Fenna Nijboer
Assetization of care? The growing intervention of investor logic in health systems
Health Care Governance / Workforce, Erasmus School of Health Policy and Management, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Erasmus University Rotterdam
Supervisors: Prof. dr. Iris Wallenburg, dr. Syb Kuijper, dr. Eline Marie Linthorst
Background
Fenna holds a Bachelor’s degree in Media & Communication and a Master’s in Sociology with the specialization “Engaging Public Issues”, both from the Erasmus University Rotterdam. For her thesis, she conducted a critical discourse analysis of policy documents to research how Rotterdam’s government of safety articulates the publicness of urban public space. As a student assistant and junior researcher within the AiPact Project, Fenna explored the role of self-employed care workers, focusing on their use of social media to present themselves as a “good care worker” and negotiating public discourses on their professionality. Throughout her academic journey, she fostered strong interests in feminist theory, STS, and political economy.
Content
In this PhD project, the tranformation in healthcare through the lens of assetization – the transformation of “things” into an asset to generate profits from (Birch & Muniesa, 2020) is explored. While the privatization of healthcare and the intervention of private actors in healthcare has been topic of debate within public, political and academic discourses, the conceptual lens of “assetization” offers a novel way to explore how health systems are increasingly transformed at the hand of investors and financial firms. These processes rely on narratives about future asset performance, such as framing healthcare investments as a “hedge” against future healthcare crises, as well as on calculative techniques that quantify and project potential profits.
Assetization, understood as the political-economic practice of turning things into financial assets, is a process that that transcends fields, such as healthcare, housing, tech and the digital economy, and entangles and appropriates its infrastructures together through a combination of legal, technical, physical, political, social and economic elements. New ordering logics, valuation instruments and regimes that are often unfamiliar in the healthcare context are introduced to healthcare systems and discourses. This PhD project focuses on the new, alternative healthcare infrastructures that are built by these private actors, raising critical questions about the intersection of investor-driven logics and the provision of care and care work. By doing so, this project aims to develop an understanding of assetization of healthcare and its larger implications for society and (unequal) relations of care. Therefore, the central inquiry guiding this PhD project is therefore: How does the assetization of care (re)configures the meaning and practices of care? Using a critical reading of these practices by drawing on, amongst others, critical theory, feminist studies, STS, economic sociology and care ethics, offers a framework for analyzing how investment and changing infrastructures of healthcare relate to and/or enforce social, political, organizational relationships, inequalities, interests and power dynamics.
