The assetization of baseball players: Instrumentalizing promise with signing bonuses and human capital contracts

Abstract

The idea that humans can be assets because their skills and work are resources that create value has been at the core of a long-standing concern among accounting scholars. This paper explores how minor league baseball players experience being considered assets and how they decide to partake in their assetization. Drawing on a range of data sources–59 interviews, archival material, and work experience–this study offers a voice to the assetized subject, and highlights that being an asset is a desired status. Assetization is a value-enhancing experience that depends on the adherence to a promise. Our results also show that financial instruments such as human capital contracts can be promissory mechanisms allowing assetized subjects to enhance their human capital value and assume the dual role of investee-investor, which further conditions an enactment of the entrepreneur of the self.