Book Review Christian Bessy, Expropriation by Law: Intellectual Property, Value and Labor, Edward Elgar, 2024

Kota Kitagawa ()
Additional contact information
Kota Kitagawa: Kansai University

Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review, 2024, vol. 21, issue 2, No 15, 373-386

Abstract: Abstract This article presents a review of Christian Bessy’s book Expropriation by Law, Edward Elgar, 2024. It is a rare and unique book that analyzes financialization from the institutional change approach elaborated by French institutionalism known as the Economics of Convention. We tend to think of patents as merely one of the increasingly fluidized rights in the trend toward securitization. However, Bessy convinces that the growing importance of intellectual property rights is not a minor and collateral consequence of financialization. In the eight chapters of his book he abductively creates and demonstrates the following thesis: the interactions among the legal intermediaries on patents have been a significant driving force of financialization because it has driven the reformation of business and financial management in corporations. This, he writes, has led to the current linkage between the corporations and the stock market. In this review two issues from the book from the perspective of the original American institutionalist John R. Commons are highlighted. First, the book focuses on the characteristics of the entrepreneur of the intermediaries that affect the reformations of internal, external, and collective aspects of public and private going concerns. This is by way of transforming conventions for patent valuations. Second, the book links financialization with the transformation of employment institutions under the proposition of endogenous dynamics of law driven by legal intermediaries.

Keywords: Economics of convention; Intellectual property; Patent; Legal intermediaries; John R. commons; B25; B52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s40844-024-00287-x Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:eaiere:v:21:y:2024:i:2:d:10.1007_s40844-024-00287-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.springer ... theory/journal/40844

DOI: 10.1007/s40844-024-00287-x

Access Statistics for this article

Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review is currently edited by Kiichiro Yagi, Yuji Aruka and Takahiro Fujimoto

More articles in Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().