Every Relevant Detail

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

Abstract

A review of The Ordinal Society by Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy.

Part I provides an overview of Fourcade and Healy’s argument and introduces readers to ordinalizing as the process of reorganizing social worlds along the lines of determinate systems with rules-based competition. Part II dives deeper into the account of ordinalization, considering its key inputs— data and the intellectual technologies of social science that build digital ranking and matching. It then shows what ordinalization produces for its subjects. Part III situates The Ordinal Society in the universe of digital technology and society scholarship. It considers the strengths and limitations, particularly for legal readers, of work that describes and critiques the current state of affairs but remains vague about what precisely has gone wrong in our embrace of rationalizing social life—and thus what, if anything, ought to be done to set things right.

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