| Summary: | While studies about hospitals have mainly focused on the issue of cure, on the relationships between physicians and patients or between physicians themselves, the importance of economic logics and the idea of profitability imply that new inquiries into hospitals must be conducted. This article aims to study the making of an economic rationale within hospitals and to observe the ways clinicians, services and medical activities are calculated and valuated. The ethnographic study presented in this article shows that new forms of logics structure the hospital’s economic functioning. I propose the term capitalization to define this logic: a cognitive and material process transforming things or services into assets. Nevertheless hospitals are singular entities where usual economic principles as profitability cannot be implemented without adjustments.
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