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Paper short abstract

This study uses assetization to examine discursive and valuation practices of financialized actors in re-shaping healthcare economies. A multimodal ethnography shows how promissory narratives of innovation are instrumentalized, while financial deals, infrastructures and investor logics are obscured.

Paper long abstract

Across healthcare systems, financial, for-profit driven actors are emerging. Relating to the notion of the “value economy” (Asdal & Doganova, 2025), these actors introduce new valuation and discursive practices to healthcare. In this study, we think through the concept of assetization to examine how healthcare entities and practices are reconfigured as capitalized property by mobilizing specific logics, devices and practices. Assetization concerns the contingent processes through which something is (re)shaped into a future revenue stream (Birch et al., 2021). Empirically, we conduct a multimodal ethnography that combines document analysis, interviews, observations and digital materials – including corporate websites, (social) media platforms, policy documents, reports and marketing and PR content – to investigate the various practices at play. We find that these actors instrumentalize promissory narratives, emphasizing societal impact, innovation, technical expertise, ESG-performances, and future-oriented visions of sustainable care to legitimate their intervention. At the same time, the valuation practices and financial infrastructures underpinning these claims and the broader constellation of financial actors and instruments involved tend to remain backgrounded in these narratives. These involve investment deals and exits, corporate restructuring, mergers and acquisitions, data infrastructures and enclosures, and commercial real-estate arrangements. By illuminating how processes of assetization, financial logics and investor rationalities become interlaced with the organization and governance of healthcare, we aim to weave together the threads through which valuation practices unfold that constitute new healthcare economies – both intangible and tangible – encompassing new revenue streams.