Degenshein_Strategies of Valuation

Abstract

This article draws upon thirteen months of ethnographic research in a Chicago pawnshop to show how prices of objects in pawnshops are actively, socially negotiated using what I term discursive strategies of valuation. Three kinds of discursive strategies of valuation emerge repeatedly in the data: a. references to the specific material attributes of the objects, b. references to the unique biographical histories of the objects, c. reference to the financial need and (relative) social positioning of the customer involved in the negotiation. Examining these strategies reveals the relationship between socially contingent and culturally constructed perceptions of value and the production of price. I find that rhetorical strategies can and do affect price, within limits. Perhaps most surprisingly, the data show that discursive strategies emphasizing a lower socio-economic status can inflate the value, and ultimately the price, of an object during negotiations.Keywords Cultural objects . Discursive strategies . Fringe banking . Pawnshops . Pricing . ValuationA discursive formation will be individualized if one can define the system of formation of the different strategies that are deployed in it; in other words, if one can show how they all derive (in spite of their sometimes extreme diversity, and in spite of their dispersion in time) from the same set of relations.-Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge (2010, p. 68) A sign in the window of Second City Pawn, 1 a pawnshop on the North Side of Chicago, proclaims that the store deals in BAnything of Value.^To the average passerby Theor Soc (2017) 46:387-409