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Galina Kallio (2020)Agriculture and Human Values. Online first. Open Access.Abstract. Questions of value are central to understanding alternative practices of food exchange. This study introduces a practice-based approach to value that challenges the dominant views, which capture value as either an input for or an outcome of practices of exchange (value as values, standards, or prices). Building on a longitudinal ethnographic study on food collectives, I show how value, rather than residing in something that people share, or in something that objects have, is an ideal target that continuously unfolds and evolves in action. I found that people organized their food collectives around pursuing three kinds of value-ideals, namely good food, good price and good community. These value-ideals became reproduced in food collectives through what I identified as valuing modes, by which people evaluated the goodness of food, prices and community. My analysis revealed that, while participating in food collectives in order to pursue their value-ideals, people were likely to have differing reasons for pursuing them and tended to attach different meanings to the same value-ideal. I argue that understanding how value as an ideal target is reproduced through assessing and assigning value (valuing modes) is essential in further explorations of the formation of value and in better understanding the dynamics of organizing alternative practices of food exchange.Excerpt. «Value-ideals—understanding value through the notion of good. The economic and sociological traditions seem to have created a divide between value and values by enforcing definitions of what, and by trying to figure out where (a) value is (Miller 2008). Claiming that value is an ideal target that guides action, and that it does it without a guarantee of ever being achieved, requires an ontological turn to practice. My ethnographic study made visible how value is to be found in the pursuit of the good, supporting an argument that some practice-oriented scholars have made (Boltanski and Thevenot 2006; Dewey 1939; Hutter and Stark 2015; MacIntyre 2008; Thévenot 2001), that people’s actions are guided by their concern for the good. The question then revolves around how something is made good, rather what makes something good. Thus, like the concept of value, the concept of good should not be understood as a quality of “a thing” (e.g. of food, price, community), but as something being continually (re-) produced in a particular practice.»Link to the article