Financialization and assetization: Assets as sites of financial power struggles

Abstract

Despite significant overlap, scholarship often distinguishes the concepts of financialization and assetization. While there are historical, ontological and conceptual reasons for this distinction, we argue that this may limit both perspectives’ analytical potential. In this paper, we develop a shared research agenda that brings together analytical strengths and core insights of both perspectives. We propose to use three notions of financial power developed in financialization scholarship – instrumental, structural and infrastructural power – and apply them to different sites of power struggles that are linked to the asset form: the challenge to create durable returns, the challenge to calculate and distribute risks, and the distribution of wider societal power relations linked to the control of larger asset classes. We illustrate the proposed perspective in three vignettes on topics pertinent to scholars working within both strands of literature: green and impact assets, asset management and housing.

Keywords:

• financialization
• assetization
• financial power
• green finance
• asset management
• housing

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the special section editors for the invitation to contribute to this section as well as their support throughout the process. We also thank the journal editors and three anonymous reviewers for very helpful and constructive feedback.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

Philipp Golka acknowledges funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) [BE 2053/11-1].

Notes on contributors

Philipp Golka

Philipp Golka is a Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne. His research is located at the intersection of economic sociology and political economy scholarship and focusses on financial markets and private wealth.

Natascha van der Zwan

Natascha van der Zwan is an Associate Professor in the Institute of Public Administration, Leiden University. She does comparative and historical research on financialization and financial governance, with a specific focus on the interconnections between the financial system and the welfare state. Her current project studies the political and institutional dimensions of sustainable investment.

Arjen van der Heide

Arjen van der Heide works as a Researcher at the Netherlands Institute for Social Research. He has worked on various topics, including insurance, government bond markets, and sustainable finance, and published a book in 2023 with Bristol University Press, entitled Dealing in uncertainty: Insurance in the age of finance.