Assetization

Assetization
Author: Kean Birch
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2020-07-14
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0262539179

How the asset—anything that can be controlled, traded, and capitalized as a revenue stream—has become the primary basis of technoscientific capitalism. 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. Contributors Thomas Beauvisage, Kean Birch, Veit Braun, Natalia Buier, Béatrice Cointe, Paul Robert Gilbert, Hyo Yoon Kang, Les Levidow, Kevin Mellet, Sveta Milyaeva, Fabian Muniesa, Alain Nadaï, Daniel Neyland, Victor Roy, James W. Williams

Assetization

Assetization
Author: Kean Birch
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2020-07-14
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0262359022

How the asset--anything that can be controlled, traded, and capitalized as a revenue stream--has become the primary basis of technoscientific capitalism. 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

Assetization
Author: Kean Birch
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2020
Genre: Capitalism
ISBN: 9780262359030

"This is a professional edited collection for the Inside Technology series looking at what the editors call assetization. They ask: what lies in the wake of commodification? How should we characterize and analyze technoscientific capitalism in the era of Uber and Airbnb, the business model sorcery of giants like Google and Genentech, rising immaterial and cognitive labor productivity represented by the explosion in Big Data, and the construction of population behavior as money-making resource? The editors define an asset as something-a piece of land, a skill or experience, a sum of money, a bodily function or affective personality, a life form, a patent or copyright, etc.-that can be owned or controlled, traded, and capitalized as a revenue stream, often involving the valuation of discounted future earnings in the present. Assets can certainly be bought and sold, yes. But the point is to get a durable rent from them, not to sell them away in the market today. How do things become assets, then? They are made so: the asset form is not, it is important to stress, the consequence of some inherent or embodied quality. The intention of this volume is to show how assets are constructed, how a variety of things are and can be turned into assets, examining the interests, activities, skills, organizations, and relations entangled in this process. Another is to stress that technoscientific capitalism entails specific practices that make the uncertainty inherent in innovation understandable and calculable as part of a broader capitalist system. The asset form reflects the tumult in contemporary technoscientific capitalism, in which it becomes harder and harder to draw clear boundaries around what counts as or comes to constitute capitalism How different is assetization from commodification? Which kind of legal constructions, political arrangements, and economic operations does it entail? Where does it find justification? What kind of critique does it call for? The research gathered in this edited volume opens directions in order to tackle these problems from a critical, qualitative perspective"--

Farming As Financial Asset

Farming As Financial Asset
Author: Stefan Ouma
Publisher:
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2020-05-31
Genre:
ISBN: 9781788211871

Stefan Ouma seeks to debunk the misconceptions and assumptions about "finance-gone-farming" with a penetrating analysis of case studies taken from both the developed and developing world. The book provides fascinating insights into the inner workings of the agri-focused asset management industry.

The Asset Economy

The Asset Economy
Author: Lisa Adkins
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2020-10-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1509544224

Rising inequality is the defining feature of our age. With the lion’s share of wealth growth going to the top, for a growing percentage of society a middle-class existence is out of reach. What exactly are the economic shifts that have driven the social transformations taking place in Anglo-capitalist societies? In this timely book, Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings argue that the rise of the asset economy has produced a new logic of inequality. Several decades of property inflation have seen asset ownership overshadow employment as a determinant of class position. Exploring the impact of generational dynamics in this new class landscape, the book advances an original perspective on a range of phenomena that are widely debated but poorly understood – including the growth of wealth inequalities and precarity, the dynamics of urban property inflation, changes in fiscal and monetary policy and the predicament of the “millennial” generation. Despite widespread awareness of the harmful effects of Quantitative Easing and similar asset-supporting measures, we appear to have entered an era of policy “lock-in” that is responsible for a growing disconnect between popular expectations and institutional priorities. The resulting polarization underlies many of the volatile dynamics and rapidly shifting alliances that dominate today’s headlines.

A Velvet Empire

A Velvet Empire
Author: David Todd
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2023-09-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691205337

How France's elites used soft power to pursue their imperial ambitions in the nineteenth century After Napoleon's downfall in 1815, France embraced a mostly informal style of empire, one that emphasized economic and cultural influence rather than military conquest. A Velvet Empire is a global history of French imperialism in the nineteenth century, providing new insights into the mechanisms of imperial collaboration that extended France's power from the Middle East to Latin America and ushered in the modern age of globalization. David Todd shows how French elites pursued a cunning strategy of imperial expansion in which conspicuous commodities such as champagne and silk textiles, together with loans to client states, contributed to a global campaign of seduction. French imperialism was no less brutal than that of the British. But while Britain widened its imperial reach through settler colonialism and the acquisition of far-flung territories, France built a "velvet" empire backed by frequent military interventions and a broadening extraterritorial jurisdiction. Todd demonstrates how France drew vast benefits from these asymmetric, imperial-like relations until a succession of setbacks around the world brought about their unravelling in the 1870s. A Velvet Empire sheds light on France's neglected contribution to the conservative reinvention of modernity and offers a new interpretation of the resurgence of French colonialism on a global scale after 1880. This panoramic book also highlights the crucial role of collaboration among European empires during this period—including archrivals Britain and France—and cooperation with indigenous elites in facilitating imperial expansion and the globalization of capitalism.

