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Assetization: A technoscientific or financial phenomenon?

Review products

Kean Birch and Fabian Muniesa (eds.), Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2020, 338 pp., $40.00 (pbk), ISBN 978-0-262-53917-3

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2023

Philipp Golka
Philipp Golka*
Affiliation:
Leiden University, Netherlands
*
Corresponding author: Philipp Golka, Universiteit Leiden, Turfmarkt 99, 2511 DP The Hague. Email: p.j.m.golka@fgga.leidenuniv.nl
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Abstract

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Finance and financialization have dominated scholarship on capitalism and society for the past decade. Although scholars noted early on that the expansion of finance relies on the creation (and trade) of new financial assets, assets and assetization have been a blind spot as scholarship continued to focus on financial markets (Langley, 2020). This, however, is currently about to change as a number of landmark publications have been published in the past months that point toward growing momentum in the field of asset and assetization research. In this short essay, I review Kean Birch and Fabian Muniesa's edited collection, Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism, which is of central importance to said momentum, and put it into dialogue with some of the other recent publications on this topic.

Keywords

Assetsassetizationfinancializationvaluation studiespolitical economy
Type
Review essay
Information
Finance and Society , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , 2021 , pp. 88 - 93
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
© 2021 The Author(s)

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