K Birch
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 27371 |
|---|---|
| NOME | K Birch |
| PRENOMES | K |
| SOBRENOME | Birch |
| ASSINATURA | BIRCH K |
| AFILIAÇÕES | York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2881-4623 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 60 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 789 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 60 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2006 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 13 |
Theorizing “compute” as the organizing asset of digital capitalism
The outsourcing of digital infrastructure and computing capacity is a defining characteristic of digital capitalism, epitomized by the emergence of cloud computing markets. Cloud computing is dominated by three corporations: Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet/Google, collectively known as “Big Cloud.” Contributing to ongoing debates in organization studies and cognate fields, our objective in this paper is to theorize and illustrate how emergence an…
Tech oligarchy
What is happening is not just a battle for market control. A small number of tech titans are busy designing our collective future, presenting their societal vision, and specific beliefs about our h...
Cloud assets and the “unit of compute”
We offer a genealogy of recent artificial intelligence infrastructure investment, situating it within a longer-term strategy by Big Cloud firms to construct and dominate the cloud computing market. Based on an analysis of 12 years of financial data and earnings calls from Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, we introduce the concept of “cloud assets” to help elucidate their dominance. Neither strictly tangible nor intangible, this is a new hybrid asset…
EdTech futures
The growth of the Education Technology (EdTech) sector in recent years has been accompanied by predictions that new digital platforms will disrupt HE. However, there remains a disjuncture between promises of digital disruption and the absence of empirical evidence of disruption. This article juxtaposes two theses on the value of education to offer a theoretical explanation for why this imagined digital disruption may be difficult to achieve. The …
Assetizing academic content and the emergence of the ‘assetizen’
Academic content, such as teaching materials and academic publications, has become an economic resource. This has occurred through assetization as the key economic regime in contemporary techno-capitalism. We analyse three cases of academic content being made into revenue-generating assets: (1) universities enclosing online learning content, (2) EdTech platform companies building databases of academic assignments and manuscripts, and (3) academic…
Mapping rentiership and assetisation in the digitalisation of education
Global economies have changed significantly over the last two decades. The rise of rentiership and assetisation has fundamentally changed the way we value and govern things and societies (Birch and
Turning universities into data-driven organisations
Universities are striving to become data-driven organisations, benefitting from data collection, analysis, and various data products, such as business intelligence, learning analytics, personalised recommendations, behavioural nudging, and automation. However, datafication of universities is not an easy process. We empirically explore the struggles and challenges of UK universities in making digital and personal data useful and valuable. We struc…
Undermining competition, undermining markets? Implications of Big Tech and digital personal data for competition policy
Many countries and jurisdictions are reforming their competition policies in response to growing political and public concerns about market concentration, especially when it comes to the market power of Big Tech firms. A particular concern is the new dynamics in market competition resulting from the rise of digital personal data as the key resource or asset underpinning our economies. Our aim in this paper is to examine the competition policy inv…
Tokenization of everything? Exploring the limits of blockchain technologies in the governance of financial markets and assets
We examine the implications of tokenization for the transformation of things into financial assets. Framed as the ‘democratization’ of financial investment by its advocates, tokenization is a process whereby asset ownership is fractionalized and represented by a digital token to be sold to potential investors on blockchain-based platforms. Tokenization can be seen as an extension of securitization to illiquid real-world assets or digital assets; …
Architectures of assetization
We outline the concept of ‘architectures of assetization’ as a way to get at the political-economic configuration of datafication in higher education through the layering of educational technology (‘edtech’) onto existing, legacy infrastructures. Edtech provides a useful empirical object of study because of the increasing deployment of new digital technologies in educational organizations; our focus is on higher education institutions (i.e. unive…
Do Artifacts Have Political Economy
