IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/halshs-02878684.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism

Author

Listed:
  • Kean Birch
  • Fabian Muniesa

    (CSI i3 - Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation i3 - Mines Paris - PSL (École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris) - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - I3 - Institut interdisciplinaire de l’innovation - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

In this book, scholars from a range of disciplines argue that the asset—meaning anything that can be controlled, traded, and capitalized as a revenue stream—has become the primary basis of technoscientific capitalism. An asset can be an object or an experience, a sum of money or a life form, a patent or a bodily function. A process of assetization prevails, imposing investment and return as the key rationale, and overtaking commodification and its speculative logic. Although assets can be bought and sold, the point is to get a durable economic rent from them rather than make a killing on the market. Assetization examines how assets are constructed and how a variety of things can be turned into assets, analyzing the interests, activities, skills, organizations, and relations entangled in this process. The contributors consider the assetization of knowledge, including patents, personal data, and biomedical innovation; of infrastructure, including railways and energy; of nature, including mineral deposits, agricultural seeds, and "natural capital"; and of publics, including such public goods as higher education and "monetizable social ills." Taken together, the chapters show the usefulness of assetization as an analytical tool and as an element in the critique of capitalism.

Suggested Citation

  • Kean Birch & Fabian Muniesa, 2020. "Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism," Post-Print halshs-02878684, HAL.
  • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-02878684
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Devika Narayan, 2022. "Platform capitalism and cloud infrastructure: Theorizing a hyper-scalable computing regime," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 54(5), pages 911-929, August.
    2. Mennicken, Andrea & Kornberger, Martin, 2021. "Von performativität zu generativität: Bewertung und ihre Folgen im Kontext der Digitalisierung," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 110925, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    3. Robert Wade & Geraint Ellis, 2022. "Reclaiming the Windy Commons: Landownership, Wind Rights, and the Assetization of Renewable Resources," Energies, MDPI, vol. 15(10), pages 1-31, May.
    4. Benjamin Raimbault, 2021. "Kean Birch, 2019, Neoliberal Bio-Economies? The Co-Construction of Markets and Natures," Review of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Studies, Springer, vol. 102(1), pages 115-119, March.
    5. Jelke R. Bosma, 2022. "Platformed professionalization: Labor, assets, and earning a livelihood through Airbnb," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 54(4), pages 595-610, June.
    6. Cooiman, Franziska, 2022. "Imprinting the economy: The structural power of venture capital," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, issue OnlineFir, pages 1-1.
    7. Braun, Benjamin, 2021. "From exit to control: The structural power of finance under asset manager capitalism," SocArXiv 4uesc, Center for Open Science.
    8. Gabor, Daniela, 2023. "The (European) Derisking State," SocArXiv hpbj2, Center for Open Science.
    9. Alexandra Langford & Geoffrey Lawrence & Kiah Smith, 2021. "Financialization for Development? Asset Making on Indigenous Land in Remote Northern Australia," Development and Change, International Institute of Social Studies, vol. 52(3), pages 574-597, May.
    10. Golka, Philipp, 2024. "Assets and infrastructures," SocArXiv rbqm9, Center for Open Science.
    11. Sarah Ruth Sippel, 2023. "Tackling land’s ‘stubborn materiality’: the interplay of imaginaries, data and digital technologies within farmland assetization," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 40(3), pages 849-863, September.
    12. Franziska Cooiman, 2024. "Imprinting the economy: The structural power of venture capital," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 56(2), pages 586-602, March.
    13. Benjamin Raimbault, 2021. "Kean Birch, 2019, Neoliberal Bio-Economies? The Co-Construction of Markets and Natures Palgrave MacMillan, 208 p," Post-Print hal-03559527, HAL.
    14. Jonathan Beaverstock & Adam Leaver & Daniel Tischer, 2023. "How financial products organize spatial networks: Analyzing collateralized debt obligations and collateralized loan obligations as “networked productsâ€," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 55(4), pages 969-996, June.
    15. Suaste Cherizola, Jesús, 2021. "From Commodities to Assets: Capital as Power and the Ontology of Finance," Review of Capital as Power, Capital As Power - Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism, vol. 2(1), pages 1-29.
    16. Tom Barnes, 2024. "Rethinking job loss in an age of assetisation: Lessons from the study of precarious older workers," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 56(3), pages 717-735, May.
    17. Rahul A Sirohi, 2024. "Corporate power and the rise of intangibles: A study of Indian firms," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 56(3), pages 865-882, May.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-02878684. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.