This international working group was initiated in 2017 by Christine von Oertzen and Sebastian Felten at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. It investigates how large organizations learn. Bureaucracies have emerged in every corner of the world, seemingly spontaneously, wherever large territories, resources, and populations were to be governed. Bureaucracies have given, and still give, paradoxical answers to the problem of governing on scale: they use abstraction to rule specific people and places; they assign authority to individuals who depend on the work of many hands and minds; they make themselves accountable to stakeholders only to be able to act more independently. Practices of collecting and transforming data have become popular objects of study in these disciplines, yielding a rich literature on how knowledge was produced and applied in state administrations, businesses, academic and religious institutions, as well as other public and private organizations. 

Members of this working group include: Maria Avxentevskaya (MPIWG), Anna Echterhölter (University of Vienna), Maura Dykstra (CalTech), Susanne Friedrich (University of Munich), Harun Küçük (University of Pennsylvania), Philipp Lehmann (UC Riverside), Kathryn Olesko (Georgetown University), Renée Raphael (UC Irvine), John Sabapathy (UCL), Jacob Soll (University of Southern California, Dornsife), Ted Porter (UCLA), Sixiang Wang (Stanford). [more]