Harking back to Langdon Winner's now classic essay "Do artifacts have politics?," my aim in this article is to ask a very similar question-namely, do artifacts have political economy? Following Winner and with the same objective in mind, I analyze artifacts that: (1) have been designed in ways that embed particular political economies; or (2) are compatible with particular political economies. I illustrate the former using Winner's own example of…
Digitalised higher education
Higher education is already profoundly digitalised. Students, academics, and university administrators routinely use digital technologies, many of which rely on data, including artificial intelligence. Universities aim to operate as data-powered organisations to support institutional efficiency and the personalisation of learning and student experience. These developments are occurring against the backdrop of university digital infrastructure mov…
Monetising Digital Data in Higher Education
Digital data are a building block of postdigital higher education and, as such, are believed to be economically and socially valuable. However, data need to be made valuable via a complex set of political-economic and socio-technical arrangements. While universities and policymakers aim to derive social benefits from digital data, we turn our attention to the economic value of digital data in the EdTech industry. In this article, we analyse the s…
Assetization as a mode of techno-economic governance
Assets are made through the configuration of technoscientific and political-economic (or techno-economic) relations, claims and practices; a process increasingly conceptualized as 'assetization'. The UN's System of National Accounts (SNA) – 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 pe…
Constructing digital assets through blockchain technologies? Unpacking the techno-economic configuration of non-fungible tokens
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are novel techno-economic configurations underpinned by cryptocurrency ledgers that transform digital files like graphic art, music, videos, etc. into digital assets. NFTs are often framed as a way for artists and other creators to profit from their activities, transforming ‘experiences’ into something for sale. As such, NFTs raise some questions pertinent to science and technology studies and political economy. We focu…
Struggling over new asset geographies
In this response, we address criticisms of our definition of assetization from an accounting perspective, its overlap with financialization, and the relationship between value and valuation it posits. We reflect on a future agenda around assetization emphasizing the political dimensions of externalizing future costs and the implications of rising inflation
In memoriam
Introduction
The Intersections between Sociology and STS
This paper charts the changing intersections between sociology and science and technology studies (STS) using computational textual analysis. We characterize this 'quali-quantitative' approach as a Big Data method, as this calls attention to the commixture of textual and numeric data that characterizes Big Data. The term Big Data, too, calls attention to the increasing privatization of both data and data analytics tools. The data mining was done …
Assetization and the ‘new asset geographies’
An asset is both a resource and property, in that it generates income streams with its sale price based on the capitalization of those revenues. Although an asset's income streams can be financially sliced up, aggregated, and speculated upon across highly diverse geographies, there still has to be something underpinning these financial operations. Something has to generate the income that a political economic actor can lay claim to through a prop…
Big Tech
Changing publication practices and the typification of the journal article in science and technology studies
In this article, we study the development of the STS journal article format since the 1980s. Our analysis is based on quantitative data that suggest that the diversity of various journal publication types has diminished over the past four decades, while the format of research articles has become increasingly typified. We contextualize these historical shifts in qualitative terms, drawing on a set of 76 interviews with STS scholars and other stake…
Reflexive expectations in innovation financing
Social studies of expectations are premised on the notion that the future is brought into the present, and thereby expectations about the future come to shape our actions, decisions, and practices in ways that performatively bring about the imagined future. In this article, I examine how social actors themselves understand, construct, and deploy future expectations in innovation financing, focusing specifically on the venture capital industry fin…
A comparative analysis of data governance
Personal data are produced through our daily interactions with digital technologies like search engines, social media, and online shopping, and is often referred to as our "digital exhaust." It has been characterized as the key resource or asset for our economies in the 21st century. This paper focuses on the socio-technical imaginaries of digital personal data as a way to understand how desired forms of data governance are co-produced with colle…
Technoscience and the logics of (venture) capital
Rethinking Value in the Bio-economy
