Pub Date : 2023-11-07DOI: 10.1080/03085147.2023.2264064
Kean Birch
Assets are made through the configuration of technoscientific and political-economic (or techno-economic) relations, claims and practices; a process increasingly conceptualized as ‘assetization’. The UN’s System of National Accounts (SNA) – a set of national accounting standards – defines assets as ‘entities that must be owned by some unit, or units, and from which economic benefits are derived by their owner(s) by holding or using them over a period of time’. Accounting standards like the SNA are implicated in the construction of assets through their ‘extension of the asset boundary’, which happens periodically as accounting standards are revised and updated to better reflect changing business practices. Assetization, then, entails more than an analysis of the transformation of something into an asset, it can also be conceptualized as a mode of governance in which social actors change their world. To make this argument, I examine the SNA’s treatment of knowledge, education and personal data: respectively, redefined as an asset (e.g. intellectual property product); treated as a quasi-asset (e.g. human capital); and subject to continued debate (e.g. digital data). In exploring the SNA’s accounting standards, I show how assetization reconfigures the governance of knowledge, education and personal data, often in problematic ways.
{"title":"Assetization as a mode of techno-economic governance: Knowledge, education and personal data in the UN's System of National Accounts","authors":"Kean Birch","doi":"10.1080/03085147.2023.2264064","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2023.2264064","url":null,"abstract":"Assets are made through the configuration of technoscientific and political-economic (or techno-economic) relations, claims and practices; a process increasingly conceptualized as ‘assetization’. The UN’s System of National Accounts (SNA) – a set of national accounting standards – defines assets as ‘entities that must be owned by some unit, or units, and from which economic benefits are derived by their owner(s) by holding or using them over a period of time’. Accounting standards like the SNA are implicated in the construction of assets through their ‘extension of the asset boundary’, which happens periodically as accounting standards are revised and updated to better reflect changing business practices. Assetization, then, entails more than an analysis of the transformation of something into an asset, it can also be conceptualized as a mode of governance in which social actors change their world. To make this argument, I examine the SNA’s treatment of knowledge, education and personal data: respectively, redefined as an asset (e.g. intellectual property product); treated as a quasi-asset (e.g. human capital); and subject to continued debate (e.g. digital data). In exploring the SNA’s accounting standards, I show how assetization reconfigures the governance of knowledge, education and personal data, often in problematic ways.","PeriodicalId":48030,"journal":{"name":"Economy and Society","volume":"100 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135476280","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-20DOI: 10.1080/03085147.2023.2256582
Maurizio Meloni, Galib Bashirov
AbstractRecent controversies surrounding Michel Foucault suggest tensions and unresolved issues in his unfinished work. Here we interrogate Foucault’s legacy in relation to his claim that the welfare-state is a secularization of the Christian pastorate. We challenge Foucault’s binary narrative of the Christian flock versus the Graeco-Roman citizen and expand the focus to other ‘technologies of power’ in medieval Islam. Rather than an outburst of governmentality in modernity, we suggest a transregional and longue durée history of which the Christian pastorate was merely one facet. This non-binary framework indicates that Foucault’s claim of a ‘demonic’ fusion of sovereign and pastoral power in modern politics requires significant revisitation. Finally, we claim that Foucault’s much-discussed fascination with neoliberalism may have roots in this one-sided narrative regarding the birth of the welfare-state.Keywords: art of governmentCOVID-19global historyFoucaultpastoratewelfare state AcknowledgementsBoth the authors wish to thank the important inputs by four anonymous referees and rich departmental conversations with our colleagues at ADI, Deakin University Australia, Chris Mayes and Miguel Vatter. We remain of course solely responsible for our findings and claims.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT180100240).Notes on contributorsMaurizio MeloniMaurizio Meloni is a social theorist and a science and technology studies scholar. He is the author of Political biology: Science and social values in human heredity from eugenics to epigenetics (Palgrave, 2016: Winner of the Human Biology Association Book Award, 2020), Impressionable biologies: From the archaeology of plasticity to the sociology of epigenetics (Routledge, 2019), co-editor of Biosocial matters (Wiley, 2016) and chief editor of the Palgrave handbook of biology and society (2018). He is currently Associate Professor in Sociology in the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University, Australia, where he was previously an ARC Future Fellow (2019–2023).Galib BashirovGalib Bashirov is an Associate Research Fellow at Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalization, Deakin University, Australia. His research examines state-society relations in the Muslim world and US foreign policy in the Middle East and Central Asia. His previous works have been published in Review of International Political Economy, Democratization, and Third World Quarterly.
