Technoscience rent: Towards a theory of rentiership

KEAN BIRCH
Senior Associate, Innovation Policy Lab, University of Toronto, Canada
Associate Professor, Department of Geography, York University, Canada
keanbirch@gmail.com

Abstract

Increasingly, a range of ‘things’ (e.g. infrastructure, data, knowledge, bodies, etc.) are configured
and/or reconfigured as assets, or capitalized property. Accumulation strategies have changed as a
result of this assetization process, which characterizes a particular form of technoscientific
capitalism. Rather than entrepreneurial strategies based on commodity production,
technoscientific capitalism is increasingly underpinned by rentiership, or the appropriation of
value through ownership rights (e.g. intellectual property), monopoly conditions, and regulatory
or market devices and practices (e.g. investment dispute courts, exclusivity agreements, etc.).
While rentiership and rent-seeking are often presented as negative phenomena (e.g. distorting
markets, unearned income) in both neoclassical and Marxist literatures – and much in-between –
it is my intention in this paper to unpack rentiership as an increasingly constitutive political-
economic process underpinning technoscientific capitalism. Rather than being framed as a
problematic ‘side-effect’ of capitalism, I argue that rentiership can help us to understand how
different forms of value extraction are constituted by and come to constitute different forms of
technoscience. This has significant analytical, political, and normative implications for
understanding the relationship between science, innovation, and business (e.g. how do rentier
rationales configure research agendas, how does innovation enable rentiership, what are the
consequences for social equity, etc.).

Introduction

‘Economic rents’ are the value that can be 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 a concept,
economic rent has been primarily associated with the ownership and control of land. In fact, its
starting point as a concept is in the 18th and 19th centuries – with the work of people like Adam
Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo – was centred on land ownership; some scholars
sought to defend this ownership (e.g. Malthus), while others sought to highlight its negative
impact on capitalist accumulation (e.g. Ricardo). During the 20th century, however, economic
rent theory has been increasingly applied to other resources – including natural resources like oil,
financial resources like capital, and, of most import to this article, intangible resources like
knowledge – and it has been generally aligned with government ‘interference’ in the naturalized
workings of the economy. Although it is an analytical concept, in seeking to explain the value
that accrues in and as the result of particular socio-economic relations, economic rent is also
implicitly a normative concept in that it is used to critique (and, on rare occasions, defend) those
same socio-economic relations – however, see William Baumol (1990) for a more nuanced
perspective. It is, moreover, interesting to note that this normative (and analytical) critique crops
up across the political spectrum, from left-wing Marxist thinkers through to right-wing free
market advocates – even if they might disagree about what constitutes rent, in contrast to other
production ‘costs’ like interest (for capital) or wages (for labour).

Recently, it seems like economic rent, and its adjectival equivalent ‘rent-seeking’, has moved to
the centre of public debate. A growing chorus of academics, politicians, journalists, activists, and
commentators have been analysing contemporary capitalism – especially its technoscientific
version – through the lens of economic rent and rent-seeking. I provide only a few relevant
examples here, but will highlight more throughout the article to illustrate my arguments. From
the pro-capitalist side, the journalist Robert Colville (2017) – who used to work for the Daily
Telegraph and now edits the CapX website, which is based at the Centre for Policy Studies –
argues that “the structure of capitalism is increasingly tending towards monopoly … [and]
because of the network effects involved, this tendency is particularly pronounced in tech”. From
the anti-capitalist side, the academic Guy Standing (2016) argues that “Plutocratic corporations
are patent hoovers, buying thousands of patents. It is a winner-takes-all market created by the
regulatory apparatus, not market forces”. Numerous others raise similar issues relevant to science
and technology studies (STS), including the privatization and commercialization of basic
research (Stiglitz, 2014), network externalities of information technology (Jacobs, 2015),
business models of new technology platform companies (Kaminska, 2016), ownership and use of
personal data (Morozov, 2016), financial technology innovation (Bregman, 2017), and even the
corporate control over tractors and their repairs (Koebler, 2017). All in all, rent and rent-seeking
offer a ripe ground for STS scholars to engage in and with contemporary political economy; in
fact, we might have something unique to offer in this regards, considering our focus on science,
technology, and innovation.

In light of all this concern, my aims in writing this article are twofold. On the one hand, there has
been limited analytical development of the concept of economic rent – outside incremental
adjustments in the dominant approaches – over recent decades, and next to none in the STS
literature, despite the increasing public debate around the capture of scientific and technological
rents (see above). There are, as usual, exceptions when it comes to STS (e.g. Fuller, 2002, 2016;
Cooper and Waldby, 2014; Birch, 2017a, 2017b, 2017c; McGoey, 2017). It is, these exceptions
notwithstanding, an opportune time to address this gap in our analytical toolkit, and that is my
primary aim in this article. On the other hand, the more general (and incremental) analytical
developments that have occurred are frequently conceptually burdened by a normative critique of
rent and rent-seeking – or, my preference, rentiership (Birch, 2017a, 2017b, 2017c) – across
different and distinct theoretical and political viewpoints. It is, for example, notable that both
Marxist and neoclassical economic perspectives of rentiership are built on some sort of idealized
notion of an economic process or logic that is then ‘distorted’ by economic rents or rent-seeking.
For example, for Marxists rentiership distorts the labour process (or value of labour),
exemplified by the notion of ‘unearned income’ (Sayer, 2015), while for neoclassical economists
rentiership distorts ‘the market’ through government interference in the market’s naturalized
functions and functionality (Congleton and Hillman, 2015). There is, in my view, room to
develop the concept of rentiership in ways that go beyond these approaches, while necessarily
building upon their insights and acknowledging their contributions.

In order to address the above aims, I start the article with a discussion of the intellectual history
of economic rent, going back to David Ricardo in the 19th century and working my way forward
from there. This brief review, and unfortunately that is all it can be, provides an introduction to
the key analytical approaches to thinking about rent and rent-seeking in order to pave the way for
a more focused section on the specific relevance of rent to discussions of science, technology,
and innovation in the field of STS. After that second section, I then seek to develop a theory of
rentiership as a way to conceptualize it as a political-economic process specifically relevant for
understanding modern, technoscientific capitalism. I end the paper by considering the theoretical,
political, and normative implications that this reworking of economic rent has in relation to
technoscientific research, development, and innovation. All told, my goal is for this article to
contribute to the ongoing resurgence of interest in STS circles in issues around the changing
political economy of research and innovation (e.g. Mirowski, 2011; Tyfield, 2012; Birch, 2013,
2017d; Hackett, 2014; Goven and Pavone, 2015; Tyfield et al., 2017).