Current debates in science and technology studies emphasize that the bio-economy-or, the articulation of capitalism and biotechnology-is built on notions of commodity production, commodification, and materiality, emphasizing that it is possible to derive value from body parts, molecular and cellular tissues, biological processes, and so on. What is missing from these perspectives, however, is consideration of the political-economic actors, knowle…
Technoscience Rent
Contemporary, technoscientific capitalism is characterized by the (re)configuration of a range of "things" (e.g., infrastructure, data, knowledge, bodies) as assets or capitalized property. Accumulation strategies have changed as a result of this assetization process. Rather than entrepreneurial strategies based on commodity production, technoscientific capitalism is increasingly underpinned by rentiership or the appropriation of value through ow…
Evolution in Economic Geography
Economic geography has, over the past decade or so, drawn upon ideas from evolutionary economics in trying to understand processes of regional growth and change. Recently, some researchers have sought to delimit and develop an "evolutionary economic geography" (EEG), aiming to create a more systematic theoretical framework for research. This article provides a sympathetic critique and elaboration of this emergent EEG but takes issue with some asp…
Neoliberalism and the geographies of marketization
Increasingly, governments are experimenting with ways to provide public goods by involving the private sector in the planning, financing, building and operating of a range of services, facilities, infrastructure, etc. In the geographical literature on neoliberalism this entanglement of the state and markets has been loosely conceptualized as a process of marketization. This concept describes the insertion of markets or market forces into the stat…
Theorizing the Bioeconomy
In the policy discourses of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and European Commission (EC), modern biotechnology and the life sciences are represented as an emerging "bioeconomy" in which the latent value underpinning biological materials and products offers the opportunity for sustainable economic growth. This articulation of modern biotechnology and economic development is an emerging scholarly field producing num…
Assetization and the ‘new asset geographies’
An asset is both a resource and property, in that it generates income streams with its sale price based on the capitalization of those revenues. Although an asset's income streams can be financially sliced up, aggregated, and speculated upon across highly diverse geographies, there still has to be something underpinning these financial operations. Something has to generate the income that a political economic actor can lay claim to through a prop…
Reflexive expectations in innovation financing
Social studies of expectations are premised on the notion that the future is brought into the present, and thereby expectations about the future come to shape our actions, decisions, and practices in ways that performatively bring about the imagined future. In this article, I examine how social actors themselves understand, construct, and deploy future expectations in innovation financing, focusing specifically on the venture capital industry fin…
Big Tech
In late 2020, the US government initiated legal suits against two Big Tech firms. In October, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) and 11 State Attorneys General filed a lawsuit against Google for ‘v
Big Tech
Varieties of neoliberalism? Restructuring in large industrially dependent regions across Western and Eastern Europe
The recent travails of the European Constitution, now Reform Treaty, illustrate the divergence of views on European integration. To many commentators and academics, European integration has come to represent the establishment of a neoliberal Europe characterized by a ‘negative’ form of integration. This neoliberalization of European economies has been underpinned by the perceived threat of globalization and global competition leading to the whole…
Old Industrial Regions in Europe
Birch K., MacKinnon D. and Cumbers A. Old industrial regions in Europe: a comparative assessment of economic performance, Regional Studies. Recent academic and policy discourses on regional development in Europe promote the expansion of ‘knowledge-based’ economies and learning regions. The assumptions underpinning the new regional policy are cast into sharp focus by the experiences of old industrial regions. The paper engages with these issues th…
The Third Sector and the Regional Development of Social Capital
n There is a growing academic and policy interest in the Third Sector and its potential impact on regional development. A key aspect of the Third Sector is its role in regional development through the promotion of social capital. However, there is considerable debate around the definition of the Third Sector that limits our understanding of its impact. Here we first disentangle a number of ambiguities to clarify the distinctions between the conce…
Techno-economic Assumptions
Contemporary capitalism is increasingly technoscientific. Examples of this include the growing role of techno-economic expertise in decision-making, such as economists specializing in research and
The problem of innovation in technoscientific capitalism
