Marion Fourcade: The Ordinal Society
Organized by the UC Berkeley Social Science Matrix; co-sponsored by the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI) and the School of Information.
Join us for a talk by Marion Fourcade, professor of sociology and director of Social Science Matrix, celebrating the publication of her book, The Ordinal Society, co-authored with Kieran Healy.
About the Book
A sweeping critique of how digital capitalism is reformatting our world.
We now live in an “ordinal society.” Nearly every aspect of our lives is measured, ranked, and processed into discrete, standardized units of digital information. Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy argue that technologies of information management, fueled by the abundance of personal data and the infrastructure of the internet, transform how we relate to ourselves and to each other through the market, the public sphere, and the state.
The personal data we give in exchange for convenient tools like Gmail and Instagram provides the raw material for predictions about everything from our purchasing power to our character. The Ordinal Society shows how these algorithmic predictions influence people’s life chances and generate new forms of capital and social expectation: nobody wants to ride with an unrated cab driver anymore or rent to a tenant without a risk score. As members of this society embrace ranking and measurement in their daily lives, new forms of social competition and moral judgment arise. Familiar structures of social advantage are recycled into measures of merit that produce insidious kinds of social inequality.
While we obsess over order and difference—and the logic of ordinality digs deeper into our behaviors, bodies, and minds—what will hold us together? Fourcade and Healy warn that, even though algorithms and systems of rationalized calculation have inspired backlash, they are also appealing in ways that make them hard to relinquish.
About the Speaker
Marion Fourcade is professor of sociology and director of Social Science Matrix at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Economists and Societies: Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain and France, 1890s to 1990s (Princeton University Press, 2009) and numerous articles on valuation, knowledge, and politics in comparative perspective. A second book, The Ordinal Society (with Kieran Healy, Harvard University Press 2024), describes the social and economic consequences of a new regime of knowledge that sees and scales people by way of behavioral data harvested through digital environments.
Professor Fourcade is a recipient of the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Book Award, the Society for the Social Studies of Science’s Ludwik Fleck prize for outstanding book in science and technology studies, and the Lewis Coser award for theoretical agenda setting. She has held visiting professorships at the Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton University and is an external scientific member of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies and a past president of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics.