Capitalist Planned Economies: Rethinking Economic Planning in the Digital Age

• Applicant: Dr. Christoph Sorg
• Subject Area: Sociological Theory ; Political Science
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 523931583

In face of governments’ failures to tackle underlying problems of the Global Financial Crisis, Covid-19 pandemic and the accelerating climate catastrophe, democratic planning (and the lack thereof) has emerged as a controversial topic of public discussion. In academia as well a dynamic new body of literature has started to discuss the possibility of alternative forms of economic coordination and planning and particularly the possibilities of digital technologies to aid in such transformation. The research project 'Capitalist Planned Economies' (CaPE) will engage with the claim that new digital technologies facilitate new forms of economic planning. Instead of the literature’s focus on theory of and model-building for alternative forms of (non-capitalist) economic planning, it will ask how planning actually works in capitalism and how recent digital transformations impact said planning.CaPE will trace the disappearance of planning from the economic social sciences to ist recent return and introduce industrial internet platforms as an important but understudied field of research. In doing so CaPE will argue that academic insights on planning are currently scarce and dispersed across disciplines, so empirical research on digital corporate planning will first have to extensively synthesize existing bodies of literature. Following this, CaPE will feature field work, which triangulates semi-structured interviews with an analysis of available documents. In contextualizing private-corporate planning with public planning and industrial policies, CaPE will construct a processual theory of planning in capitalism, provide empirical insights into emerging industrial internet platforms as a new and understudied field and add a new way of looking at the digital economy. A better understanding of how planning currently works is a pivotal first step for subsequent discussions about alternative forms of planning for social and ecological resilience in times of crisis.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position