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L’École de comptabilité vous convie à la présentation du projet Assetization as a mode of techno-economic governance: An analysis of the treatment of knowledge, education, and personal data in the UN’s System of National Accounts de Kean Birch de l’Université de York en Ontario.

La présentation se déroulera en anglais.

Résumé

Assets are made through the configuration of technoscientific and political-economic (or techno-economic) relations, claims, and practices. The transformation of things into assets is increasingly conceptualized as a process of assetization, which is used to analyze how future revenue streams are constituted and how they are capitalized. The UN’s System of National Accounts (SNA), which is 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 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 actors change the world through techno-economic means. To illustrate 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 up for debate as an asset in the most recent SNA revision (e.g. digital data). In exploring debates about accounting standards in the SNA, I analyze how assetization comes to reconfigure the governance of knowledge, education, and personal data, often in problematic ways.