An Intellectual History of Economic Rent

Economic rent is an analytical concept; it does not refer to the economic practices of ‘renting’ or
‘leasing’ resources or property. For example, Anne Haila (1990: 277) makes a useful distinction
between “rent as a differential product” and “rent as a payment for the use of land [or other
asset]”. It is important to make this point clear from the start since it can create confusion and it
helps to avoid falling into the trap of conceptually conflating the two notions of ‘rent’, as some
STS scholars have done in their work (e.g. Cooper and Waldby, 2014). As noted in the
introduction, there are different approaches to analysing economic rent. For simplicities sake,
these can be split between classical and neoclassical economics, Marxist political economy, and
others. Obviously I can only provide a brief introduction to the intellectual history of economic
rent in this article, considering the space available and the need to develop the rest of my
argument, so I concentrate on the first two perspectives. There are, however, a number of more
thorough overviews available for the interested reader (e.g. Haila, 1988, 1990; Zeller, 2008;
Campling and Havice, 2014; Ward and Aalber, 2016).

Economic rent has its intellectual origins in the work of classical political economists (Lackman,
1976). In particular, David Ricardo (1817[2001]) provided a thoroughgoing conceptualization of
differential rent in relation to land ownership. As Ricardo (1817[2001]: 39) defined it: “Rent is
that portion of produce of the earth, which is paid to the landlord for the use of the original and
indestructible powers of the soil”; that is, the biophysical qualities and productivity of land (e.g.
soil quality, rainfall, sunshine, etc.). Here, Ricardo argued that different economic rents – or
‘differential rent’ – accrue to different pieces of land depending on the aggregate prices of corn
produced by said land. It is important to note the difference between differential rents and
commodity prices. Namely, that value in the former case is constituted by the lowest productive
unit (i.e. least productive piece of land), since more productive units accrue higher returns and
therefore can command higher rent; in the latter case, value is constituted by the most productive
unit (i.e. cheapest production process). Conceptually, differential rent was primarily concerned
with the processes of production, rather than the exchange of commodities and their prices, in
that raising productivity – and thereby reducing prices – does not reduce rent (Rigi, 2014). As
such, Ricardo did not conceptualize rent as a determinant of price; rather, it reflected the transfer
of profit from capitalist to property owner (Ward and Aalbers, 2016).
Subsequently, economic rent was developed in different ways by heterodox political economists
who stuck with the labour theory of value (e.g. Karl Marx, Henry George) and more orthodox
economists who adopted notions of marginal utility (e.g. John Bates Clark, Alfred Marshall). I
provide a chronology of the overlapping intellectual histories of rent theory below, but it is
important to note that what I present here only goes so far. I am going to start with the more
orthodox approaches and then move on to the heterodox approaches.

Economic thinkers of a more orthodox bent, especially those influenced by the marginal
revolution of the late 19th century, moved in different directions. Some, like Alfred Marshall
(1890[1920], 1893), extended the concept of rent to other resources (e.g. technology, machinery)
with fixed supply – which could be applied to most resources – by equating the ‘time value’ that
said resources accrues during the period of their use with economic rents. Marshall (1893: 85)
used the term quasi-rents here to reflect the fact that “value is found by capitalising their quasi-
rent”, distinguishing it from other, ongoing forms of rent (e.g. land). Many orthodox economists,
however, largely jettisoned economic rent as a differential concept after the marginal revolution.
For example, Linsey McGoey (2017) argues that John Bates Clark – an American economist at
the turn of the 20th century – developed the theory of marginal productivity as a direct response
to the criticism of economic rent by campaigners like the American Henry George. According to
McGoey:

“A second repercussion of Clark’s notion is that his “law” essentially extinguishes the
problem of illegitimate rent seeking by positing that under ideal market conditions, rent
seeking cannot exist: all proceeds to capital owners are a natural reflection of the
economic contribution they have made” (p.264).

It is possible to identify the influence of both Marshall and Bates in the later work of
Schumpeter. In The Theory of Economic Development, for example, Schumpeter (1934[2012])
specifically wrote that rent is “determined by the marginal productivity of land” (p.25). He was
more interested, however, in the source of entrepreneurial profits than rents per se, although
these profits bear a strong similarity to Marshall’s conception of quasi-rents.1 As a result, such
entrepreneurial profits are often defined as Schumpeterian rents (e.g. Teece, 2003) and reflect
Schumpeter’s argument that entrepreneurs “create new value by establishing new combinations
of capital goods and new modes of organization” (Sautet, 2016: 2). A whole literature has
emerged on this topic in business and management fields (e.g. Teece, 1986, 1998, 2006; Pisano,
1991), whose (perhaps marginal) influence on STS can be traced through innovation studies.

Aside from the likes of Schumpeter and others working on innovation, entrepreneurship, and
similar fields, the advent of marginalism seemed to mean that the concept of rent largely
disappeared in mainstream economics until the 1960s and 1970s. Some, like Michael Hudson
(2012), argue that mainstream economics simply did away with any separation between interest
and rent (or unearned income) and profits (or earned income), while other argues that marginal
utility shifted interest towards opportunity costs (Ward and Aalbers, 2016). Economic rent came
back into the picture with the work of neoclassical economists like Gordon Tulloch (1967) and

1
It is interesting to note that Schumpeter (1950: 25) saw both Ricardian and Marxist rent theory as a means to
theorize away the analytical need to address “Services of Natural Agents” in the “process of production and
distribution”.
Anne Krueger (1974), who sought to conceptualize it in terms of rent-seeking. This, however,
had a very specific meaning that distinguished it from earlier notions of (differential) rent. For
example, according to Krueger (1974: 291):

“In many market-oriented economies, government restrictions upon economic activity are
pervasive facts of life. These restrictions give rise to rents of a variety of forms, and
people often compete for the rents. Sometimes, such competition is perfectly legal”.

Generally speaking, this concept of rent-seeking is now used predominantly in the neoclassical
sense to mean the interference of governments in the naturalized workings of a market or
economy, especially at the behest of some vested interest (e.g. a business seeking to shore up a
monopoly position). Examples of this perspective include the ProMarket blog run out of the
Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, as well as the use of the term ‘rentier
state’ in political science (e.g. Beblawi and Luciani, 1987).

