Marion Fourcade
Modern institutions, both public and private, rely on tools and procedures that track individuals, assess their behavior, and assign them membership in various categories. They use them, variously, in their efforts to monitor conduct, calculate risk, or extract value. These classifications distribute value, rank people and things, and shape their future lives.
How is social order constituted and legitimated in a society ruled by digital classifiers and associated actuarial techniques? What do these developments mean for fundamental principles such as equality and fairness? What are the moral implications of looking at individuals through the lens of these new classificatory architectures? And how do we justify the use of techniques that are growing ever more efficient at predicting outcomes but are ever less amenable to human sense making?
Marion Fourcade has a BA in Sociology (Univ. of Paris 7) and in Economics (Univ. of Paris 1), a Ma in Social Sciences (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales), Ph.D. in Sociology (Harvard University). She is presently professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and an associate fellow of the Franco-German MaxPo Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies. Marion Fourcade upcoming book The Ordinal Society investigates new forms of social stratification and morality in the digital economy.