What Happens When Evaluation Goes Online? Exploring Apparatuses of Valuation in the Travel Sector

Abstract

Our research focuses on the fast-changing landscape of contemporary social media where user-generated content is increasingly being used to evaluate a wide range of products and services. The move to online valuations is raising important questions about how valuations change when they are produced online by consumers, and what outcomes they generate for the organizations being evaluated. To address these questions, we investigate two prominent hotel valuation schemes currently at work in the hospitality industry, and identify significant differences in their valuation practices and outcomes. We develop a practice-based lens for examining the materiality of valuations, providing a way of understanding the differences we observed in terms of performativity. This lens explains both how valuations are actively produced in ongoing practice, and how their production is significantly reconfiguring everyday practices of the organizations being evaluated. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings for research on valuation and organizations. KeywordsValuation, Social Media, Practice Lens, Materiality, Apparatus, Performativity Practices of valuation have been growing in salience over the past few decades as organizations, products, and services are all rendered subject to various forms of monitoring and audit (Espeland and Stevens 2008; Miller and Rose 2008; Munro and Mouritsen 1996;Pentland 2000;Power 1997;Strathern 2000). The organizational implications of such heightened scrutiny have been considerable (Espeland and Sauder 2007;Martins 2005) -increasing the visibility and accountability of processes and outcomes, while intensifying strategic and operational concerns with criteria, metrics, and assessment. Such implications are likely to become even more influential as evaluations move online, becoming widespread, consumer-based, globally dispersed, and widely accessible.In the move to online reviewing, established forms of valuation are challenged, as the rise of the Internet and social media in particular blurs traditional distinctions between production and consumption.Valuations -which have traditionally been produced by a small number of recognized experts, critics, media, and authorities using formal, standardized and often institutionalized criteria grounded in professional knowledge and industry experience -are now also (and increasingly) being produced online by large numbers of anonymous and distributed consumers using informal, variable, and individual criteria grounded in personal opinions and experiences.While there has been considerable research interest in valuation processes and outcomes (Callon and Muniesa 2005;Hsu, Roberts, and Swaminathan 2012;Espeland and Sauder 2007;Rao, Monin and Durand 2003;Waguespack and Sorenson 2011;Zhao and Zhou 2011), we currently know little about what happens when valuations move online. We addressed this gap by conducting an empirical study in the travel sector, focusing specifically on two primary research questions: how do practices of valuatio...

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