{"title":"The ‘government of men’: Moving beyond Foucault’s binaries","authors":"Maurizio Meloni, Galib Bashirov","doi":"10.1080/03085147.2023.2256582","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2023.2256582","url":null,"abstract":"AbstractRecent controversies surrounding Michel Foucault suggest tensions and unresolved issues in his unfinished work. Here we interrogate Foucault’s legacy in relation to his claim that the welfare-state is a secularization of the Christian pastorate. We challenge Foucault’s binary narrative of the Christian flock versus the Graeco-Roman citizen and expand the focus to other ‘technologies of power’ in medieval Islam. Rather than an outburst of governmentality in modernity, we suggest a transregional and longue durée history of which the Christian pastorate was merely one facet. This non-binary framework indicates that Foucault’s claim of a ‘demonic’ fusion of sovereign and pastoral power in modern politics requires significant revisitation. Finally, we claim that Foucault’s much-discussed fascination with neoliberalism may have roots in this one-sided narrative regarding the birth of the welfare-state.Keywords: art of governmentCOVID-19global historyFoucaultpastoratewelfare state AcknowledgementsBoth the authors wish to thank the important inputs by four anonymous referees and rich departmental conversations with our colleagues at ADI, Deakin University Australia, Chris Mayes and Miguel Vatter. We remain of course solely responsible for our findings and claims.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT180100240).Notes on contributorsMaurizio MeloniMaurizio Meloni is a social theorist and a science and technology studies scholar. He is the author of Political biology: Science and social values in human heredity from eugenics to epigenetics (Palgrave, 2016: Winner of the Human Biology Association Book Award, 2020), Impressionable biologies: From the archaeology of plasticity to the sociology of epigenetics (Routledge, 2019), co-editor of Biosocial matters (Wiley, 2016) and chief editor of the Palgrave handbook of biology and society (2018). He is currently Associate Professor in Sociology in the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University, Australia, where he was previously an ARC Future Fellow (2019–2023).Galib BashirovGalib Bashirov is an Associate Research Fellow at Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalization, Deakin University, Australia. His research examines state-society relations in the Muslim world and US foreign policy in the Middle East and Central Asia. His previous works have been published in Review of International Political Economy, Democratization, and Third World Quarterly.","PeriodicalId":48030,"journal":{"name":"Economy and Society","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135617882","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-14DOI: 10.1080/03085147.2023.2246263
Sarah Bracking, Maud Borie, Glenn Sim, Theo Temple
This paper explores the issuance and growth of transition and sustainability-linked bonds into the green market segment normally reserved for green bonds between 2018 and 2021. Using a performative economics and STS approach we examine how key terms within environmental political discourse – transition, green, sustainability – have been incorporated into the operation of investment markets, and given specific, if unstable and contested, technico-economic forms. Using event ethnography, industry literature and primary interviews, we examine how classification works as a market device, by exploring why the newer ‘transition bond’ was favoured by some investors but not others in comparison to green and sustainability bonds. We argue that the credibility of different green labelled products is being mediated by uneven references to scientific evidence, in the context of competing marketization strategies, which have world-making effects.
{"title":"Turning investments green in bond markets: Qualification, devices and morality","authors":"Sarah Bracking, Maud Borie, Glenn Sim, Theo Temple","doi":"10.1080/03085147.2023.2246263","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2023.2246263","url":null,"abstract":"This paper explores the issuance and growth of transition and sustainability-linked bonds into the green market segment normally reserved for green bonds between 2018 and 2021. Using a performative economics and STS approach we examine how key terms within environmental political discourse – transition, green, sustainability – have been incorporated into the operation of investment markets, and given specific, if unstable and contested, technico-economic forms. Using event ethnography, industry literature and primary interviews, we examine how classification works as a market device, by exploring why the newer ‘transition bond’ was favoured by some investors but not others in comparison to green and sustainability bonds. We argue that the credibility of different green labelled products is being mediated by uneven references to scientific evidence, in the context of competing marketization strategies, which have world-making effects.","PeriodicalId":48030,"journal":{"name":"Economy and Society","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134911708","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-13DOI: 10.1080/03085147.2023.2242187
Alex Preda, Ruowen Xu, Julie Valk
Market making is a crucial activity in financial markets, expected to reduce uncertainties related to price and liquidity information, and to enable strategic interactions among traders. Sociologis...
