Nearly every aspect of our lives is measured, ranked, and processed into discrete, standardized units of digital information. In this talk recorded at BESI on December 5, 2024, Fourcade shows how 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.
About the Speaker
Marion Fourcade is a 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. Her new book, “The Ordinal Society,” (Harvard University Press, 2024), co-authored with sociologist Kieran Healy, 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.
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, is an external scientific member of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, and was previously president of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics.