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Making Mining Good: Tracing the semiotics of justification in mineral exploration and mining

Tobias Olofsson

Valuation Studies2025https://doi.org/10.3384/vs.2001-5992.2025.12.1.119-142article
AJG 1
Weight
0.46

What the paper says

What does it mean for a business or industry to be and do good? And who can count themselves within the good economy? This article investigates the justification of goodness in mineral exploration and mining and uses the entwinement between value creation and destruction characteristic of mining to trouble notions of goodness in impactful industries. Based on analyses of indepth interviews, ethnographic fieldnotes, and archival materials, the article follows the ways in which mining industry actors seek to negotiate contradictions between creation and destruction; and does so while using an innovative conceptual framework based in Peircean semiotics to open up justification for analysis of the underlying semiotic machinery that actors rely on to signify goodness. Mobilizing this conceptual toolkit, the article investigates how miners and explorers emphasize certain values, or signs, over others and how values are used to assert that some mines and miners do more good than others.

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https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.3384/vs.2001-5992.2025.12.1.119-142

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@article{tobias2025,
  title        = {{Making Mining Good: Tracing the semiotics of justification in mineral exploration and mining}},
  author       = {Tobias Olofsson},
  journal      = {Valuation Studies},
  year         = {2025},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.3384/vs.2001-5992.2025.12.1.119-142},
}

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Making Mining Good: Tracing the semiotics of justification in mineral exploration and mining

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Evidence weight

0.46

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.37 × 0.4 = 0.15
M · momentum0.60 × 0.15 = 0.09
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.