When it comes to heterodox political-economic thinkers, it is probably impossible to provide a

thorough outline in the space available, so this discussion will necessarily be truncated. While
American thinkers like Henry George or Thorstein Veblen – writing at the end of the 19th
century and beginning of the 20th century – are known for their critiques of rentiership (see
Hudson, 2012; McGoey, 2017), my focus in this section will be on the Marxist perspective on
economic rent. The conception of economic rent developed by Marx has lasted into the 21st
century with a recent resurgence of interest (e.g. Felli, 2014; Rigi, 2014; Ward and Aalbers,
2016; Andreucci et al., 2017), although it languished somewhat in the late 20th century (Haila,
1988, 1990; Anderson, 2014; Christophers, 2016). While he built upon the work of Ricardo,
Marx (1894[2010]) sought to distinguish between several different types of economic rent,
which he outlined in Capital: Volume III. According to Harvey (1982[1999]), Haila (1988,
1990), and Ward and Aalbers (2016), for example, Marx theorized two forms of differential rent
as well as monopoly rent and absolute rent. It is worth considering each of these in turn.

First, differential rent is split between DR1 and DR2 (Marx 1894[2010]). Whereas DR1 reflected
earlier political economist’s emphasis on land as the source of rent, DR2 reflected the
investments made on land that increased its productivity (e.g. irrigation, tree clearing) or
usefulness (e.g. buildings, infrastructure). The split in differential rent helps to separate land as a
non-reproducible asset from land as an accumulation of past capital investments, usually over a
long timeframe (Harvey 1982[1999]). In his updating and reworking of Marx, David Harvey
(1982[1999]) adds a spatio-temporal twist to rent theory. On the one hand, Harvey defines rent
as “the basis for various forms of social control over the spatial organization and development of
capitalism” (p.337), including ‘absolute’ forms of space (e.g. biophysical qualities of land again)
and ‘relational’ forms of space (e.g. circulation and location across space). On the other hand, his
arguments reflect Marshall’s earlier claims about the need to incorporate a temporal frame into
rent theory (see above). In particular, Harvey – like Marshall (1890[1920], 1893) – argues that
some assets, especially land, are made more valuable, in rent terms, as the result of successive,
sequential investments over time. Taking this spatio-temporal dimension into account helps to
explain how a shop space in a train station accrues rent as the result of potential customer flows
attracted to the station over time, but not resulting from an investment of the shop space owner;
however, in differential terms it only accrues rent if there are other shops with lower customer
flows.

Second, in developing Marx’s theory, Harvey (1982[1999]) argued that there are two forms of
monopoly rent, or MR1 and MR2. As a starting point, monopoly rent can be defined as arising
from “the ownership of a tradable asset that is considered to be unique” (Rigi, 2014: 923).
Harvey distinguished between (1) monopoly rent (MR1) created by the quality of the asset (e.g.
land quality), and (2) monopoly (MR2) created by the rent itself (e.g. denial of access). Although
they do not distinguish between two versions of monopoly rent like Harvey, Ward and Aalbers
(2016: 5) highlight the difference between ‘classical’ and ‘modern’ examples of monopoly rent,
where the former represents something like a “fine wine from a particular vineyard”, while the
latter represents something like a “toll road that is the only viable route”. As such, these
examples largely reflect Harvey’s conception of MR1 and MR2. Analytically speaking, Haila
(1990: 278) argues that such monopoly rent depends on property rights, and is, therefore,
different from differential rent, which “was conceived as being caused by technically and
ahistorically determined production differentials and as existing independently of private
property on land”. As a result, monopoly rent was often associated with pre-capitalist economic
systems (e.g. feudal ownership) and seen as dysfunctional because it was a barrier to
accumulation.2 However, this view has changed over the 20th century (Haila 1988, 1990). For
example, Harvey and others have linked monopoly rent with finance capital, conceptualizing
monopoly rent as claims on future revenues and, therefore, as endogenous to capitalism.
However, the materiality of land (and other biophysical materials) matters here since land has a
recurring use, being difficult to either destroy or use up (although not impossible), meaning that
it provides can indefinite future claims whereas other assets cannot (e.g. machine).

Finally, absolute rent is the last type of rent theorized by Marx. Generally speaking, it has
received less attention, popular or academic, than either differential or monopoly rent, although
there are examples of scholars theorizing it as a form of ‘monopoly class rent’ (e.g. Sørensen,
2000; Anderson, 2014). In the original Marxist sense, absolute rent reflects the arrangement of
property relations in society, such that a particular society’s property rights create a social class
that has the social right to limit access to assets and charge for their use. One relatively recent
application of this notion is Aage Sørensen’s (2000) idea of ‘class as exploitation’ in which our
ownership and control of access to any asset enables us to extract economic rents and determines
our class position. According to Ward and Aalbers (2016), some Marxists critiqued the
applicability of absolute rent outside the 19th century, preferring increasingly to theorize
economic rent in specific terms rather than generic ones. For example, as Jäger (2003) notes,
there seems to be little difference between monopoly rent and absolute rent, aside from the fact
that the former is relevant for a specific asset, while the latter is applied generally to societal
relations.

2
In a recent article, Geoffrey Hodgson (2017) points out that capitalism could only really take off when land was
released from limitations on its transfer and sale, and could therefore be used as collateral; this contrasts with the
notion that capitalism arose as the result of secure property rights. As such, it is possible that economic rents only
emerge because of capitalism, rather than reflecting a feudal hangover. Prior to its use as collateral, the value of land
was set by custom or whim; once it is released from customary restraints, it could be re-priced to reflect the expected
returns from production.
As this discussion of economic rent should illustrate, there are an array of concepts at play in the
analysis of rentiership. I have only outline two key perspectives here, but want to mention a few
more key concepts that could be relevant in any further conceptual developments. First, there is
an old and longstanding interest in the figure of the rentier in heterodox discussions of economic
rent. For example, people like Thorstein Veblen (1908), R.H. Tawney (1921), and John Maynard
Keynes (1936) all argued that the separation of ownership from management had led to the rise
of a class of people for whom property represented a significant income stream, but who did
little work to merit said income. Tawney went so far as to argue that various rents represented a
form of ‘improperty’. Second, the notion of ground-rent, which prefigures much of the rest of
the discussion of rent theory, is an important concept in urban studies and planning. It refers to
the “rent paid for the use of land” (Ward and Aalbers, 2016) and, following the work of Neil
Smith (1979), has some to underpin much of the literature on gentrification, since it helps to
explain the incentive to restrict access to an asset (e.g. land, buildings) in order to reduce the gap
between currently ‘capitalized’ and ‘potential’ ground rent. For example, Tom Slater (2016) uses
it in his recent analysis of ‘planetary rent gaps’ as a way to explain how international investors
secure investment opportunities in global housing markets. Finally, Arvidsson and Colleoni
(2012) suggest that there is a financial rent reflecting the capture of part of the global surplus of
financial capital through regimes of shareholder value maximization. Similarly, Haila (2015)
outlines forms of derivative rent, fiscal rent, and others in her book Urban Land Rent. While all
these conceptions of rent are interesting, and indeed could be very relevant to STS, I have to
limit myself to a manageable sub-set of them in this article.

