Seeing like a market

Abstract

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