{"title":"Purity and dangers: Market making, structural uncertainty, and circuits of exchange in the cryptoeconomy","authors":"Alex Preda, Ruowen Xu, Julie Valk","doi":"10.1080/03085147.2023.2242187","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2023.2242187","url":null,"abstract":"Market making is a crucial activity in financial markets, expected to reduce uncertainties related to price and liquidity information, and to enable strategic interactions among traders. Sociologis...","PeriodicalId":48030,"journal":{"name":"Economy and Society","volume":"2 11","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2023-09-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138505619","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-13DOI: 10.1080/03085147.2023.2245633
Tim White
Housing has long been the quintessential rentier asset. But under financialized capitalism its enrolment into accumulation dynamics has greatly intensified. As investors increasingly turn to residential real estate in search of corporate rents, the logic of assetization is reaching novel locations in the housing process – extending to new scales, metrics and micro-morphologies. This paper argues one such novel location is that most intimate and familiar of places: the bed. Bringing together constructivist and political economy approaches to assets and drawing on the empirical case of co-living, the bed is identified as both a technical tool for projecting and enhancing income from real estate, and a strategy for de-risking investments by hyper-focusing on the necessities of life. Reducing domestic space to a technology for bare repose, bed-as-asset offers key insights into how the rhythms of housing are being harmonized with the needs of investors.
{"title":"Beds for rent","authors":"Tim White","doi":"10.1080/03085147.2023.2245633","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2023.2245633","url":null,"abstract":"Housing has long been the quintessential rentier asset. But under financialized capitalism its enrolment into accumulation dynamics has greatly intensified. As investors increasingly turn to residential real estate in search of corporate rents, the logic of assetization is reaching novel locations in the housing process – extending to new scales, metrics and micro-morphologies. This paper argues one such novel location is that most intimate and familiar of places: the bed. Bringing together constructivist and political economy approaches to assets and drawing on the empirical case of co-living, the bed is identified as both a technical tool for projecting and enhancing income from real estate, and a strategy for de-risking investments by hyper-focusing on the necessities of life. Reducing domestic space to a technology for bare repose, bed-as-asset offers key insights into how the rhythms of housing are being harmonized with the needs of investors.","PeriodicalId":48030,"journal":{"name":"Economy and Society","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135739707","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/03085147.2023.2225346
Noëlle Rohde
Abstract The political ideal of meritocracy has increasingly come under attack, but continues to figure centrally in the national identity of many self-declared liberal democracies, including Germany. A question which remains underexplored is where and how meritocratic thinking becomes ingrained in individuals to account for its pervasive appeal. This paper argues that the school grade plays a pivotal role. Ethnographic fieldwork in a German comprehensive school revealed that students consistently defended grading even though they often received very low grades themselves. The pupils’ arguments evoked core meritocratic motifs of betterment, hierarchy and social ascent. In order to explain this finding, grades are situated in a wider theory of quantification, arguing that it is in their capacity as numbers that grades encourage meritocratic thinking.