Technoscience Rent

My aim in this section is to think through how economic rent might be relevant for an STS
audience, especially one interested in understanding the political economy of technoscience. As
Haila (1990: 277) notes, economic rent is conceived of as a “technical-economic phenomenon”
as much as a “juridical relationship”. In this section, then, I discuss how rent-seeking, differential
rent, and monopoly rent relate to extant STS literature. It is important, from the start, to frame
this discussion in terms that broaden the applicability of economic rent theory from land alone to
other resources and assets, especially those constituted as or by technoscientific knowledge and
its outputs (Birch, 2017b, 2017d). Several STS scholars have started to engage with resources
and assets as distinct analytical categories in STS, whether in terms of intangible assets like
intellectual property (e.g. Birch and Tyfield, 2013; Lezaun and Montgomery, 2015; Martin,
2015), human capital (Cooper and Waldby, 2014), business models and valuation practices (e.g.
Birch, 2017d; Muniesa et al., 2017), or new kinds of asset like personal data (Vezyridis and
Timmons, 2017). As with previous extensions of economic rent theory beyond land (e.g. oil
rentier states), this engagement with resources and assets as analytically interesting phenomena
provides the means to deploy economic rent theory in another field of enquiry – in this instance
STS. My aim in this section, then, is to outline how the concept of economic rent can be used to
analyse different aspects of the technoscience-society relationship in existing STS theories and
concepts. As such, my aim in this section is not to develop a wholly new analytical concept,
which I leave to the next section where I seek to develop a theory of rentiership.

I start this discussion by examining how the concept of rent-seeking is relevant to STS. It is
notable that this concept is already evident in STS in the discussion of ‘regulatory capture’,
especially in relation to the pharmaceutical sector. An example of this is John Abraham’s (2008)
research on pharmaceutical regulation, along with colleagues likes Courtney Davis (e.g. Davis
and Abraham, 2013). These scholars argue that the capture of regulatory agencies happens when
they “regulate primarily in the interests of the industry, rather than the public interest”, and it
happens through active lobbying and structural changes (e.g. ‘revolving door’) (p. 9). Even
though they do not deploy the concept of rent-seeking specifically, their arguments reflect the
concept outlined by the likes of Tullock and Krueger – namely, private organizations focus on
lobbying government for policy and legislative changes, rather than focusing on research and
development. A similar, although more specific analysis of rent-seeking, is evident in the work
of Frohlich (2016: 4) when he argues that “Regulation, including standards setting, becomes a
potential site for ‘rent-seeking’, where the state is ‘captured’ by private interests who seek third-
party certification to protect their market”. As this would imply, lobbying and other policy and
political interventions are constitutive of particular codes, standards, regulations, and
certification (Busch, 2011), which end up not only imposing costs on certain parties and not
others, but also configuring technoscience through the necessary pursuit of compliance. An
example here, going back to Abraham’s work, is the pharmaceutical industry and the constitutive
role played by regulations in pharmaceutical research and development programmes – that is, the
pursuit of blockbuster drugs in order to ameliorate the high costs of regulatory testing (REF).
Another example is where standards and their network externalities enable certain social actors –
whether that be a single firm or even whole nation – can accrue rents on the basis of control over
those standards (Teece, 1998). This is a point emphasized by Jim Balsillie, ex-CEO of
Blackberry, in his discussions of the national benefits reaped by the USA as the centre of
standards setting in information technology (REF).

As with standards and regulations, intellectual property rights (IPRs) are another useful
illustration of the relevance of economic rent theory to STS. Whereas standards might be
conceived of as a form of rent-seeking, IPRs are closer to the concept of monopoly rent, as
outline by Christian Zeller (2008) and others (e.g. Birch and Tyfield, 2013; Cooper and Waldby,
2014).3 At this point, it is worth considering the two versions of monopoly rent that Harvey
(1982[1999]) identifies; namely, monopoly rent derived (1) from the qualities of an asset itself –
its ‘quality’ or ‘specificity’ – or (2) from the denial of access to that asset (see Haila, 1990).
Analytically speaking, then, IPRs would better reflect the latter definition, as property rights are
a bundle of rights including rights of exclusion. I focus on this second form of monopoly rent
here, but that does not mean the other form is not relevant.4 In legal terms, IPRs confer
monopoly rights on their owners, including the (often temporary) right to returns on their
3
It is important to note that IPRs can reflect more than one form of rentiership: first, they represent monopoly rents
accrued through monopoly rights (e.g. patents, copyright, etc.) to research and its outputs (Mirowski, 2011); second,
they represent rent-seeking on the part of IPR creators and holders to extend or strengthen intellectual property
protection by influencing policy-making (Tyfield, 2008); and third, they represent a particular property system
underpinning a new innovation regime (Coriat et al., 2003). These three might necessary accompany – or co-
produce – each other, as the evolution of the biotechnology industry since the 1970s largely illustrates (Slaughter
and Rhoades, 2004).
4
An example of monopoly rent derived from the qualities of an asset itself, which is relevant to STS, could include
the particular post-treatment qualities of certain biological materials (e.g. cell lines – see Waldby and Mitchell,
2006), or their specific biophysical materialities (e.g. energy content of different biofuel feedstocks – see Birch and
Calvert, 2015). This form of monopoly rent can be equated with the neoclassical conception of ‘Schumpeterian
rent’; for example, the well-known management theorist David Teece (2006) conceptualizes Schumpeterian rent as a
reflection of the quality or specificity of an asset, rather than the degree of a firm’s market monopoly or control.
investment – this is framed as an ‘entrepreneurial’ or ‘Schumpeterian’ rent in neoclassical terms
(Teece, 1998). As Christopher May (2010: 4) puts it, IPRs reflect certain “legal benefits”
including “the ability to charge rent for use”, as well as “the right to receive compensation for
loss” and “the right to demand payment for transfer to another party through the market”. As
such, IPRs represent ‘assets’ as defined by the International Accounting Standards Board
(IASB), rather than commodities – see Birch and Tyfield (2013) and Birch (2017d) for an outline
of the distinctive characteristics of assets versus commodities.

According to Zeller (2008: 98), this form of monopoly rent is the “result of a systematic shortage
of supply created by the property monopoly of the supplier of a key product [including
knowledge], which encounters no direct competition from substitution goods.” He goes on to
argue that knowledge monopolies, of relevance in STS debates, are distinct because:

“In contrast to the differential rent, which arises due to differently favorably located or
fertile pieces of land, no information differential rent can emerge, because every enclosed
information is unique and is normally used in each case for the production of specific
products”.

