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Assetization

Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism

This edited volume extensively explores the concept of “assetization” as a defining process in contemporary technoscientific capitalism. Assetization refers to transforming various entities that were not previously considered economic assets – such as objects, experiences, information, living beings, and people – and repositioning them as “assets” that can be controlled, traded, and leveraged to generate a durable stream of future revenues or economic rents.

Recommended for: Economists, sociologists, geographers, and other social science researchers interested in the critical analysis of contemporary capitalism, financialization, and the expanding role of assets in the technoscientific economy. This book provides in-depth, interdisciplinary perspectives on the concept of “assetization” and its manifestations across various domains.

You will:

  • Gain a deeper understanding of how a wide range of things, from knowledge and data to infrastructure and natural resources, are being transformed into capitalized “assets” that can be controlled, traded, and generate economic rents.
  • Explore how the logic of investment, return, and rent-seeking is increasingly supplanting traditional commodity production and market exchange as the driving force behind contemporary capitalism.
  • Learn about the diverse interests, practices, and sociotechnical arrangements involved in the process of assetization across domains like intellectual property, biomedical innovation, energy, mining, education, and social services.
  • Develop critical perspectives on how the assetization of public goods and social issues can reshape the relationships between the state, private sector, and citizens.
  • Engage with interdisciplinary conceptual frameworks and empirical case studies that shed light on the complex and often contradictory dynamics of assetization.
  • Consider the broader societal implications of the rise of technoscientific capitalism centered on the extraction of value from a proliferating array of “assets.”
  • Be equipped to contribute to scholarly debates and policy discussions on the role of assets, financialization, and alternative modes of economic organization in the contemporary world.

Detailed Overview

The interdisciplinary contributors analyze in depth how this process of assetization unfolds across different domains. They examine in detail the assetization of traditional areas of knowledge through mechanisms like patents, commodification of personal data, and financialization of biomedical innovations. Chapters also provide nuanced examinations of how infrastructure in the forms of railways and renewable energy systems are being reconstructed as investable assets. Additional contributions scrutinize emerging strategies for translating nature itself into tradable assets through the property rights systems applied to biodiversity and agriculture. The volume further explores assetization efforts extending market logics into new spheres by repositioning traditional public goods domains like higher education and social services as investable assets. Taken together, the contributors illustrate how assetization has become a pervasive and consequential driving logic within technoscientific capitalism today, exerting influence by imposing investment rationales and techniques of valuation onto expanding areas of social and economic life.

Citation and Licensing

Birch, K. and Muniesa, F. (Eds.). (2020). Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism. The MIT Press. https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-edited-volume/4848/AssetizationTurning-Things-into-Assets-in. Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license. The license can be viewed here: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

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Assetization
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