Workshop: Digital Capitalism & Varieties of Science

In recent years, digital technologies have not only given rise to new sociocultural realities, thus reshaping economies, but have begun to profoundly alter the ways in which knowledge is produced, validated, and disseminated. Against this backdrop, this workshop explores the intersection of varieties of science and varieties of digital capitalism through a comparative and interdisciplinary lens. Starting from specific digital technologies—particularly the metaverse, extended reality, and human augmentation—we examine distinct institutional, cultural, and epistemic configurations.

Our focus lies especially on Japan, which has been characterized as a coordinated market economy alongside Germany. The workshop adopts an approach that investigates how science and capitalism co-evolve under conditions of digital transformation—understood here as a topic for critical inquiry (following Stolterman and Croon Fors 2004). Moving beyond modernization theory, we ask how digital tools and platforms take shape across a range of socio-political contexts, and how they in turn affect knowledge regimes and research practices.

By bringing together perspectives from STS, economics, and Japanese studies, along with insights from practice, the workshop seeks to open-up a productive dialogue on how emerging technologies, digital capitalism, and scientific cultures co-constitute one another—across regions, disciplines, and epistemic traditions. We hold that the case of Japan, the first non-Western country to become an advanced economy and fertile spawning ground for technoscientific imaginations and attributions, offers particularly valuable insights into these processes.