Seeing like a market

By M. Fourcade, Kieran Healy. 2016

534 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Socio-Economic Review, 2017, Vol. 15, No. 1, 9–29 doi: 10.1093/ser/mww033 Advance Access Publication Date: 8 December 2016 Article Article Seeing like a market Marion Fourcade 1, * and Kieran Healy 2, * University of California, Berkeley and 2 Duke University *Correspondence: fourcade@berkeley.edu; kjhealy@soc.duke.edu Abstract What do markets see when they look at people? Information dragnets increasingly yield huge quantities of individual-level data, which are analyzed to sort and slot people into categories of taste, riskiness or worth. These tools deepen the reach of the market and define new strategies of profit-making. We present a new theoretical framework for understanding their development. We argue that (a) modern organ- izations follow an institutional data imperative to collect as much data as possible; (b) as a result of the analysis and use of this data, individuals accrue a form of capital flowing from their positions as measured by various digital scoring and ranking methods; and (c) the facticity of these scoring methods makes them organizational devices with potentially stratifying effects. They offer firms new opportunities to structure and price offerings to consumers. For individuals, they create classification situations that identify shared life-chances in product and service markets. We dis- cuss the implications of these processes and argue that they tend toward a new economy of moral judgment, where outcomes are experienced as morally deserved positions based on prior good actions and good tastes, as measured and classified by this new infrastructure of data collection and analysis. Key words: classification, big data, technology, markets, institutions, morality JEL classification: A13, O33 Across institutional domains, tracking and measurement is expanding and becoming ever more fine-grained (Limn, 2012; Gillespie et al., 2014; Pasquale, 2015). We see it in everyday consumption, in housing and credit markets, in health, employment, education (Cottom, 2016), social relations, including intimate ones (Levy, 2015), legal services, and even into political life (Ziewitz, 2016) and the private sphere (Neff and Nafus, 2016). Sociologists studying the state, technology and the market have sought to describe and understand these trends in different ways. This article proposes a framework to analytically unify their con- cerns, and to grasp the implications of contemporary technological developments for proc- esses of inequality and stratification. C The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press and the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. V All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com

Subfields: Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8281f42494a03e6f73e851645c2611e728d59df7

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Citations in the corpus

The Society of Algorithms (2021, background): “The institutionalization of a “data imperative” (Fourcade & Healy 2017) across organizations of all types was game-changing, not only for the tech industry but for capitalism in general.”
Platform Real Estate: theory and practice of new urban real estate markets (2018, background): “From the perspective of the user, the PRE stack offers a new ‘way of seeing’ for market participants (Fourcade & Healy, 2016) as they navigate user pathways between the outer interfaces of the PRE stack and the central market concerns.”
Towards a critical race methodology in algorithmic fairness (2019, background): “Although in the modern neoliberal era, markets have been an emerging force in categorization and segmentation [39], the entity tasked with categorization above all others has been the state.”
Algorithms at Work: The New Contested Terrain of Control (2020, background): “…forms of recording under technical and bureaucratic control, however, since algorithmic recording greatly expands previous con-trol mechanisms in scope and frequency, workers may experience a loss of privacy (Anteby & Chan, 2018; Fourcade & Healy, 2016; Rosenblat & Stark, 2016; Tufekci, 2014).”
The Internet of Landlords: Digital Platforms and New Mechanisms of Rentier Capitalism (2020, background): “The practice of acquiring data ﬁ rst — indeed, of designing things for the primary purpose of data extraction — and then (hopefully) ﬁ guring out how to valorise it later is now normal for organisations following the platform model (Fourcade and Healy 2017).”
Categories all the way down (2017, unknown): “They also have a phenomenological aspect (Fourcade and Healy 2016).”
Big Data Surveillance: The Case of Policing (2017, background): “As individuals leave more digital traces, a “new economy of moral judgement” (Fourcade and Healy 2017:24) becomes possible.”