Introduction: Critical approaches to rentiership

Abstract

The provocation of this special issue is that contemporary capitalism is different. It is increasingly dominated by rentiership rather than entrepreneurship: that is, the extraction of economic rents from the ownership and/or control of assets and resources, rather than profits resulting from the production and sale of new goods and services. We understand economic rents as the value exacted or extracted from the socio-natural world as a result of the relations of ownership and control of particular assets or resources, primarily because of their constructed degree of scarcity or quality (see Birch, 2017, 2020; Birch and Ward, 2022; Christophers, 2020; Haila, 2016; Standing, 2016; Ward and Aalbers, 2016; Zeller, 2008). The concept of rentiership adds to a geographical analysis by specifying the socio-economic power imbalances, strategies, and processes driving wealth extraction and concentration. We circulated the call for papers in mid-2018 when unease with the prevalence of rent-seeking in contemporary capitalism appeared to be coming to a head (Mulgan, 2013; Piketty, 2014; Sayer, 2015; Standing, 2016; Stiglitz, 2012). While papers have been available online since as early as 2019, the final special issue itself has been delayed as a result of the pandemic and associated time pressures on authors. In that period, the characterization of contemporary capitalism as “rentier,” in the sense of being dominated by assets and their owners (Christophers, 2019, 2020; Mazzucato, 2018), has become almost commonplace (e.g. Wolf, 2019). This has extended beyond academia; for example, the 2020–2025 Strategic Plan of major Canadian think tank the Centre for International Governance Innovation highlights the need for “research and analysis surrounding how different competition frameworks could lead to changes in market power and the distribution of rents.” Similar concerns with the problems associated with rentiership are evident in major NGOs (e.g. Jacobs, 2015), the United Nations (e.g. UNCTAD, 2017), and even the World Economic Forum.