APOLOGIES FOR CROSS-POSTING
CfP Association of American Geographers Conference 2018, New Orleans,
10-14 April 2018
RENT, RENT-SEEKING, AND RENTIERSHIP IN GEOGRAPHICAL PERSPECTIVE
Organized by Kean Birch (York University, Canada), Callum Ward (KU
Leuven,
Belgium) & Christian Zeller (Universität Salzburg, Austria)
Sponsored by Economic Geography Speciality Group, AAG
Outline
Unicorns stalk Silicon Valley (promising huge returns to investors), big
pharma ramps up drug prices on the back of knowledge monopolies (buying
back their shares with the profits), multinational corporations hide
‘their’ intellectual property in offshore shell companies (avoiding
much-needed taxes), and governments turn the air we breathe into a
financial asset (giving it away to polluters). Contemporary capitalism is
different; it is increasingly dominated by forms of rentiership rather than
entrepreneurship, by the extraction of economic rents rather than the
creation of new products and services (Birch 2017a; Felli 2014; Sayer 2015;
Swyngedouw, 2010; Ward & Aalbers, 2016). Economic rents can be defined as
the value extracted from economic activity – broadly conceived – as the
result of the ownership and control of a particular resource, primarily
because of that resource’s inherent or constructed degree of
productivity, scarcity, or quality. As geographers, it is necessary to
unpack how we analyse and understand – theoretically, politically, and
ethically – the diversity of modes of ownership and control of resources
in contemporary capitalism, including sociotechnical platforms (e.g. Uber),
business model sorcery (e.g. Google), prosumer productivity (e.g.
Facebook), Big Data mining (e.g. consumption patterns), and financial
warlockery (e.g. interchange fees). This unpacking opens up opportunities
to return to some of the geographical classics (e.g. David Harvey, Neil
Smith) on economic rent, as well as engage with more recent literatures
pushing forward debate in this area (e.g. Andreucci et al. 2017; Birch
2017b, 2017c; Haila 2016; Langley & Leyshon 2016; Maurer 2017; Schwartz
2017; Slater 2017; Storper 2013; Tretter 2016; Ward & Aalbers, 2016; Zeller
2008).
Questions
In light of the apparent spread and prevalence of economic rents and
rent-seeking in our economies and societies, this session’s aim is to
understand the geographical dimensions of rentiership, defined as the
practice and process of constructing economic rents and rent-seeking. This
raises a number of questions we invite contributors to address (others are
also welcome):
* What are the intellectual histories of rentiership in human geography?
* Are current conceptions of rentiership fit for purpose? Do we need to
update them?
* How does rentiership relate to geographical concepts like territory,
place, space, and scale?
* How are rentiers involved in the process of mobilizing various social
goods as financial assets?
* How do we take rent theory beyond land in order to analyze assets and
resources like technoscientific knowledge, friendship and love, human
bodies and living entities, etc.?
* Does the concept of rentiership help us understand new sociotechnical
configurations like social media platforms (e.g. Uber), business models
(e.g. Google), Big Data, etc.?
* What are the (geographical, biophysical, sociotechnical) materialities
and/or technologies (accounting practices, legal assemblages, etc.) of
rentiership?
* What, if anything, is new about the prevalence of rentiership in
contemporary capitalism? Do we need new analytical tools to understand it?
Abstract Submission
If you would like to participate in the session, please submit an
abstract
(250 words max) by 18 October 2017 to k...@yorku.ca (mailto:k...@yorku.ca),
callum.w...@kuleuven.be (mailto:callum.w...@kuleuven.be), and
christian.zel...@sbg.ac.at
(javascript:linkTo_UnCryptMailto('ocknvq,ejtkuvkcp0bgnngtBudi0ce0cv');). If
you would like to participate in other ways (e.g. discussant) then please
feel free to contact us as well.
