Inequality & Social Policy Seminar: Marion Fourcade

Date: 

Monday, March 28, 2022, 12:00pm to 1:15pm

Location: 

Allison Dining Room

Rationalized Stratification

Marion Fourcade, Professor of Sociology, UC Berkeley

Abstract: The pairing of massive data sets with processes – or “algorithms” – written in computer code to sort through, organize, extract or “mine” them has made inroads in almost every major social institution. Today, techniques of mathematical optimization are routinely implemented across domains as varied as education, medicine, credit, insurance, criminal justice and the public sphere, in an effort to streamline and automatize processes of risk prediction, resource allocation, communication and decision-making. These techniques are reorganizing markets, the state, and society at large. In the sphere of the market they create new classifications and forms of capital that structure people’s life-chances. In the sphere of the state they transform the conditions of citizenship and political identification. And for society as a whole they advance new forms of social organization, oriented toward and justified by measurement.
Based on paper and ongoing work with Kieran Healy.

Marion Fourcade
received her PhD from Harvard University (2000) and taught at New York University and Princeton University before joining the Berkeley sociology department in 2003. A comparative sociologist by training and taste, she is interested in variations in economic and political knowledge and practice across nations. Her first book, Economists and Societies (Princeton University Press 2009), explored the distinctive character of the discipline and profession of economics in three countries. A second book, The Ordinal Society (with Kieran Healy), is under contract. This book investigates new forms of social stratification and morality in the digital economy. Fourcade is also an Associate Fellow of the Max Planck-Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies (Maxpo), an External Scientific member of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, and a past President of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (2016).

This event is open to Harvard ID holders only.