This article draws upon thirteen months of ethnographic research in a Chicago pawnshop to show how prices of objects in pawnshops are actively, socially negotiated using what I term discursive strategies of valuation. Three kinds of discursive strategies of valuation emerge repeatedly in the data: a. references to the specific material attributes of the objects, b. references to the unique biographical histories of the objects, c. reference to the financial need and (relative) social positioning of the customer involved in the negotiation. Examining these strategies reveals the relationship between socially contingent and culturally constructed perceptions of value and the production of price. I find that rhetorical strategies can and do affect price, within limits. Perhaps most surprisingly, the data show that discursive strategies emphasizing a lower socio-economic status can inflate the value, and ultimately the price, of an object during negotiations.

Using a combination of FOIA-requested legislative committee hearings and in-depth interviews, this manuscript investigates the work of Illinois prosecutorial lobbyists in state-level crime policy during a time of penal reform. I find that prosecutorial lobbyists are a regular and influential presence in policy discussions, advocating primarily for 'law and order' policies that expand prosecutorial discretion, even following the Great Recession. I also find that they repeatedly evoke their relationship to crime victims to frame their policy positions for a bipartisan audience. However, attention to discourse reveals that victims’ own interests regularly clash with prosecutorial discretion. These clashes create what I term discursive ruptures, or uncomfortable and surprising rhetorical fissures that emerge in what is otherwise seen as a near iron-clad political alliance. In such instances, prosecutors risk alienating a key source of their political legitimacy to protect their own discretionary authority. Beyond insight into momentary political discomfort, these ruptures suggest that the powerful and productive alliance between prosecutors and victims is neither as natural nor as robust as relational perspectives have generally assumed, unearthing fault lines in prosecutors’ unparalleled power to punish.

In 2017, more than 22 percent of all U.S. households used an alternative financial service at least once. While fringe-banking enterprises mainly serve people with low or moderate incomes who lack access to more conventional banking services, pawnshops in particular also provide an important and distinct last resort for many customers.

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This article draws upon thirteen months of ethnographic research in a Chicago pawnshop to show how prices of objects in pawnshops are actively, socially negotiated using what I term discursive strategies of valuation. Three kinds of discursive strategies of valuation emerge repeatedly in the data: a. references to the specific material attributes of the objects, b. references to the unique biographical histories of the objects, c. reference to the financial need and (relative) social positioning of the customer involved in the negotiation. Examining these strategies reveals the relationship between socially contingent and culturally constructed perceptions of value and the production of price. I find that rhetorical strategies can and do affect price, within limits. Perhaps most surprisingly, the data show that discursive strategies emphasizing a lower socio-economic status can inflate the value, and ultimately the price, of an object during negotiations.Keywords Cultural objects . Discursive strategies . Fringe banking . Pawnshops . Pricing . ValuationA discursive formation will be individualized if one can define the system of formation of the different strategies that are deployed in it; in other words, if one can show how they all derive (in spite of their sometimes extreme diversity, and in spite of their dispersion in time) from the same set of relations.-Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge (2010, p. 68) A sign in the window of Second City Pawn, 1 a pawnshop on the North Side of Chicago, proclaims that the store deals in BAnything of Value.^To the average passerby Theor Soc (2017) 46:387-409