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Stefan Artmann, The asset-based valuation of everything and its relation to science, Science and Public Policy, Volume 43, Issue 6, December 2016, Pages 881–883, https://doi.org/10.1093/scipol/scw038
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The call to act more entrepreneurially is often heard when policy-makers and scientists are discussing shortcomings in the management of scientific institutions. Reforming a university so that it better ignites the spirit of entrepreneurship in the minds of its faculty, students, and administrative officers, needs more than just inspiring character sketches of resilient go-getters with a high readiness to assume risk, infectious enthusiasm and, at best, a common-good orientation. Any pragmatically relevant idea of good entrepreneurship must specify the conditions necessary to encourage entrepreneurial action: What incentive scheme should be implemented? What indicators should help evaluate its outcomes? What should the mechanism of accountability be?
The debate on the role of entrepreneurship in scientific institutions could profit from a rigorous analysis of what has been going on in the management of economic organizations since the rise to dominion, in the 1980s, of what mostly its adversaries call ‘neoliberal’ thought. ‘The financialization of the firm’—this is how Alexander Styhre, chair in organization theory and management at the University of Gothenburg, identifies the most powerful management trend of the last 40 years in the title of his new book. Embedding that tendency in economic, social, and cultural contexts, Styhre has no qualms about conferring upon his central concept the function of an umbrella term: anything that contributes to, or is a consequence of, understanding economic organizations as ‘bundles of financial resources’ (p. 58) forms part of financialization. Styhre’s main perspective is provided by economic sociology, which explains how economic organizations result from the practices of social actors. In Styre’s first two chapters the reader encounters snapshots of economic history from the birth of chartered banking in Renaissance Genoa to today’s investor capitalism, sociological approaches to the institutional structure of capital accumulation, policy analyses of the deregulation of financial markets, epistemological criticism of neoclassical economics, as well as pointed animadversions on neoliberalism.