Assetization as a mode of techno-economic governance: Knowledge, education and personal data in the UN's System of National Accounts

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.

Keywords:

• assetization
• governance
• research & development
• human capital
• digital personal data
• national accounting

Acknowledgements

My thanks to the organizers and participants at the following events: Perspectives on the Fourth Industrial Revolution Workshop, KAIST, South Korea (2017); European Association for the Study of Science and Technology Conference and 6^th Changing Political Economy of Research and Innovation Workshop, both Lancaster, United Kingdom (2018); Society for Social Studies of Science Conference, Sydney, Australia (2018); Technoscientific Constitutionalism Joint DFG-NSF Workshop, Washington DC, United States (2019); The Assetization of Work: Varieties of Human Capital Workshop, University of Sydney, Australia (2019); Geography Seminar Series, University of Newcastle, Australia (2019); Science and Technology Policy Webinar, University of Athens, Greece (2020); and Department of Science & Technology Studies Seminar Series, University of Vienna, Austria (2021). My thanks also to the guest editors (especially Veit Braun), reviewers, journal editors and journal manager for their comments and suggestions. Usual disclaimers apply.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 UN Statistics Division, https://unstats.un.org/UNSD/nationalaccount/sna.asp

2 UN Statistics Division, https://unstats.un.org/UNSD/nationalaccount/sna.asp

3 This type of extension had happened before as SNA committees debated whether one thing or another was best conceptualized as an asset or not. Haskel and Westlake (2018, p. 43), for example, outline how SNA1993 had extended the asset boundary to include spending on software, which was then subsequently enacted in the EU (1995), United Kingdom (1998) and elsewhere.

4 A related, but tangential, issue here is the assetization of education through student loans, although I do not have space to go into in this paper (see Milyaeva & Neyland, 2020).

5 See here: https://unstats.un.org/unsd/nationalaccount/update_Issues.asp

6 See here: https://unstats.un.org/unsd/nationalaccount/uProc.asp

7 See here: https://unstats.un.org/unsd/nationalaccount/aeg/2020/M14.asp

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada under Grant [Ref. 435-2018-1136].

Notes on contributors

Kean Birch

Kean Birch is Director of the Institute for Technoscience & Society and Professor in the Graduate Program of Science & Technology Studies at York University, Canada. He has a new book coming out with Palgrave Macmillan called Data enclaves.