Organizing Technoscientific Capitalism: Epistemic Values, Practices & Assets - I

Abstract

Capitalism is increasingly technoscientific, by which we mean that it is increasingly configured by the development and distribution of technoscientific products, services, platforms, and activities; in turn, technoscience is increasingly configured by the accounting, management, and performativity of profit-oriented organizational logics. Technoscientific capitalism is, in this sense, underpinned by organizational dynamics and inter-organizational relationships that often get obscured within STS debates about the supposed neoliberalization of society and science. A key question to ask, then, is how is technoscientific capitalism organized? What are the epistemic values, practices, and assets that are deployed in the entanglement of capitalism and technoscience? There are many possible answers here, not only aimed at these questions but also raising further questions for debate. Of particular interest to this Open Panel are the range of analytical and/or empirical takes on (1) epistemic and economic valuations, (2) academic values and practices, (3) organizational assets, relationships, and management, and (4) public-private frameworks that configure science, technology, and innovation.

Questions
•How are socio-epistemic relationships, practices, and resources organized to solve societal problems? Or to produce socio-economic value?
•What forms of knowledge and values do these relationships generate or constitute? How are these knowledges and values organized and managed?
•Are different forms and practices of knowledge more or less subject to processes of assetization, commodification, and/or capitalization?
•Do these processes assetization, commodification, and/or capitalization open up and/or close down the possibilities for inter-organizational relationships and practices?

Chair

• Kean Birch, York University

Individual Presentations

• Cannibalizing Capital: Disruption as Rhetoric, Practice, and Process - Devika Narayan, University of Minnesota

• Grants and Epistemic Values, Practices and Assets - Jane Bjørn Vedel, Copenhagen Business School

• Investment "Heat Maps" and Other Devices for Knowing and Performing High-Tech Investment - Jacob Hellman

• Social Organization of Work in Academic Labs in the Biomedical Sciences: Transformation through Competition - Annalisa Salonius, Independent Scholar, formerly University of Pennsylvania

• Valuing the Infrastructure: Assetization of Bio-Resources in Japan - Koichi Mikami, Keio University

Session Organizers

• Jane Bjørn Vedel, Copenhagen Business School

• John Grant Gardner, Monash University, Australia

• Kean Birch, York University