Open seminar at Score

Date: Thursday 24 September 2026
Time: 10:00 - 11:30
Location: Score, Frescativägen 14 A, Stockholm University

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: who gets a loan, a job, a ride, a date, and on what terms. In this talk, I will explore how this atomization of human experience into streams of analyzable 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 recent book with Kieran Healy, The Ordinal Society (Harvard University Press 2024), and extends its argument to the present.

Marion Fourcade is the Natalie Cohen Professor of Sociology 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.