"Was This Review Helpful to You?" Creation and Re-Creation of Value through Measurement

In our contribution we want to tackle the question how valuation and measurement procedures are intertwined, in order to gain more detailed insight into the entanglement of value and measure. What happens to value in the course of measuring? We argue that measurement is always an act of value creation and re-creation, insofar as it rests on the assertion that something is potentially of value or valuable: Measurement always presupposes that something is, in principle, relevant. This creation and re-creation of value, however, does not yet say anything about the actual value it refers to, it asserts that something has value, but not, which value it has.

This is evident for example regarding the multiplicity of evaluation and measurement procedures in the peer review system in science. The quantification of citations through impact factors and other indices, the further evaluation of impact factors concerning their correlation with other performance metrics establish chains of measurements, where it becomes more and more obscure which value they actually express. Hence it is only through the concrete practices of evaluation and measurement that this value becomes fully conceptualized.

We conclude that value is created and re-created through the actual practices of measurement and discuss possible discrepancies, e.g. a hegemony of measurement over value in the depicted phenomena in peer reviewing in science. We finally reason that there is a considerable value diffusion through a multiplication of measurements and evaluation procedures insofar as these operations ceaselessly re-create, transform and modify values, which remain in constant flux and are steadily overthrown, while at the same time they set up, claim, and configure more and more values, whose reference measure become increasingly obscure.