There are numerous examples of these sorts of monopoly right relevant to STS. The example I
draw on here is patenting and journal publishing in academia. These practices are increasingly
debated in academia, where STS scholars – and many others – have raised concerns about the
limitations placed by IPRs on access to knowledge (e.g. Drahos and Braithewaite, 2002; Hope,
2008; Hackett, 2014; Harvie et al., 2014). Access is constrained through IPRs like (a) patent
rights and (b) copyright. The latter is clearly evident in the subscription fees charged by
publishers to access journal articles, which has been defined as ‘knowledge rolls and rents’ by
Martin Hall (2010). These IPRs limit the deployment of proprietary knowledge in finding
solutions to broad social problems, since they necessitate some form of payment (e.g. license
fee). As Hall notes, however, these IPRs should not be confused with ‘knowledge’ itself, which
can be reproduced at marginal, if any, cost. In thinking through the implications of this for STS,
it is important to remember that intangible assets – like patents, copyright, brands, and other
IPRs – do not depreciate or deteriorate like tangible assets (e.g. machines, buildings, etc.),
meaning that IPRs can represent an ongoing “source of revenue” because “rights over
reproduction are constantly renewed resources [i.e. assets], offering the opportunity of perpetual
income (in the form of rents) with negligible renewal or transactional costs” (Hall, 2010: 67).
However, two issues might be worth addressing in future research. First, future revenue claims
are not implicit in the characteristics of the intangible asset itself, in that future rents are not
known when an intangible asset is enclosed by IPRs. This implies that rents are constructed as
part of the process of assetization, not simply inherent to an asset. Second, therefore, the capture
of monopoly rents is an (pro)active process, rather than a passive process associated with many
notions of rentier states or ownership; it involves the management, policing, enforcement and
reinforcement of property rights and their value by their holders as I have shown elsewhere
(Birch, 2017d).

The final form of economic rent I want to consider here is differential rent. It is probably the
least amenable, analytically speaking. In STS terms, it might make sense, though, to
conceptualize differential rent in terms of (a) moral economies of science (Kohler, 1994) and (b)
varied forms of affective, cognitive, and/or immaterial labour (Boutang, 2011). In both cases, it
is first important to consider how human activities and labour might be considered a form of rent
or rent-seeking. Steve Fuller (2002) provides a useful starting point in this regard. He argues that
the need to qualify for professional standing in knowledge communities – whether academic or
legal or medical, etc. – can “be seen as a form of intellectual rent that is imposed on the student”
(p.38). As Latour and Woolgar (1979) argued some time ago, knowledge production involves all
sorts of credit, credibility, and credentials, which can (and probably should) be differentiated in
our analysis – for example, citations vary widely between different researchers, which has
significant impacts on the capacity of those different researchers to find employment, wages,
grants, awards, etc. These issues raise questions about whose ideas are most influential (e.g.
those who are already cited) and why (e.g. epistemic barriers to entry), which go beyond the
description of the process itself. More recently, Fuller (2016) has expounded on these arguments
in his book Academic Caesar by arguing that academics are increasingly tempted to secure the
future of the university by “making the entry costs too high for newcomers [e.g. other knowledge
producers or providers]” (p.48). As a result, it is more than worthwhile for STS to engage with
the idea that intellectual ‘labour’ can be theorized in differential terms.

First, I think that differential rent has particular resonance with STS debates around the ‘moral
economy’ of science (Shapin, 1991; Kohler, 1994). As Kohler (1994: 12) outlines it, when
applied to science the moral economy refers to the ‘moral conventions’ that regulate scientists,
their activities, their access to equipment and materials, and their system of credit and rewards.
Kohler goes on to note Shapin’s (1991) earlier work on the moral economy of 17th century
scientists as well as Latour and Woolgar’s (1979) work on credit cycles in (more recent)
laboratories. Others have drawn on this concept of moral economy to analyse how moral values
and conventions regulate the “various kinds of exchange, including what rewards are
appropriate” (Dussauge et al., 2015), noting that these values and conventions are contingent –
that is, subject to change and contestation. Second, differential rent also has resonance with
discussions of affective, cognitive, and immaterial labour, especially drawing on the work of
autonomist Marxists (see Boutang, 2011), but also other inspirations (see Murphy, 2006; Vora,
2015). Here, it is possible to conceptualize what Veblen (1908) called ‘habits of life’ – that is,
humour, love, friendship, loyalty, reputation, etc. – as social relations and dispositions that can
be monetized and capitalized with the deployment of specific techno-economic arrangements,
leading to the capture of differential rents depending on their qualities. In both of the cases I
mentioned above, the relevance of differential rent to STS is probably most obvious in the
analysis of the status of individual researchers, institutions, or broader communities (e.g. city,
nation). On the one hand, status reflects the credit and credibility of social actors; for example,
well-cited researchers extract rent as a result of the increasing ‘credit’ their higher visibility and
epistemic centrality in their disciplines provides them (Fuller, 2016). At the same time, their
status reflects a broader system of collective labour in which other, less well-cited researchers act
as ‘prosumers’ who both produce and consume the credibility and reputation of the output of the
more well-cited researchers – primarily through citation practices. The latter is important
because it recognizes that knowledge production , and the credit system which currently
underpins it, are social processes and that the ‘free’ labour of citers is highly differentiated,
similar to advertising, branding, and other immaterial processes (Arvidsson and Colleoni, 2012).
It is for this reason that people like Sørensen (2000: 1548) specifically argued that “larger rents
provide an incentive for institutions of higher education to increase tuition costs”. At base,
universities with higher status researchers can charge more tuition than those with lower status
researchers, even though the status of all researchers is determined collectively by the citation
(and other ‘moral’ practices) of every researcher.

