Organizing the sharing economy through experiments: framing and taming as onto-epistemological work

Prior work on performativity has illustrated how theories intervene in economic organizing. We expand this body of research by studying how concepts, and particularly those that are loosely defined and/or not widely understood, provoke their own realities through experiments. We examine how different experimental set-ups allow these concepts to be seized by a multitude of actors all wishing to instantiate worlds in their own interests, and how they potentially open up multiple competing realities as a result. We follow the concept of Mobility-as-a-Service as it mobilizes various experiments across public and private realms in Stockholm and Dublin, and we analyse how specific types of experiments co-produce epistemic and ontological work. Our results illustrate how different experimental designs can be conducive in taming and/or framing ambiguous concepts through interconnected processes of such onto-epistemological work. This highlights the distributed and relational but also the ‘provocative’ facets of performing ambiguous concepts through experiments. We discuss the consequences of these insights for how we think about scaling from experiments to broader socio-economic realities.