Valuation in Practice: Zooming In and Out of Rotterdam Community Initiative Value Through the Practice Lens

This paper addresses the persistent misalignment between institutional framings of community based initiatives and the situated, lived dynamics of their everyday organizing. Instead of treating such initiatives as either ‘scalable solutions’ or a romanticized, but unprofessional whole, we propose an inside out account of how a South Rotterdam food garden and Rotterdam-based social movement articulate value through their practices. Theoretically, we ground the analysis in practice theory, treating practices as organized, open ended nexuses of doings and sayings whose organization can be examined through practical understandings (embodied know how), rules (explicit and tacit prescriptions), teleoaffective structures (ends, projects and their affects) and general understandings (abstract senses of worth and value that shape actions) (Schatzki, 2012). We operationalize Nicolini’s strategy of zooming in and zooming out to shift between different modes and scales of the various elements that make up a practice. Additionally, we build on Latour’s ‘matters of concern’ to understand value as valuation work: ongoing activities, attachments and decives through which matters become worth sustaining (Latour, 2004;2005). In order to depart from the logic and doings of local initiatives themselves, we ask the question: How are community initiatives maintained in practice, and what do these maintenance practices reveal about their matters of concern (i.e., what is valued and kept going)? Empirically, the study draws on ethnographic fieldwork and action oriented methods over the course of one year, supplemented with semi-structured interviews. Zooming in, we document how rules (clear harvesting windows, permissive lateness), practical understandings (competent tool use, crop care, sequencing of tasks), and teleoaffective orientations (belonging, dignity, “keeping the garden healthy”) organize the work. Zooming out, we show how these micro routines cohere into matters of concern, i.e. into the sustainment of such initiatives. Through collective analysis sessions and zine-making, we interacted with our participants about the outcomes, which resulted into a deeper layer of analysis in the approach from within. The contribution is twofold. Conceptually, we offer a practice based vocabulary for analysing value from within. Rather than coding abstract ‘values’ as rigid categories, we trace valuation practices as relational and ongoing attachments, care devices and maintenances. Methodologically, the zooming strategy provides a disciplined way to connect situated observations to grounded macro articulations, avoiding both top down externalization and micro isolation (Nicolini, 2009). The approach clarifies how collective identity is practiced in everyday doings, while making visible the work by which certain concerns gain normative force. This equips researchers and practitioners with a method and language to articulate identity and value from within, without defaulting to linear metrics or externally imposed categories.