{"title":"‘To assign people their place in society’: School grades and the quantification of merit","authors":"Noëlle Rohde","doi":"10.1080/03085147.2023.2225346","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2023.2225346","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The political ideal of meritocracy has increasingly come under attack, but continues to figure centrally in the national identity of many self-declared liberal democracies, including Germany. A question which remains underexplored is where and how meritocratic thinking becomes ingrained in individuals to account for its pervasive appeal. This paper argues that the school grade plays a pivotal role. Ethnographic fieldwork in a German comprehensive school revealed that students consistently defended grading even though they often received very low grades themselves. The pupils’ arguments evoked core meritocratic motifs of betterment, hierarchy and social ascent. In order to explain this finding, grades are situated in a wider theory of quantification, arguing that it is in their capacity as numbers that grades encourage meritocratic thinking.","PeriodicalId":48030,"journal":{"name":"Economy and Society","volume":"89 1","pages":"506 - 530"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76226506","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/03085147.2023.2238463
Donald MacKenzie, Koray Caliskan, Charlotte Rommerskirchen
Abstract A user’s online action is often followed, around a second later, by ads being shown to her/him. Much happens in that second, including near-instantaneous auctions (sometimes coordinated by the user’s own phone or other device) in which algorithms bid to show particular advertisers’ ads. Contributing to the burgeoning social-science literature on online advertising, we examine contending material forms these auctions take in ‘open display’ advertising. We trace the emergence of Google’s centralized auctions, and how they have been challenged by decentralized ‘header bidding’. We argue: first, that ad platforms should be seen as ‘stack economization’ processes, which layer different forms of economization in complex ways; second, that those processes are sometimes fiercely contested, and can be the site of intricate – and currently changing – material politics.
{"title":"The longest second: Header bidding and the material politics of online advertising","authors":"Donald MacKenzie, Koray Caliskan, Charlotte Rommerskirchen","doi":"10.1080/03085147.2023.2238463","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2023.2238463","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract A user’s online action is often followed, around a second later, by ads being shown to her/him. Much happens in that second, including near-instantaneous auctions (sometimes coordinated by the user’s own phone or other device) in which algorithms bid to show particular advertisers’ ads. Contributing to the burgeoning social-science literature on online advertising, we examine contending material forms these auctions take in ‘open display’ advertising. We trace the emergence of Google’s centralized auctions, and how they have been challenged by decentralized ‘header bidding’. We argue: first, that ad platforms should be seen as ‘stack economization’ processes, which layer different forms of economization in complex ways; second, that those processes are sometimes fiercely contested, and can be the site of intricate – and currently changing – material politics.","PeriodicalId":48030,"journal":{"name":"Economy and Society","volume":"26 1","pages":"554 - 578"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76098741","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/03085147.2023.2237350
Christopher Holmes, David Yarrow
Abstract This paper analyses the rise of environmental accounting in global governance via a case study of the UN System of Environmental-Economic Accounting. We draw on recent literature that highlights the boundary between ‘economy’ and ‘non-economy’ as an important site of politics, and which establishes the key role of accounting practices in constructing that boundary. We show how the conceptual framework underpinning emergent global environmental accounting standards attempts to distinguish economy from non-economy in a way consistent with mainstream macroeconomic thought. However, and in contrast to existing critical accounts, we demonstrate that attempts to draw a clear boundary between the ‘economic’ and ‘non-economic’ aspects of the environment sometimes end up de-stabilizing that very distinction, establishing heterogenous notions of economic value that are increasingly inconsistent with standard national accounting practices.
{"title":"Global environmental accounting and the remaking of the economy-environment boundary","authors":"Christopher Holmes, David Yarrow","doi":"10.1080/03085147.2023.2237350","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2023.2237350","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper analyses the rise of environmental accounting in global governance via a case study of the UN System of Environmental-Economic Accounting. We draw on recent literature that highlights the boundary between ‘economy’ and ‘non-economy’ as an important site of politics, and which establishes the key role of accounting practices in constructing that boundary. We show how the conceptual framework underpinning emergent global environmental accounting standards attempts to distinguish economy from non-economy in a way consistent with mainstream macroeconomic thought. However, and in contrast to existing critical accounts, we demonstrate that attempts to draw a clear boundary between the ‘economic’ and ‘non-economic’ aspects of the environment sometimes end up de-stabilizing that very distinction, establishing heterogenous notions of economic value that are increasingly inconsistent with standard national accounting practices.","PeriodicalId":48030,"journal":{"name":"Economy and Society","volume":"24 1","pages":"449 - 474"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78214026","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-30DOI: 10.18207/criso.2023..138.41
Keuntae Kim
{"title":"The Current Status and Determinants of Premarital Pregnancy in Low-Fertility Era","authors":"Keuntae Kim","doi":"10.18207/criso.2023..138.41","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18207/criso.2023..138.41","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48030,"journal":{"name":"Economy and Society","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2023-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83560151","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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