Winning the Reputation Game

Winning the Reputation Game
Author: Grahame R. Dowling
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2016-04-22
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0262335093

Core strategies for creating a corporate reputation that will provide a competitive advantage in the marketplace: a back-to-basics approach. What does a company have to do to be admired and respected? Why does Apple have a better reputation than, say, Samsung? In Winning the Reputation Game, Grahame Dowling explains. Companies' reputations do not derive from consultant-recommended campaigns to showcase efforts at corporate transparency, environmental sustainability, or social responsibility. Companies are admired and respected because they are “simply better” than their competitors. Companies that focus on providing outstanding goods and services are rewarded with a strong reputation that helps them gain competitive advantage. Dowling, who has studied corporate reputation–building for thirty years, describes two core strategies for creating a corporate reputation that will provide a competitive advantage: to be known for being Best at Something or for being Best for Somebody. Apple, for example, is best at personal technology products that enhance people's lifestyles. IKEA is best for people who want well-designed furniture at affordable prices. Dowling covers such topics as the commercial value of a strong reputations—including good employees, repeat customers, and strong share price; how corporate reputations are formed; the power of “being simply better”; the effectiveness of corporate storytelling (for good or ill; Kenneth Lay of Enron was a master storyteller); and keeping out of trouble. Drawing on many real-world examples, Dowling shows how companies that are perceived to be better than their competitors build strong reputations that reflect past success and promise more of the same. Companies that artificially engineer a reputation with irrelevant activities but have stopped providing the best products and services available often wind up with mediocre—or worse—reputations.

European Objects

European Objects
Author: Brice Laurent
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2022-02-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0262368560

How interventions based on objects—including chemicals, financial products, and consumer goods—offer a path to rethink European integration. Interventions based on objects, Brice Laurent claims, have become a dominant path for European policy-making. In European Objects, Laurent analyzes the political consequences of these interventions and their democratization. He uses the term “European objects” to describe technical entities that are regulated—and thereby transformed—by European policies. To uncover the bureaucratic and regulatory intricacies of European governance, Laurent focuses on a series of these objects, including food products, chemicals, financial products, consumer goods, drinking water, and occupational environments. Laurent argues that taking European objects seriously offers a way to rephrase the dreams of harmonization and, eventually, rethink the constitutional strength of European integration. Laurent doesn’t just clarify how European regulation works, but also explores ways to realize long-term objectives for European integration, such as a harmonized market or an objective expertise. Regulation is best understood as “regulatory machinery” bringing together various types of legal constraints, material interventions on objects, and the imagining of desirable futures. Analyzing European objects enables Laurent to explore what regulation has become after years of evolution have made it a central component of the European policy world. He offers practical illustrations of how the regulatory machinery functions today. If Europe succeeds at reinventing the terms of its legitimacy with objects that matter for the European publics, it will provide a telling demonstration that the opposition of expertise and populism is not the unavoidable fate of liberal democracies.

We Have Never Been Neoliberal

We Have Never Been Neoliberal
Author: Kean Birch
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2015-02-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1780995350

A number of people have claimed that the ongoing financial crisis has revealed the problems with neoliberal thought and neoliberal policies in the 'Atlantic Heartland'. However, if we look at the history of the 'Heartland' economies then it becomes evident that they were never neoliberal in the first place - that is, the economic policies and discourses in these countries did not follow neoliberal prescriptions. /We Have Never Been Neoliberal/ explores this divergence between neoliberal theory and 'neoliberal' practice by focusing on the underlying contradictions in monetarism, private monopolies, and financialization. The book finishes by proposing a 'manifesto for a doomed youth' in which it argues that younger generations should refuse to pay interest on anything in order to avoid the trap of debt-driven living.

The Financialization of Housing

The Financialization of Housing
Author: Manuel B. Aalbers
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2016-05-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1317361784

Due to the financialization of housing in today’s market, housing risks are increasingly becoming financial risks. Financialization refers to the increasing dominance of financial actors, markets, practices, measurements and narratives. It also refers to the resulting structural transformation of economies, firms, states and households. This book asserts the centrality of housing to the contemporary capitalist political economy and places housing at the centre of the financialization debate. A global wall of money is looking for High-Quality Collateral (HQC) investments, and housing is one of the few asset classes considered HQC. This explains why housing is increasingly becoming financialized, but it does not explain its timing, politics and geography. Presenting a diverse range of case studies from the US, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Spain, the chapters in this book include coverage of the role of the state as the driver of financialization processes, and the part played by local and national histories and institutions. This cutting edge volume will pave the way for future research in the area. Where housing used to be something "local" or "national", the two-way coupling of housing to finance has been one crucial element in the recent crisis. It is time to reconsider the financialization of both homeownership and social housing. This book will be of interest to those who study international economics, economic geography and financialization.