‘Landgrabbing’ as a technology of market governance: Revealing and resisting spatio-temporal hegemony in digital markets

This paper offers a spatio-temporal critique of digital market expansion by introducing and conceptualizing the Silicon Valley-inflected concept of ‘landgrabbing’. By taking the vernacular of landgrabbing seriously, we interrogate not only how it organizes digital spacetime but also what worldviews it propagates. We infuse elements from critical economic geography and social theory into marketing to analyze landgrabbing as a pervasive technology of market governance that promotes and normalizes an expansionary mindset. We highlight four spatial and three temporal mechanisms that, combined, represent a conceptual toolkit for analyzing contemporary landgrabbing practices: the spatial mechanisms of Taking possession, Fixing, Arbitraging, and Appropriating ; and the temporal mechanisms of Accelerating, Futuring, and Lagging . We propose that market studies research on temporality and spatiality should work in tandem and with a critical perspective toward the property relations created in digital markets in order to deepen our understanding of how market power accumulates. Controlling markets’ spatio-temporalities is a central matter of market power: over who can impose their own coordinates on other market actors.