Certifying the “Age Tech” Market: Welfare Bureaucracies as Evidence-Making Machines

• In Event: Market Codes: Bureaucrats, Brokers, and Algorithms

Abstract

Why and how does a welfare agency become a market facilitator? While previous research has long shown that the state and market are embedded, it casts the state’s role primarily as a regulator that intervenes to address market problems. It fails to explain how states can shape markets not as an exogenous regulatory force, but as an active participant as a market buyer. In the case of a decentralized and privatized welfare state, such as the United States, welfare agencies and private firms intersect in the market for social services, but this process and its consequences are not well studied. To examine this, I analyze the emergence of New York State’s statewide partnerships with “Age Tech” firms between 2019 and 2025. Drawing on 45 interviews with state and county aging officials and startup leaders, I trace how mid-level bureaucrats build an evaluative apparatus that converts uncertain market offerings into “evidence-backed” services. I show that officials confront accountability dilemmas of vendor instability and political stewardship, which they manage through discretionary screening and pilot tests that formalize professional judgment into a portable evidentiary package. This evidence travels, as it confers market advantage on selected vendors. I advance previous research in economic sociology, delegated welfare state, and sociology of evaluations by showing how welfare bureaucracies act as market-shaping “evidence machines” through public procurement in weakly standardized markets.

Author

• Nayun Eom, Harvard University