It is perhaps pertinent to end this section with a general comment about the theorization of
economic rent and rent-seeking across the literature reviewed in the last two sections. I want to
make three points worth emphasizing in any conceptualization of rentiership, the task I undertake
next. First, and as noted in the introduction, rent and rent-seeking are as much normative notions
as they are analytical. They are generally used to connote a negative economic phenomenon; as
such, ‘rent’, throughout its intellectual history, has never been a ‘neutral’ concept. While this
might not seem to be an issue in a field like STS where scholars such as Donna Haraway (1988)
have explicitly invoked ‘situatedness’ as a critique of ‘objectivity’ claims, an almost universally
negative perspective on rent necessarily closes down an array of social activities and
subjectivities that we may actually want to support. For example, Steve Fuller (2002, 2016) has
defined academic disciplines and scholarship as examples of rent-seeking; if we treat rentiership
as wholly negative, then it raises the question of whether something like academia is also a
problematic endeavour. Second, contemporary capitalism is very different from the eras in which
many of the original rent theorists were writing (e.g. Marx, Ricardo, etc.). I again noted in the
introduction that numerous contemporary writers argue that capitalism is increasingly
characterized by a shift towards capital accumulation strategies driven by the ownership and
control over resources and assets, rather than by the production of new goods and services. As
Baumol (1990) noted, though, ‘entrepreneurial’ effort is driven by a variety of roles, some of
which entail productive activities, some unproductive, and some entirely destructive. It is not,
then, simply adequate to contrast, analytically or normatively, rentiership with entrepreneurship
as different political-economic processes; instead, it is important to work out how rentiership fits
in any wider analysis of (technoscientific) capitalism, as inherent and even necessary to
capitalism. Finally, on an analytical level, the preceding discussion illustrates the extent to which
rent theory, on whichever side of the political equation you fall, has been based on the
assumption that there are such things as true or fundamental value – whether this reflects notions
of earned labour or competitive markets – to which we can refer in calculating the excess
represented by rent. In contrast, my preference has always been to theorize economies and
markets as ‘instituted’ (Polanyi, 1957), and, increasingly, to theorize value as ‘managed’ (Birch,
2017d). However, where a market is instituted and value managed, it makes little analytical
sense to theorize an excess over some primordial base. It is, in light of these concerns, necessary
to do more than simply apply rent theory to the object of study in STS, as I have done in this
section. It is vital to unpack rentiership as a concept and as a social process and practice in order
to push the debate forward.

Towards a Theory of Rentiership

In the last section I sought to apply rent theory to STS as a way to illustrate its relevance to
analyses of science, technology, and innovation. In this section, I develop a theory of rentiership
– that is, an analytical conception of economic rent as a social process and practice – to bring
together the diverse strands of rent theory I have already outlined. As a task, it is necessarily
partial, in that this has to be the starting point for an ongoing theoretical and empirical
examination of ‘actually existing’ rentiership. To summarize my theoretical claims briefly here, I
conceptualize rentiership as a social process and practice involving a series of actions, practices,
and transformations that, in the context of STS, enable the alignment of technoscientific
knowledge production with the realization of returns from its commercialization, which can be
separated by a significant period of time (e.g. 10-20 years). First, it involves the ‘thing-ification’
of technoscientific knowledge as part of the co-production of understandings of value and
practices of valuation. Second, it involves turning that thing into an asset, or ‘assetization’
(Birch, 2017d), as a way to organize valuation and govern or manage value over time. Finally, it
involves the extraction of value (i.e. rent) – or its ‘creation’ in business parlance – through the
ownership and control provided by (a) government fiat, (b) monopoly control, and/or (c) the
configuration of markets and technoscience.

Any attempt to develop a theory of rentiership relevant for STS, however, has to start with an
outline of knowledge, in a general and technoscientific sense. Arguably, knowledge – in all its
contested wonder – represents a basic unit of analysis in STS (e.g. Bloor, 1976; Fuller, 1998). As
diverse social science literatures emphasize, knowledge can be hard to pin down, it is difficult to
codify, it is intangible, etc. However, it is important to stress that knowledge is not a ‘thing’ in
our heads or on the page; rather, knowledge is a social process bounded by social practices,
social actors, social values, social institutions, etc. (Fuller, 1998; Tyfield, 2012). Moreover,
knowledge encompasses the learning and knowing of technical information as well as the
learning and knowing of feelings and emotions (e.g. desires and dislikes), political, social, and
economic values, incentives, and motivations (e.g. cultural tastes), relational states and
dispositions (e.g. friendship), and much else besides – that is, it reflects Veblen’s (1908) ‘habits
of life’ as much as any technical understanding of the world. As a result, knowledge has to be
conceived of as more than atomistic and individual creativity or intellectual. A number of
autonomist Marxists have specifically theorized these various ‘knowledge’ practices, relations,
and identities as forms of ‘labour’, even though we do not earn a wage for them. Thinkers like
Lazzarato (1997), Morini and Fumagalli (2010), and Boutang (2011), for example, argue that
contemporary capitalism is underpinned by forms of ‘immaterial’, ‘affective’, and ‘cognitive’
labour. Now, my intention here is not to equate different forms of (knowledge) labour as
analytically equivalent. In fact, Schumpeter (1959: 25) specifically argued that rent theories
based on the LTV (e.g. Ricardo, Marx) make this theoretical assumption, and thereby ignore the
specificities of the “Services of Natural Agents”. Such phrasing is obviously reminiscent of
actor-network theory (ANT), highlighting the need to understand the social and techno-economic
relations, arrangements, and entities that enable the monetization of knowledge, its capitalization
in distinct organizational forms, and its capture through different forms of rentiership.

First, knowledge has to be turned into a ‘thing’ – or, reified as a techno-economic object like a
patent, or copyright, or similar intellectual property (IP) designation. Knowledge starts out as an
ephemeral, distributed, and collective process, but it needs to be transformed into something that
is alienable for it to have value. This ‘thing-ification’ of technoscientific (or any) knowledge
follows from the distinction that Fuller (2013) makes between knowledge as a substance (is) and
function (does). He argues that knowledge’s function is to replace something else, although this
necessarily means a function of something rather than a substance. Fuller goes on to argue that
the value of knowledge, therefore, has to be understood as “determined more by the cost incurred
by lacking it than the benefit received from possessing it” (p.13); in this sense, the value of
knowledge is better theorized in terms of positional goods, rather than public goods as argued by
numerous economists of science (see Mirowski, 2011). Positional goods entail a zero-sum
consumption in which the use of the good stops its use by another person, thereby sustaining the
status of the first user and limiting its usefulness to other potential users. However, while this
might be a useful way to think about the value of knowledge, it assumes that knowledge – really,
its function – will be used up in consumption, which is not necessarily the case. In contrast, the
transformation of knowledge into a thing – through IP rights, for example – ensures that
knowledge is separated from its function, so that it can be alienated and exist as property, which
has an expected ownership lifespan (e.g. 20 year patent right). As such, thing-ification entails a
dual process in which our understandings of the value of knowledge (e.g. its status as a positional
good) are always necessarily co-produced with how we can value knowledge (e.g. as an IPR).

