APOLOGIES FOR CROSS-POSTING**
**
Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S)
Boston, Massachusetts, USA
30 August – 2 September 2017
*CALL FOR PAPERS*
*Open Panel #68*
TECHNOSCIENCE RENT
*Organizer*
Kean Birch, York University, Canada
*Discussant*
Steve Fuller, University of Warwick, UK
*Abstract*
As an increasing number of 'things' (e.g. infrastructure, student debt,
medical care, personal data, sunlight, etc.) are turned into assets, it
is necessary to work out how value is appropriated from those assets
through new forms of 'rentiership' (or rent-seeking). Often presented as
the dark side of innovation and entrepreneurship, rent-seeking comes in
many forms, including: government fiat (e.g. GHG emissions); monopoly
(e.g. intellectual property); organizational arrangements (e.g. business
models); and market configurations (e.g. value chains and networks,
platforms). It is helpful to build on and go beyond the assumptions
built into both Marxist and neoclassical economic literatures that
rent-seeking is a problematic activity that distorts or corrupts the
‘naturalized’ working of capitalism or free markets. As such, the
purpose of this open panel is to consider these different forms of
rentiership as they constitute and are constituted by different forms of
technoscience, in order to unpack the concept analytically and
empirically and its political and normative implications for science,
technology, and innovation. The panel welcomes papers on different forms
of rentiership in technoscience, different conceptions of rentiership
drawing on Marxist, neoclassical, and other traditions, and discussions
of the analytical, political, and normative usefulness of rentiership as
a concept.
*Process*
The deadline for submitting an abstract is *1 March 2017*. If you want
to participate in this open track then you will need to select it when
you submit your abstract through the 4S Conference Website:
http://www.4sonline.org/meeting. If you would like to discuss the
relevance of your paper to the open track, then please feel free to
contact me: k...@yorku.ca <mailto:k...@yorku.ca>
*References*
Birch, K. (2016) Rethinking value in the bio-economy: Finance,
assetization and the management of value, /Science, Technology and Human
Values /DOI: 10.1177/0162243916661633
Birch, K. (2017), Financing technoscience: Finance, assetization and
rentiership, in D. Tyfield, R. Lave, S. Randalls and C. Thorpe (eds),
/The Routledge Handbook of the Political Economy of Science/, London:
Routledge.
Birch, K., Tyfield, D. and Chiapetta, M. (2017) From neoliberalizing
research to researching neoliberalism: STS, /rentiership/ and the
emergence of commons 2.0, in D. Cahill, M. Konings and M. Cooper (eds),
/The SAGE Handbook of Neoliberalism/, London: SAGE.
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Frase, P. (2016) /Four Futures: Life After Capitalism/, London: Verso.
Fuller, S. (2002) /Knowledge Management Foundations/, Woburn MA:
Butterworth-Heinemann.
Fuller, S. (2016) /The Academic Caesar/, London: Sage.
Haila, A. (2015), /Urban Land Rent/, Chichester: Wiley Blackwell.
Krueger, A. (1974) The Political Economy of the Rent-Seeking Society,
/American Economic Review/, 64(3): 291–303.
Langley, P. and A. Leyshon (2016), ‘Platform Capitalism: The
Intermediation and Capitalisation of Digital Economic Circulation’,
/Finance and Society/, early view.
Lazzarato, M. (2015), /Governing by Debt/, South Pasadena CA: Semiotext(e).
McGoey, L. (forthcoming) The Elusive Rentier Rich: Piketty’s data
battles and the power of absent evidence, /Science, Technology & Human
Values/.
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Political Ecology
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