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Prof. Einstein served graduate students as a model of prudence in remaining unfashionably true to the grand…
State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle
Translated into Chinese and Japanese.
Departmental Colloquium Series
Georg Rilinger "When Less Testing Is More: Experimental Authority and the Limits of Commensuration"
Monday, October 5, 2026 - 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm
Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
Abstract: Classificatory infrastructures underpin platform business models. Research on quantification shows how common measures and impersonal procedures can help coordinate actors with divergent commitments. Why, then, did iLabor’s culture of data-driven development fail to consolidate the work on its classificatory infrastructure? Drawing on archival sources collected during ethnographic research at this Silicon Valley labor platform in 2017–2018, we examine an effort to construct an integrated taxonomy of work. We identify three groups with divergent normative visions of the market. Although they endorsed the project’s overarching vision, concrete design decisions brought their priorities into conflict. Participants treated these disagreements as empirical questions, but appeals to data could not settle which priorities should prevail. Team leads instead invoked the ideology of experimentation: the belief that structured testing would ultimately yield objective insight. Through assertions of experimental authority, deferral, and promises of future resolution, they secured provisional agreements that allowed construction to proceed while embedding unresolved commitments in overlapping infrastructural arrangements. These appeals became less effective when experimental practices drew scrutiny, exposing discrepancies between ideal and practice. The findings show how a cultural commitment to experimentation can sustain cooperation while postponing the normative settlements needed to build a consistent infrastructure.
Bio: Georg Rilinger is an Assistant Professor of Economic and Organizational Sociology at MIT Sloan School of Management, where he holds the Fred Kayne (1960) Career Development Professorship. His research examines organizational, cultural, and political reasons why technocratic expertise — from Nobel Prize-winning market designers to financial regulators — so often fail to prevent market failures, drawing on archival research, interviews, and ethnographic methods. He is the author of Failure by Design (University of Chicago Press, 2024), winner of the Viviana Zelizer Prize for Best Book in Economic Sociology, and his work has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Socio-Economic Review, Theory and Society, and others.
Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Economy & Society Initiative.