As this would suggest, it is important to unpack valuation practices alongside the positional
status of knowledge. This is perhaps most evident, as a process, in the ongoing political-
economic transformation of academic science since the 1970s, especially in the USA, resulting
from the expansion of IPRs across many technoscientific fields (Mirowski, 2011; Tyfield, 2012;
Hackett, 2014). As Janet Hope (2008: 19) notes, such IPRs are really “private regulatory tools
that enable their owners to order the market by fixing prices” and, as a result, they “encourage
rent-seeking via the pursuit of unproductive property rights”. It is through the legal monopoly
rights conferred by IPRs that knowledge is turned into a ‘thing’ (e.g. patent) and, simultaneously,
can be valued as such because this makes it possible to value the expected future profits and
rents that can be captured from the techno-economic configuration of markets. For example,
Arvidsson and Colleoni (2012: 145) argue that the valuations of social media platforms like
Facebook do not necessarily follow from calculations of advertising revenues, or “rational
calculations as to the underlying performance of company assets”, but rather from the “ability to
initiate and sustain a convention that enables a rational estimate of a company’s future financial
performance” (i.e. continuing increases in share value). As should be evident, rentiership entails
both understandings of value as an abstract concept – e.g. as financial opportunity cost
(Chiappello, 2015) – and valuation practices that can turn these understandings into social
processes. For example, Harvey (1982 [1999]) argued that geographical places can be
conceptualized in monopoly rent terms, such as a location with many passers-by (e.g. train
station). The location is more valuable, in retail terms, than one with fewer passers-by (e.g.
residential neighbourhood), leading to higher rental charges for the first location, which then get
passed on to consumers. It is important to note, however, that in this example the thing that is
valuable is the number of people passing by the shop, not the land at that location.

Second, and despite the normative language he still uses, rentiership might seem closer to what
Baumol (1990) defined as ‘unproductive’ or ‘destructive’ entrepreneurship, rather than
‘productive entrepreneurship’. In order to avoid the normative connotations implied by these
definitions, however, it might be best to think of rentiership as economic activity that does not
entail the production of new goods and services (cf. Pike, 2015). Rather, and building on rent
theory, rentiership is a process by which things are turned into assets, or resources in the
production process (i.e. factors of production). As such, it reflects the growing interest in STS
and cognate fields in the ‘assetization’ of knowledge, information, data, and suchlike (e.g. Birch,
2015, 2017; Martin, 2015; Birch and Muniesa, 2016; Muniesa et al., 2017; Vezyridis and
Timmons, 2017). In contrast to commodification, assetization involves the creation of assets,
which the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) defines as “a resource controlled by
the entity as a result of past events and from which future economic benefits are expected to flow
to the entity”.5 As I have noted elsewhere (Birch, 2017c), technoscientific knowledge was
reclassified as an ‘asset’ in the 2008 Systems of National Accounts (SNA), which is an
international statistical standard produced by the United Nations; prior to this it was classified as
an input into production.6 Assetization involves the conversion of a ‘thing’ into identifiable and
alienable property, which has value both as a resource (i.e. intermediate input) and as tradable
property. In relation to knowledge, research is transformed into an intangible asset as a result of
things like intellectual property (IP – like a patent or copyright), organizational procedures and
processes (e.g. database and software), reputation (e.g. brand), and ‘goodwill’ – the last of these
represents the value of a business as a going concern (MacKenzie, 2009). Assets are interesting
for a variety of reason (Boutang, 2011; Birch, 2017d), but most notably in the context of
rentiership for how their value and valuation are organized, managed, and governed.

In relation to knowledge, intangible assets – like IPRs – are often organized and constructed as
monopolies in which legal restrictions (e.g. patent rights) inhibit the replication or imitation of
knowledge resources; as such, rentiership involves the organization of limits and exclusions on
the use of a resource or its copies (Zeller, 2008; May, 2010). As such, and this is crucial,
knowledge can only be turned into an intangible asset through its identification and classification
as a resource, which means finding ways to extract it from the freely and openly accessible
knowledge ‘commons’ (Birch et al., 2017). According to Frase (2016), for example, a key
defining feature of intangible assets (e.g. copyright) is the fact that exclusion and use rights are
also follow-through rights that get extended in the sale of their copies (e.g. CD, DVD), thereby
reinforcing monopolies despite the proliferation of copies. An interesting example, in this case, is
the ongoing fight between US farmers and tractor manufacturer, John Deere, resulting from the
latter’s attempt, through license agreements, to limit the ability of farmers to repair or modify
their tractor’s software or electronic functions (Koebler, 2017). As mentioned above, this
necessitates international standards like the SNA or IASB, but is also requires the legal extension
and application of ownership rights to knowledge ‘assets’ and their ‘products’, whether the latter
is given away for free or not. A key question to consider in this context is where the value of
intangible assets lies. As several political economists argue (e.g. Nitzan and Bichler, 2009;
Styhre, 2015; Bryan et al., 2017), much of the value of intangible assets rests in the valuation of
asset holders (e.g. business organizations), rather than in the inherent qualities of the asset itself
since intangible assets can be valued very differently by different people (Bryan et al., 2017).
Consequently, in my previous work I stress the need to analyse the firm in STS debates about
value (Birch, 2017d).

With the above paragraph in mind, it is important to remember that the valuation of intangible
assets is not a simple matter. Indeed, it involves a diverse array of political-economic
knowledges, practices, and processes (Birch, 2017c, 2017d). Here, rentiership relates to the
dynamic management of the earnings, or yield, of an asset over its lifespan – which is how
Marshall (1890[1920]) defined quasi-rents. In technoscientific capitalism, the future earnings or
yields of an asset are highly uncertain; for example, Hopkins (2012) provides an outline of these
uncertainties in the biotech or life sciences sector. In part, uncertainty results from concerns
about when a substitute might be found for an asset, when an asset might lose its appeal, and
5
https://www.iasplus.com/en/standards/other/framework
6
https://unstats.un.org/unsd/nationalaccount/sna2008.asp
when an asset might lead to a new product or service. The capitalization of a business – or asset
– has become an important valuation practice in uncertain fields like biotech and information
technology where there is limited profit data (Doganova and Eyquem-Renault, 2009). According
to Muniesa (2012) and Muniesa et al. (2017), capitalization represents a political-economic
epistemology and social practice which involves the discounting of future earnings in the
present. Originally introduced in the early 20th century, it contradicted notions of inherent value
prevalent in LTV approaches. Instead, it represents a way to calculate the value of future
earnings – using a discount rate to work out their current value – and therefore the suitability of
something for investment (Muniesa, 2012, 2014). As such, it involves a valuation based on
future expectations rather than past work, meaning that it has created demand for a vast financial
ecosystem – since valuations cannot be made through market exchanges when value I based on
future expectations – comprising a range of political-economic experts who form part of the
management and governance of value through their valuation judgements (e.g. brokers),
valuation assessments (e.g. analysts), valuation monitoring (e.g. accountants), and so on (Birch,
2017d). Rentiership necessitates this active and ongoing organization, management, and
governance of value, meaning that it is not a passive process; it can involve significant effort on
the part of asset owners to manage the valuation decisions of investors. However, it means that
financiers, investors, and others can make a valuation of something that has no historical
precedence (e.g. profits), such that the timeframe between technoscientific ‘discovery’ (or, more
likely, IP filing) and realization of value – which can be many years afterwards – are aligned
with one another.

