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.