The Ordinal Society

We live in an ordinal society.

Fueled by digital technologies, the infrastructure of the internet, and ever-expanding computing power, scores and metrics increasingly form the invisible scaffolding that structures social life, down to its most intimate aspects. In this talk, Marion Fourcade will explore how this atomisation of human experience into streams of analysable data has transformed the process of capital accumulation, facilitated a deeper integration of financial logics into everyday life, and sustained the rise of insidious forms of social competition, moral judgment, and inequality.

This talk is based on the recently published book with Kieran Healy, The Ordinal Society. (Harvard University Press 2024)

Meet our speaker and chair

Marion Fourcade is the Natalie Cohen 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.

Rebecca Elliott is Associate Professor of Sociology. Her research focuses on how climate change, as a material and symbolic phenomenon, is reshaping social and environmental landscapes. She is a research associate at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and at the LSE Centre for the Analysis of Risk and Regulation. She co-convenes the Social Life of Climate Change, a cross-disciplinary seminar series and working group.

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