A spate of recent scandals concerning personal digital data illustrates the extent to which innovation and finance are thoroughly entangled with one another. The innovation-finance nexus is an example of an emerging dynamic in technoscientific capitalism in which innovation is increasingly driven by the pursuit of “economic rents”. Unlike innovation that delivers new products, services, and markets, innovation as rentiership is defined by the ext…
A Geographical Political Economy of Evolution in Economic Geography
Key themes for evolution in economic geography are identified that clarify and further refine and reinforce our argument for broader conceptions of institutions, social agency, and power and for the situation of the plural and emerging field of evolutionary approaches more fully within geographical political economy. We address the following issues: conceptual and terminological clarity; evolution and institutions within and beyond the firm; agen…
EU agri-innovation policy
The knowledge-based bio-economy has gained prominence as a research and innovation policy of the European Union. As a policy framework the knowledge-based bio-economy has attracted two contending visions, which can be analyzed as imaginaries – strategic discourses prefiguring a possible, desirable future. In the dominant vision, life sciences will enhance productivity for European competitive advantage in global value chains. A rival vision links…
Alliance‐Driven Governance
As the economy has globalized, it has also regionalized, which has led to the integration of different spaces across different scales. A number of theories contend that the endogenous assets of these locations provide them with the means to compete in this globalizing economy, especially in relation to knowledge‐based sectors like biotechnology. Among these theories, the cluster concept stands out. However, there is little support for the argumen…
Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism means many things to many people. Often used indiscriminately to mean anything ‘bad’, neoliberalism is in need of dissection as an analytical category and a way of understanding the transformation of society over the last few decades. This paper is a brief introduction to neoliberalism and a number of key analytical approaches used to study it, including governmentality, Marxism, ideational analysis, history and philosophy of econom…
Divergent Paradigms of European Agro-Food Innovation
The Knowledge-Based Bio-Economy (KBBE) has gained prominence as an agricultural R&D agenda of the European Union. Specific research policies are justified as necessary to create a KBBE for societal progress. Playing the role of a master narrative, the KBBE attracts rival visions; each favours a different diagnosis of unsustainable agriculture and its remedies in agro-food innovation. Each vision links a technoscientific paradigm with a quality pa…
Assetization as a mode of techno-economic governance
Assets are made through the configuration of technoscientific and political-economic (or techno-economic) relations, claims and practices; a process increasingly conceptualized as 'assetization'. The UN's System of National Accounts (SNA) – 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 pe…
Introduction
Changing publication practices and the typification of the journal article in science and technology studies
In this article, we study the development of the STS journal article format since the 1980s. Our analysis is based on quantitative data that suggest that the diversity of various journal publication types has diminished over the past four decades, while the format of research articles has become increasingly typified. We contextualize these historical shifts in qualitative terms, drawing on a set of 76 interviews with STS scholars and other stake…
Towards a theory of rentiership
Architectures of assetization
We outline the concept of ‘architectures of assetization’ as a way to get at the political-economic configuration of datafication in higher education through the layering of educational technology (‘edtech’) onto existing, legacy infrastructures. Edtech provides a useful empirical object of study because of the increasing deployment of new digital technologies in educational organizations; our focus is on higher education institutions (i.e. unive…
Struggling over new asset geographies
In this response, we address criticisms of our definition of assetization from an accounting perspective, its overlap with financialization, and the relationship between value and valuation it posits. We reflect on a future agenda around assetization emphasizing the political dimensions of externalizing future costs and the implications of rising inflation
Introduction
Two very different reports produced for the UK government in the last three years have connected the state of our physical health with that of our material wealth. The first of these was produced in 2003 by the Bioscience Innovation and Growth Team (BIGT) titled Improving National Health, Improving National Wealth, whilst the second, called Health Inequalities-Status Report on the Programme for Action, was produced in 2005 by the Department of He…
The Totalitarian Corporation
Throughout its history as an institution, the corporation has been associated withtyranny of one sort or another, from the early period with the imperialist expeditions of the East India Company - virtual ruler of the Indian subcontinent - to the vestige of monarchical privilege embodied in corporate charters in the early USA. However, despite these characterisations throughout the centuries, there has been a very limited attempt to provide a rig…
The Virtual Bioeconomy
This article considers how the bioeconomy—conceived as a market constituted by and constituting technologies derived from the biosciences—can be usefully considered as a virtual economy in that the representations and practices of economic activity differ significantly from one another. It does so through an analysis of the economic theories on spatial innovation processes (e.g. clusters) that have proved a popular approach in economic geography.…
Growth Cultures
This is especially evident in Phil Cooke's new book Growth Cultures that brings together several years worth of research on the bioeconomy—as the commercial exploitation of the life sciences is now commonly defined. It is well worth reading the preface to this volume to ground the rest of the book in the evolving thinking about this important ‘industry’. Growth Cultures collects together in one volume much of Cooke's prolific output from the late…
Public Sector Spending and the Scottish Economy
NTRODUCTION A recent debate in Scottish media and business circles has been highly critical of the role of the public sector in the Scottish economy. The debate has revolved around the extent to which public sector expenditure and investment has ‘crowded out’ the private sector, leading to poor national economic performance. This article suggests that there is little evidence for such a claim, whilst it could be argued that the opposite is actual…
Knowledge, Space and Biotechnology
This article outlines and reviews the trends in research on the biotechnology industry over the last 20 years, drawing a distinction between theories that emphasise knowledge processes and those that focus on spatial processes. It covers research in strategic management, innovation studies, political economy, new economic geography, cluster theory, regional studies and economic geography. In reviewing these two strands of literature, it develops …
Varieties of neoliberalism? Restructuring in large industrially dependent regions across Western and Eastern Europe
The recent travails of the European Constitution, now Reform Treaty, illustrate the divergence of views on European integration. To many commentators and academics, European integration has come to represent the establishment of a neoliberal Europe characterized by a ‘negative’ form of integration. This neoliberalization of European economies has been underpinned by the perceived threat of globalization and global competition leading to the whole…
The Third Sector and the Regional Development of Social Capital
n There is a growing academic and policy interest in the Third Sector and its potential impact on regional development. A key aspect of the Third Sector is its role in regional development through the promotion of social capital. However, there is considerable debate around the definition of the Third Sector that limits our understanding of its impact. Here we first disentangle a number of ambiguities to clarify the distinctions between the conce…
Old Industrial Regions in Europe
Birch K., MacKinnon D. and Cumbers A. Old industrial regions in Europe: a comparative assessment of economic performance, Regional Studies. Recent academic and policy discourses on regional development in Europe promote the expansion of ‘knowledge-based’ economies and learning regions. The assumptions underpinning the new regional policy are cast into sharp focus by the experiences of old industrial regions. The paper engages with these issues th…
Alliance‐Driven Governance
As the economy has globalized, it has also regionalized, which has led to the integration of different spaces across different scales. A number of theories contend that the endogenous assets of these locations provide them with the means to compete in this globalizing economy, especially in relation to knowledge‐based sectors like biotechnology. Among these theories, the cluster concept stands out. However, there is little support for the argumen…
The knowledge–space dynamic in the UK bioeconomy
The loss of manufacturing employment to lower cost economies has meant that countries like the UK have sought to promote innovation in areas such as biotechnology. The emergence of the ‘bioeconomy’, however, has been highly uneven, with concentrations of activity in certain countries and particular regions in those countries. In the UK, for example, there are four major concentrations of the bioeconomy. Each of these concentrations exhibit distin…
Evolution in Economic Geography
Economic geography has, over the past decade or so, drawn upon ideas from evolutionary economics in trying to understand processes of regional growth and change. Recently, some researchers have sought to delimit and develop an "evolutionary economic geography" (EEG), aiming to create a more systematic theoretical framework for research. This article provides a sympathetic critique and elaboration of this emergent EEG but takes issue with some asp…
A Geographical Political Economy of Evolution in Economic Geography
Key themes for evolution in economic geography are identified that clarify and further refine and reinforce our argument for broader conceptions of institutions, social agency, and power and for the situation of the plural and emerging field of evolutionary approaches more fully within geographical political economy. We address the following issues: conceptual and terminological clarity; evolution and institutions within and beyond the firm; agen…
