clear, functional theories of drama, music, and performance. Through cases that ensnared figures including Lord Byron, Laura Keene, and Dion Boucicault, this book discovers how the law theorized central aspects of performance including embodiment, affect, audience response, and the relationship between scripts and performances. This history reveals how the advent of performance rights reshaped how we value performance both as an artistic medium and as property.

The theory of value structure concerns the meaning of “better than” and “good,” as well as the way in which values serve as a basis for rational decision making. Drawing methodologically from economics and theories of decision making, the aim of serious axiology in metaethics is to do justice to problems that have puzzled philosophers of value for centuries. Can value comparisons be cyclic? Are all values comparable with each other and can decision makers just add up different aspects of an evaluation to determine the best course of action? A Theory of Value Structure: From Values to Decisions starts with a thorough introduction to the modeling of “better than” comparisons from a normative perspective. In the philosophical part of the book, Erich H. Rast argues that aspects of “better than” comparisons can differ qualitatively so much that one aspect may outrank another. Consequently, the classical weighted sum aggregation model fails. Values cannot always be summed up and comparisons may be fundamentally noncompensatory, an indeterminacy that explains problems like the apparent nontransitivity of “better than” and hard cases in decision making. Using a lexicographic method of value comparisons, Rast develops a multidimensional theory of “better than” and shows how and to which extent it can be combined with standard methods of decision making under uncertainty by using rank-dependent utility theory.

The 1850s United States witnessed a far-reaching political, social, and economic crisis. Symptomatic of this, a wide range of narrative fiction from sentimental novels to sensational drama identifies a foundational link between liberal institutions and performative utterances. Auctions, trials, marriages, and contracts, this fiction contends, all depend on the self-constituting authority of words and performances which anybody and everybody can appropriate and are always subject to misfiring. Rather than viewing this as a liberatory and egalitarian political force, however, writers from Herman Melville and James Fenimore Cooper to Captain Mayne Reid and E.D.E.N. Southworth insist that such naked authority must be supplemented. A broad swath of 1850s literature insists that this supplement ought to come from Christianity. Anticipating thinkers like Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, these works suggest that legitimate political authority depends upon its ability to represent Christian transcendence and account for revealed truth, something firmly outside of speech acts’ and performance’s purview. In so doing, this diverse body of fiction registers a desire to reconstitute political authority on transcendent and representable ground, augmenting institutional reliance on mere words and assuaging the contemporary crises of confidence and authority.

This book explores belonging as a performative achievement. The contributors investigate how identities are embodied and effected, and how lines of allegiance and fracture are produced and reproduced. Questions of ′difference′ are tackled from a perspective that attends to the complexities of history and politics. Drawing on sociology, philosophy and anthropology, this collection brings together leading commentators, including Judith Butler, Paul Gilroy and Arjun Appadurai, as well as a range of new scholars. It examines questions of visuality, political affiliation, ethics, mimesis, spatiality, passing, and diversity in modes of embodied difference. The volume advances conceptual and theoretical issues through testing various propositions around specific examples or questions. What emerges is a rich engagement with the complexity of contemporary forms of belonging.

'Value' seems like an elusive and abstract concept. Nonetheless, notions of value underpin how we understand our lives, from discussions about the economic contribution of different kinds of work and productive activity, to the prices we pay for the things we consume. So what is value, and where does it come from? In this new book, Frederick Harry Pitts charts the past, present and future of value within and beyond capitalist society, critically engaging with key concepts from classical and neoclassical political economy. Interrogating the processes and practices that attribute value to objects and activities, he considers debates over whether value lies within commodities or in their exchange, the politics of different theories of value, and how we measure value in a knowledge-based economy. This accessible and intriguing introduction to the complexities of value in modern society will be essential reading for any student or scholar working in political economy, economics, economic sociology or management.

This book targets the critical issue of decision making in uncertain conditions and situations. The aim is to increase readers’ understanding of complexity and of socio-economic interactions through the application of systems thinking perspectives. Among the various areas and topics addressed are complexity and sustainable management, markets as complex adaptive systems, the impacts of psychological and emotional factors upon value co-creation exchanges, and ICT enablers of service network performance and service exchange fulfillment. Thanks to the chosen perspectives, all of which are based on different systems research streams, the book will support more consistent and robust decisions, leading to sustainable, wise, and viable systems dynamics. It will aid managers, practitioners, and consultants in their decision-making processes and will also be of interest for academics and scholars in management, systems, computer science, engineering, and marketing.