Political Economy of the Ordinal Society

The Centre for research on social InequalitieS and the médialab are pleased to welcome Marion Fourcade for a discussion on her latest book The Ordinal Society co-authored with Kieran Healy (Duke University). 

Our society increasingly relies on an invisible network of numbers, scores, and digital categories. It is through this interpretive framework that institutions observe, evaluate, and direct us, shaping our daily lives down to their most intimate aspects. 

In her presentation, Marion Fourcade will demonstrate how the atomization of human experience into analyzable data streams has changed the process of capital accumulation, facilitated a deeper penetration of financial logics into our lived experience, and supported the emergence of insidious forms of social competition, moral judgments, and inequality.

Marion Fourcade is a Professor of Sociology and Director of the Social Science Matrix at the University of California (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, primarily in economic sociology and sociology of knowledge.

Speakers

Marion Fourcade (Director of the Social Science Matrix at the University of California, Berkeley, Professor of Sociology) 

Chair: Sylvain Parasie (Director of the médialab, Professor of Sociology at Sciences Po)
Discussant: Tom Azoulay (CRIS)