Abstract
‘Capitalization’ is not a topic that is traditionally associated with cultural studies, and this book, therefore, may not initially appear to have direct relevance to the readers of this journal. However, the subtitle – ‘a cultural guide’ – might well intrigue the reader. ‘What do the authors mean when they talk about capitalization as a cultural phenomenon?’, she might ask. This was also my question upon reading this book, and in this review I take this question as my guide. Specifically, I aim to understand the book’s value for those scholars who do not study finance as such, but are interested in the implications of its increasing role within other domains.
In recent years, a new research area has emerged at the borders of cultural and economic sociology, science and technology studies (STS), management and organization studies, and cultural anthropology, among others. This area – valuation studies – aims to study ‘valuation as a social practice’ (Helgesson and Muniesa, 2013: 1), which means understanding value as ‘the outcome of a process of social work and the result of a wide range of activities (from production and combination to circulation and assessment) that aim at making things valuable’ (Helgesson and Muniesa, 2013: 6).
This focus on valuation as a performative process that brings value into being is an important critical context within which to read Capitalization: A Cultural Guide. The book is the result of a collaborative process between a group of scholars, Collectif CSI, with Fabian Muniesa and his team at its core, at one of the key institutions in valuation studies: the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation at the Ėcole des Mines de Paris. This is also (not incidentally) the birthplace of Actor-Network Theory.
The book presents itself as a kind of travel guide along a range of sites that give us insights into the cultural phenomenon of capitalization. Capitalization, it is argued, should be understood as a particular ‘semiotic complex’ that is not just limited to the world of finance but is a valuation process that is pervasive across society. The book comprises 13 short chapters. The first outlining the pragmatist perspective on capitalization, followed by 11 empirical explorations and a last concluding chapter.
Capitalization is described as a ‘specific configuration of reality’ (p. 20) that requires a particular scenario and a particular gaze that enacts that scenario. A scenario should be understood as an ‘outline’ or ‘narrative’ through which capitalization might unfold. In finance, this capitalization process can be broadly understood as ‘envisaging the value of something in terms of an investment. Valuing then means assessing the expected future monetary return from investing in it’ (p. 11).
The scenario of capitalization is one where, very often, two figures meet (for example, an investor and an entrepreneur, or a funder and a funded, (p. 131)) with the aim of creating value. The gaze, meanwhile, is the particular investment perspective that is at the heart of capitalization. This perspective is aimed towards the future, and it enacts a particular relation between the present and the future (p. 91). The scenario and the gaze rely upon each other and together form the semiotic complex that is capitalization.
But chapters within the book also follow capitalization outside of finance. For instance, Chapter 7 brings us to a management consultancy firm that seeks to capitalize on knowledge previously produced in consultancy jobs. Chapter 8 explores the world of science and discusses scientific knowledge production in terms of asset management. Chapter 11 analyses activity-based costing in public hospitals as a particular form of financing (and valuing) healthcare services. These chapters are short and rather than presenting full empirical studies, they aim to illustrate a cultural perspective on capitalization and to offer an analytical tool for understanding valuation processes outside of finance.
A valuable aspect of this book is the way in which the authors put capitalization as a cultural phenomenon centre stage, and the ways in which they differentiate it from related processes such as commercialization or privatization. By conceiving of capitalization as a particular scenario and gaze, it becomes very easy to imagine capitalization outside of finance, and indeed to see it all around you. For instance, the book details the ways in which gatekeepers in the cultural industries evaluate models, manuscripts or comedians; these cultural objects are valued via the gaze of capitalization in light of their expected future value.
It is a pity that the authors do not make a stronger claim about the importance of capitalization in society. This is partly due to the chosen format for the text – a ‘travel guide’ that is not intended to discuss extensively links with related research. While understandable, this represents a missed opportunity to engage with recent scholarship in STS that develops a related approach of understanding capitalism as a cultural scenario. Fochler approaches ‘capitalism as a particular cultural way of producing, attributing, and accumulating specific forms of worth’ (Fochler, 2016: 928). Drawing on Boltanski and Chiapello, he specifies the central imperative of capitalism as the ‘orientation toward attaining ever more capital’ (Fochler, 2016: 929). There are interesting differences between this scenario of capitalism as accumulation and profit maximalization, and the scenario of capitalization that is suggested to be much more focused on the future and long term capital gains (p. 124). Moreover, the ideas of ‘asset management’ have become increasingly important in the organization of scientific research in public research organizations and in the domain of science policy. Terms like portfolio management (Wallace and Rafols, 2015) are increasingly used by funding agencies as well as scientists themselves to understand and assess the value of their research (Fochler, 2016; Rushforth et al., 2018).
In my view, the authors are too careful in their assessment of the importance of capitalization in those societal domains beyond finance. For instance, when introducing the chapter on the sciences they write, Let us now move […] to the temple of public science: the university research center. Why such a detour? What does this have to do with capitalization? We move again into the muddy waters of the metaphorical. […] assessing the worthiness of scientific contributors could very well be thought of in terms of asset management: scientific publications with potential to generate future citations, research recruits with potential to generate future publications, and a sense of investment in publication power that requires the strategic administration of scientific capital. Is this a gratuitous play on words? How much of a detour is this detour? (p. 81)
Asking the reader to think twice about whether or not this is a legitimate detour suggests an unnecessary hesitancy; this might also stem from a conceptual ambiguity in how the authors engage with the cultural phenomenon of capitalization in their own empirical material. The authors draw on a distinction between capitalization in a literal and metaphorical sense; however, this differentiation sits uneasily with their commitment to the concept of performativity. When we accept capitalization as a cultural phenomenon that has performative effects (in enacting particular configurations of reality), the concept of the ‘metaphorical’ becomes, to me, very confusing. There is no reason to assume (and the book doesn’t give us any) that metaphorical capitalization has any less performative effect than ‘actual’ capitalization. The effects might be different – again, the book doesn’t systematically specify this – but metaphorical capitalization can be at least as pervasive in rethinking (and thus re-enacting) reality as literal capitalization.
Understanding capitalization as a cultural phenomenon, in particular as a combination of a scenario and a gaze, is a fruitful and highly stimulating way to engage with this concept. Doing so makes the concept travel to other societal domains and urges the reader to think about valuation processes in other spheres. While this book offers a good introduction to this approach, it is mainly due to its form as an introductory travel guide that it somewhat lacks engagement with the wider literature and societal domains outside finance. This does make it excellently suited to serve as an introductory text to students in cultural studies. Its short chapters give solid examples of capitalization and offer an easy way to explore the pragmatist approach to valuation.
