Abstract:
Today, 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. Fueled by digital technologies, the infrastructure of the internet, and the rapid expansion of computer processing power, scores and metrics pervade our lives -- streamlining and automating processes of communication, risk prediction, resource allocation, transaction, labor control and decision-making. In The Ordinal Society, Kieran Healy and I argue that the disaggregation of social activities into data streams transforms the process of capital accumulation and facilitates a deeper integration of financial logics into everyday life. It also sustains the rise of insidious forms of social competition, moral judgment, and inequality.
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), The Ordinal Society (with Kieran Healy, Harvard University Press 2024), and numerous articles on valuation, knowledge, and politics in comparative perspective. 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. Website: www.marionfourcade.org
