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Is there such a sub-discipline as “sociology of valuation and evaluation”? Identifying the main focus, the topics, and the analytical designs, i.e., reflecting on a theoretical profile of such an investigation, is far from complete. The main question is indeed—where to start when addressing the sociology of valuation and evaluation? Is it a specific area of research, analysis, and inquiry, with specific objects? Should we confine it to the many important qualitative and quantitative studies dedicated to the measure of market performance, the efficiency of public policy, profitability of private investment, or identification of best practices in various areas (see on benchmarking: Lascoumes and Le Galès 2005; Bruno and Didier 2013)? Beyond business and administration processes, a huge body of research in economic sociology has developed in recent years that has renewed the investigations on economic experience through a moral lens (Lamont 2000; Vatin 2008; Karpik 2010; Beckert and Aspers 2011; Bidet 2011; Zimmermann 2011; Dubuisson-Quellier 2013). Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy (2007) proposed a synthesis, summing up what we have known since Weber and Veblen, or by Hirschman and Sen, namely that capitalism rests on and generates a moral order as much as an economic order. All these works invite us to consider economics as a “moral science” (Sen 1991), a problem already raised in the works of Viviana Zelizer (1979, 1985). On the other hand, quantitative analysis is becoming more reflexive regarding its own operations. Alain Desrosières’ (1993) history of statistics was crucial in France in transforming researchers’ sensitivity to the question of “measuring the social” and the social construction of figures. And many of his questions anticipate Wendy Espeland and Mitchell Stevens (1998, 2008) elaboration on “commensuration as a social process”. Another area in which the notion of evaluation came to have much saliency is cultural sociology, for a good part, at the beginning, through the reception of Bourdieu’s Distinction (1984/1979) and his works on the field of cultural production (1993) by Michèle Lamont, Paul DiMaggio or Robert Wuthnow. These works ask what constitutes the success and decline of intellectual reputations (Camic 1992)? What makes the hierarchical distribution of wealth, status, and prestige? How are class, gender, and race inequalities dependent on cultural categories (Lamont and Fournier 1992)? And how do moral boundaries work in the organization of institutional life? A number of overviews of this growing area of research is now available (Timmermans and Epstein 2010; Lamont 2012; Lamont and Thévenot 2000; Helegsson and Muniesa 2013; Kjellberg et al. 2013).

DOI: 10.1007/s10746-015-9344-6

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