Finally, rentiership is realized through different forms of value extraction, often still framed as
value ‘creation’ in business circles. In each case, value extraction is enacted through the
ownership and control of assets, whether bought or developed in-house, rather than the
production of new goods and services. Here I discuss three forms of rentiership, although there
are probably more: (a) government fiat, (b) monopoly control, and/or (c) the configuration of
markets and technoscience.

The first form of value extraction is government fiat. As stated earlier, my approach to analysing
rentiership through a Polanyian lens (Polanyi, 1957), namely the idea that economies and
markets are ‘instituted’ rather than natural or naturalistic. From this perspective, rentiership
entails forms of government or quasi-government fiat, which includes the establishment of
regulations, standards, and codes (Busch, 2011). This can happen in at least three ways: first, the
presence and absence of regulations etc. can lead to the shifting of markets from one jurisdiction
to another (e.g. stem cell tourism – Sleeboom-Faulkner and Patra, 2011; Rosemann, 2014);
second, new regulations etc. can create new markets altogether (e.g. ethanol fuel standards –
Birch and Calvert, 2015); and third, and most interesting here, new regulations etc. can both
curtail existing markets and open new markets (e.g. greenhouse gas emissions – Lohmann,
2017). I want to focus on the last of these since it illustrates the impacts of government fiat most
clearly. A helpful example of is the introduction of carbon markets, which Romain Felli (2014)
theorizes as a form of ‘climate rent’. Felli argues that government (or quasi-government) fiat
does not create “commodities” per se, but rather legally constituted “public entitlements to emit
greenhouse gases” enacted through property rights (p.254). He goes on to call it an
“administrative grant” representing a “barrier to production” which is the very thing “that makes
them valuable” (p.266). As such, this form of government fiat reflects the Marxist notions of
absolute rent in which ownership rights are first instituted and then distributed, protected, and
enforced by the state, and provides an underlying logic to rentiership – namely, societal rules on
the ownership and control of useful assets. Other examples of this form of rent extraction
abound, including of land, of water, of culture, and so on (Andreucci et a., 2017).

The second form of value extraction is monopoly, especially intellectual monopoly in regards to
science, technology, and innovation – for example, IPRs like patents, copyright, etc. (Zeller,
2008). There is an important element of government fiat involved here also, but it is not
necessarily a defining feature of monopoly control since monopoly rents can accrue as the result
of the uniqueness or rarity of an asset as well. However, that being said, people like Fuller (2013)
are quite clear that the value of knowledge is constituted by access, which means that state-
instituted IPRs do create monopolies. There are at least three reasons why IPRs are better
theorized as monopoly control, rather than absolute monopoly represented by government fiat.
First, IPRs represent very different socio-legal ‘things’ (e.g. patent, copyright, trade secret,
trademark, etc.), which are configured in very specific ways to create specific exclusions. For
example, Kang (2015) highlights the need to differentiate between types of property rights,
including ‘use’, ‘fruits’, and ‘abuse’ rights. It is interesting to note that property rights over assets
(cf. commodities) do not necessarily allow owners to destroy their asset (e.g. knowledge, land,
customer base, etc.). On the other hand, they may extend use rights to copies of the asset.
Second, IPRs entail a specific time frame (e.g. 20 year patent right) (May, 2010). Consequently,
they do not represent a generic form of ownership encompassing the societal rules of the game or
covering assets with perpetual lifespans (e.g. land). Third, increasingly, ownership rights,
especially of assets, are governed as forms of investment (in assets) through corporate
mechanisms like investor dispute panels, rather than through government sanction. Alongside
IPRs, other forms of monopoly control are also possible, especially those based on the unique or
special quality of an asset. General examples might include things like wine appellations or
unique artwork (Harvey, 2002), although it is still pertinent in relation to technoscientific
knowledge claims. The uniqueness and specificity of many research findings and their
commercial potential, for example, are inscribed in the legal terminology of IPRs like patents
(Pagano and Rossi, 2017).

The final form of value extraction I want to outline results from the configuration of markets and
technoscience. As noted above, the temporal nature of valuation practices in rentiership –
exemplified by capitalization (Muniesa et al., 2017) – necessitate the techno-economic
configuration of specific organizational forms – namely, the private business enterprise (Birch,
2017d). Considering the uncertainty of technoscientific commercialization, there are obvious
limitations on the financing of innovation; that is, it needs to ensure that investors can receive
their capital back before the realization of value in production events (e.g. selling products or
services) (Hopkins, 2012). According to Pisano (2006), for example, the long timelines involved
in biopharmaceutical development meant that biotech firms pursued research and business
strategies based on monetizing knowledge in order to finance product developments. Such
monetization of knowledge, however, is dependent on the configuration of knowledge markets
through the reinforcement of IPRs as well as the emergence non-performing entities – or ‘patent
trolls’ in more poetic language – which buy IP and then engage in litigation to extract value from
their property rights (Chien, 2014). Rentiership, in this sense, can involve more than the simple
assertion of government fiat or monopoly power. It also involves the configuration of markets
and technoscience, exemplified in two examples here. First, work by Lazonick and Tulum (2911)
shows that much of the financing that goes into the US biopharmaceutical sector is used to buy
back shares, rather than increase research and development. As a consequence of the market
pressures on managers to maximize shareholder value and avoid risky investments in long-term
product development, Lazonick and Tulum argue that firms use capital to increase share values
through financial means and outsource risky research to smaller firms. Second, and perhaps more
interesting, are the Epipen and Daraprim drug cases (Glabau, 2016a, 2016b), although I focus on
Daraprim for want of space. In 2015, the then CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, Martin Shkreli,
was raked over the proverbial coals for raising the cost of Daraprim 5000%, from US$13.50 to
US$750 (Glabau, 2016b). A lot of noise was made about FDA regulations giving Turing a
monopoly on the drug; however, it had been off patent for some time so this did not seem to
explain the case. Instead, Turing exploited FDA rules on market exclusivity provided by
regulations on testing old drug to ensure their compliance with current regulations as well as
convincing the previous rights holder to starve the market so no other company could get hold of
any Daraprim tablets to run their own tests (Olson, 2015). It was not simply a case of
government regulation or monopoly rights gone bad; instead, it was an active configuring of the
market and technoscience in order to extract rents.

Conclusion

To follow!

Analytical
- Rent is not abnormal; rentiership is normal
- Rentiership is active social practice

STS
- We need to develop new competencies
- We need to rejuvenate political economy, inside STS and outwith (we have a lot to
contribute)

Universities are at tipping point

- How do we defend what we do
- How do we fund what we do

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