Towards a theory of rentiership

Abstract

Increasingly, a range of 'things' (e.g. infrastructure, data, knowledge, bodies, etc.) are configured and/or reconfigured as assets, or capitalized property. Accumulation strategies have changed as a result of this assetization process, which characterizes a particular form of technoscientific capitalism. Rather than entrepreneurial strategies based on commodity production, technoscientific capitalism is increasingly underpinned by rentiership, or the appropriation of value through ownership rights (e.g. intellectual property), monopoly conditions, and regulatory or market devices and practices (e.g. investment dispute courts, exclusivity agreements, etc.). While rentiership and rent-seeking are often presented as negative phenomena (e.g. distorting markets, unearned income) in both neoclassical and Marxist literatures – and much in-between – it is my intention in this paper to unpack rentiership as an increasingly constitutive political-economic process underpinning technoscientific capitalism. Rather than being framed as a problematic 'side-effect' of capitalism, I argue that rentiership can help us to understand how different forms of value extraction are constituted by and come to constitute different forms of technoscience. This has significant analytical, political, and normative implications for understanding the relationship between science, innovation, and business (e.g. how do rentier rationales configure research agendas, how does innovation enable rentiership, what are the consequences for social equity, etc.).