Please note: once you have submitted an abstract to us, you will also
need
to register AND submit an abstract on the AAG website. The AAG abstract
deadline is 25 October 2017:
http://annualmeeting.aag.org/AAGAnnualMeeting/Call_for_Submissions/Submit_an_Abstract/AAGAnnualMeeting/How_to_Submit_an_Abstract.aspx?hkey=2ddb8b77-96dd-483f-950a-086823af2336
(http://annualmeeting.aag.org/AAGAnnualMeeting/Call_for_Submissions/Submit_an_Abstract/AAGAnnualMeeting/How_to_Submit_an_Abstract.aspx?hkey=2ddb8b77-96dd-483f-950a-086823af2336)
References
Andreucci, D. et al. (2017) “Value Grabbing”: A Political Ecology of
Rent, Capitalism Nature Socialism,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2016.1278027
Birch, K. (2017a) Commentary: Towards a theory of rentiership, Dialogues
in Human Geography 7(1): 109-111.
Birch, K. (2017b) Rethinking value in the bio-economy: Finance,
assetization and the management of value, Science, Technology and Human
Values 42(3): 460-490.
Birch, K. (2017c) A Research Agenda for Neoliberalism, Cheltenham:
Edward
Elgar.
Felli, R. (2014) On climate rent, Historical Materialism 22(3-4): 251-280.
Haila, A. (2016), Urban Land Rent, Chichester: Wiley Blackwell.
Langley, P. and A. Leyshon (2016), ‘Platform Capitalism: The
Intermediation and Capitalisation of Digital Economic Circulation’,
Finance and Society, early view.
Maurer, B. (2017) Value transfer and rent: Or, I didn’t realize my
payment was your annuity, in K. Hart (ed.) Money in a Human Economy,
Oxford: Berghahn.
Sayer, A. (2015) Why We Can’t Afford the Rich, Bristol: Polity Press.
Schwartz, H.M. (2017) Club goods, intellectual property rights, and
profitability in the information economy, Business and Politics 19(2):
191-214.
Slater, T. (2017) Planetary rent gaps, Antipode 49: 114–137.
Storper, M. (2013) Keys to the City, New Jersey: Princeton University
Press.
Swyngedouw, E. (2010) The Communist Hypothesis and Revolutionary
Capitalisms: Exploring the Idea of Communist Geographies for the
Twenty-first Century, Antipode 41(1): 298-319.
Tretter, E. (2016). Shadows of the Sunbelt City, Athens GA: University
of
Georgia Press.
Ward, C. and Aalbers, M. (2016) Virtual special issue editorial essay
‘The shitty rent business’: What’s the point of land rent theory?,
Urban Studies 53(9): 1760–1783.
Zeller, C. (2008) From the gene to the globe: Extracting rents based on
intellectual property monopolies, Review of International Political Economy
15(1): 86-115.
Kean Birch
Graduate Program Director, Science & Technology Studies Program
(http://sts.gradstudies.yorku.ca/)
Associate Editor, Science as Culture
(http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/csac)
Associate Professor, Department of Geography
(http://geography.laps.yorku.ca/)
4700 Keele Street
York University
Toronto
Canada
M3J 1P3
Tel.: (+1) 416-736-2100, ext. 30126
NEW BOOKS
Birch, K. (2015) We Have Never Been Neoliberal
(http://www.zero-books.net/books/we-have-never-been-neoliberalC:/Users/esouser/Documents/Admin),
Zer0 Books.
Springer, S., Birch, K. and MacLeavy (eds) (2016) The Handbook of
Neoliberalism (https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138844001),
Routledge.
Birch, K. (2016) Innovation, Regional Development & the Life Sciences
(https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138807617), Routledge.
Birch, K. et al. (2017) Business & Society: A Critical Introduction
(https://www.amazon.co.uk/Business-Society-Introduction-Richard-Wellen/dp/1783604484?ie=UTF8&keywords=kean%20birch&qid=1459974367&ref_=sr_1_5&sr=8-5),
Zed Books.
Birch, K. (2017) A Research Agenda for Neoliberalism
(http://www.e-elgar.com/shop/a-research-agenda-for-neoliberalism), Edward
Elgar.
Twitter: @keanbirch (https://twitter.com/keanbirch)
Personal website: http://www.keanbirch.net/ (http://www.keanbirch.net/)
(http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/csac20/current)