Sustainable Capital? The Neoliberalization of Nature and Knowledge in the European “Knowledge-based Bio-economy”
As an EU policy agenda, the “knowledge-based bio-economy” (KBBE) emphasizes bio-technoscience as the means to reconcile environmental and economic sustainability. This frames the sustainability problem as an inefficiency to be overcome through a techno-knowledge fix. Here ecological sustainability means a benign eco-efficient productivity using resources which are renewable, reproducible and therefore sustainable. The KBBE narrative has been elab…
Knowledge, Space, and Economic Governance
As an increasing amount of manufacturing employment has relocated to the Global South, the developed economies of the Global North have sought new ways of competing within the global economy. In part they have done so through the promotion of the so-called 'knowledge-based economy' (KBE) constituted by innovations and new markets in high-tech industries like telecommunication, information technology, and the life sciences. A KBE discourse has bec…
Knowledge, place, and power
The idea that there is an emerging “bioeconomy” characterized by the capture of the latent value found in biological material (e.g. cells, tissues, plants, etc.) has become a popular policy agenda since the mid-2000s. A number of scholars have also written about this intersection between the life sciences and capitalism, often drawing on anthropological and sociological perspectives to conceptualize the new socialities, subjectivities, and identi…
EU agri-innovation policy
The knowledge-based bio-economy has gained prominence as a research and innovation policy of the European Union. As a policy framework the knowledge-based bio-economy has attracted two contending visions, which can be analyzed as imaginaries – strategic discourses prefiguring a possible, desirable future. In the dominant vision, life sciences will enhance productivity for European competitive advantage in global value chains. A rival vision links…
An Open Biotechnology Revolution
Biobazaar: The Open Source Revolution and Biotechnology, by Janet Hope, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008, 428 pp., US$27.95. Innovation sits at the heart of government policies in a gr
Divergent Paradigms of European Agro-Food Innovation
The Knowledge-Based Bio-Economy (KBBE) has gained prominence as an agricultural R&D agenda of the European Union. Specific research policies are justified as necessary to create a KBBE for societal progress. Playing the role of a master narrative, the KBBE attracts rival visions; each favours a different diagnosis of unsustainable agriculture and its remedies in agro-food innovation. Each vision links a technoscientific paradigm with a quality pa…
Theorizing the Bioeconomy
In the policy discourses of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and European Commission (EC), modern biotechnology and the life sciences are represented as an emerging "bioeconomy" in which the latent value underpinning biological materials and products offers the opportunity for sustainable economic growth. This articulation of modern biotechnology and economic development is an emerging scholarly field producing num…
Clinical Labor
As most people who read this journal are aware, bioeconomy is a contested and contestable descriptor and concept, one that has emerged in recent years as a key term to analyze the relationship betw
Austerity
Rethinking ‘Drop-in’ Biofuels
A sustainable transition is premised upon moving from a carbon energy regime to a renewable energy regime; a highly contested political-economic transformation, to say the least. In places like the United States and European Union the main form of renewable energy is bioenergy, especially biofuels. Recent policy and industry efforts are focusing on the development and implementation of what are known as ‘drop-in’ biofuels, so named because they c…
Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism means many things to many people. Often used indiscriminately to mean anything ‘bad’, neoliberalism is in need of dissection as an analytical category and a way of understanding the transformation of society over the last few decades. This paper is a brief introduction to neoliberalism and a number of key analytical approaches used to study it, including governmentality, Marxism, ideational analysis, history and philosophy of econom…
Neoliberalism and the geographies of marketization
Increasingly, governments are experimenting with ways to provide public goods by involving the private sector in the planning, financing, building and operating of a range of services, facilities, infrastructure, etc. In the geographical literature on neoliberalism this entanglement of the state and markets has been loosely conceptualized as a process of marketization. This concept describes the insertion of markets or market forces into the stat…
Political science (41 obras) · Economics (29 obras) · Sociology (29 obras) · Business (19 obras) · Politics (18 obras) · Computer Science (15 obras) · Law (12 obras) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (11 obras) · Bioeconomy and Sustainability Development (10 obras) · Economic system (10 obras)