We live in an ordinal society. 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 (Harvard University Press 2024) Kieran Healy and Fourcade show how algorithmic predictions not only influence people’s life chances but also 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 metrics and rankings 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.
This talk will focus on the book's economic chapters, which analyze how the disaggregation of labor, services and products into data streams both transforms the process of capital accumulation and facilitates a deeper integration of financial logics into everyday life.
Program
2:15 Welcome by Dean Anne Julie Semb and Head of Department Kristin Asdal
2:25: Political Economy of the Ordinal Society by honorary doctor Marion Fourcade
3:10: Q & A's
3:30: End
Welcome! The lecture is open to all.
► Read interview with Fourcade: Sociologist Marion Fourcade deeply honoured for being appointed an honorary doctorate