Georg Rilinger Wins Viviana Zelizer Best Book Award

Former MPIfG postdoc Georg Rilinger is the winner of the Viviana Zelizer Best Book Award for 2025. The prize is awarded annually by the Section on Economic Sociology of the American Sociological Association (ASA). Rilinger’s winning title is Failure by Design: The California Energy Crisis and the Limits of Market Planning, published in 2024 by the University of Chicago Press. In his monograph, Rilinger develops a theoretical framework for studying markets as the product of organizational planning and understanding the limits of market design. The empirical basis for his study is California’s energy crisis, which began in 2000 and left economic turmoil in its wake. By analyzing the complex difficulties surrounding electricity markets, the economic sociologist simultaneously illuminates the Californian crisis and helps to create a broader understanding of markets as social constructs with inherent weaknesses.

The Viviana Zelizer Best Book Award is one of the most important accolades in the field of economic sociology. It was first awarded in 2003 and is named after the influential sociologist Viviana Zelizer in recognition of her fundamental contributions to the discipline. Georg Rilinger was a postdoc at the MPIfG from 2020 to 2022. He is currently Assistant Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management in Cambridge, MA, where he works on entrepreneurship, technological innovation, and strategic management. His research interests include issues around social engineering in the digital economy, the role of expertise in government, the creation of markets, and regulatory failure.