ABSTRACT
People discussed how computing has become central to social formation reproduction (SFR), as well as the problems in a range of existing social theories that prevent them from properly representing the computing/SFR connection. They see an ethnological theory of valuation as a way to state their own understanding of valuation in some basic tenets. Humans have valued many things in many ways, but they also change the way they value, and these changes follow trajectories of path-dependency. Second, they can identify three elementary forms of valuing, which they refer to as nominal, ordinal, and ratio valuing. Third, they traced how ratio valuing has historically come to dominate the other forms, yet they pointed out how this domination is not total. Fourth, they showed how capitalism could be understood as the social formation type where work is subjected to ratio values, money becoming the general measure of what is shared among the different values.
