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Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy, The Ordinal Society

Céleste Bonnamy
p. 515-521
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Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy, The Ordinal Society, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2024, 373 pages, 978-067429668-8

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Crédits : Harvard University Press

1In The Ordinal Society, US-based sociologists Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy extend their longstanding intellectual collaboration by offering a social theory of digital capitalism. Their central thesis is that constant measurement and ranking have become the structuring principles of economic and social life. We now live, they argue, in a society where everything is measured—because anything can be rendered measurable through digital technologies. This is what they term the “ordinal society.” The book makes a significant contribution to the growing scholarship on digital capitalism, engaging directly with Shoshana Zuboff’s (2019) “surveillance capitalism”, but advancing a distinct perspective. While sharing Zuboff’s diagnosis that the digital economy relies on the production of a “behavioral surplus,” which sustains pervasive surveillance of individuals, Fourcade and Healy shift attention to the underlying social mechanism that enables such surplus: measurement itself, which they analyse as a distinctive “social form.” They unpack their analysis through seven chapters, partly building on previous work.

2In the first three chapters—“The Box of Delights,” “The Data Imperative,” and “Classification Situations”—Fourcade and Healy extend classical sociological concepts into the digital era. While they do not explicitly frame it this way, these chapters appear—at least to this reader—as highlighting three general features of the ordinal society: its affective grip, its compulsion to measure, and its classificatory consequences. Each chapter develops one of these dimensions in turn.

3First, in Chapter 1, they emphasize the positive emotional effect of novelty—what they call “delight”—that digital technologies generate among individuals, even as it obscures the harmful structures beneath. Mobilizing a “Maussian” perspective, they analyse social interactions in the ordinal society as “gift-like” (43). Digital technologies create the illusion of a gift—for example, a fitness application offering a free training programme—while hiding the counter-gift, namely the invisible data generated by use of the service—e.g. information about the length and intensity of daily training. Combining this Maussian lens with a Marxist reading, the authors underscore the centrality of sociability in digital capitalism, where network structures enable the exploitation of social interactions—what they call the “exfiltration of sociality.” (58) Thus, whereas Zuboff speaks of a “behavioral surplus,” Fourcade and Healy shift the focus to the concept of a “social substrate” (48), underlying the relational dimension of exploitation.

4Chapter 2 recalls that the obsession with counting had already been identified by Max Weber as a common trait of both public administration and capitalism. This long-term drive to measure everything underpins what Fourcade and Healy call the “data imperative,” defined as the naturalized belief “that the long-term profitability of organizations depends on the collection and exploitation of data” (76-77). As a consequence, organizations now accumulate data without any predetermined purpose: data are gathered simply because technology makes it possible, and because there is always the prospect of future monetization. The data imperative is thus at once a “normative ceremonial” (83) and an economic strategy. It also carries a learning dimension, since the imperative to extract insights from amassed data has fuelled the rise of opaque machine learning and artificial intelligence systems whose outputs are often unintelligible to human actors. In this way, the will to measure everything becomes both a ritualized practice and a structural logic of digital capitalism.

5In Chapter 3, Fourcade and Healy return to their earlier work on “classification situations” (Fourcade and Healy, 2013), defined as “positions in a general system of categories that are consequential for one’s life chances” (104). In the ordinal society, these situations—such as credit scoring—no longer rest primarily on demographic variables but are generated by opaque, non-human models. This “post-demographic classificatory infrastructure” (104) reshapes “the structure of ordinary sociability” (116), producing new classes and identities. The authors then advance one of their most stimulating theoretical propositions: extending Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of capital, they introduce a new form of capital specific to digital capitalism, which they call “eigencapital.” Derived from the mathematical concept of eigenvalues, eigencapital refers to the composite measures that situate an individual in social space by aggregating multiple forms of information. These informational resources constitute the eigencapital of individuals, enabling them to exercise certain forms of privilege within the ordinal society. Conversely, if industrial capitalism was marked by the “lumpenproletariat”, digital capitalism produces a “lumpenscoretariat”: a mass of individuals burdened with very low scores, and thus deprived of eigencapital and the privileges it affords.

6Together, these chapters show an ordinal society driven by delight and exfiltrated sociality, ruled by the data imperative, and stratified by eigencapital’s privileges and dispossessions.

7The next two chapters—“The Great Unbundling” and “Layered Financialization”—turn to the economic dimensions of the ordinal society, examining how measurement and ranking reshape market dynamics. In Chapter 4, Fourcade and Healy show how the obsession with data transforms property and ownership in consumer markets. A key feature is the commodification of data generated through the use of consumer goods. Buying a phone, for example, no longer entails a simple transfer of property: beyond the device itself, the phone continuously produces data that remain under the control of the seller, fuelling a secondary market of services derived from consumer use. The second major consequence of the data imperative and of classification situations is the emergence of new pricing mechanisms. Platform ecosystems make it possible to set individualized prices, continuously adjusted to consumer profiles. This practice is particularly salient in insurance markets, which rely heavily on the new forms of scoring unpacked in Chapter 3.

8Chapter 5 makes the case that digital capitalism and financialization are deeply entangled. This “layered financialization” rests on two main dynamics. First, the massive collection of data enables a proliferation of abstractions from commodities. This is visible in the multiplication of derivative products built on standardized commodities, which expand opportunities for speculation and enhance market liquidity. Second, the growth of digital technologies themselves is sustained by financial speculation. Tech companies are heavily reliant on capital markets, while the rise of cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance protocols illustrates the attempt—ultimately unsuccessful—to realize the dream of hyperliquidity of assets. In this way, the ordinal society extends financialization to new domains, with data serving both as collateral and as the substrate for new speculative instruments. What emerges from these two chapters is a portrait of markets where ownership, pricing, and even liquidity itself are reshaped by the relentless drive to extract and valorise data.

9Chapters 6 and 7—“The Road to Selfdom” and “Ordinal Citizenship”—shift the focus to the political sociology of the ordinal society. In Chapter 6, Fourcade and Healy assess the new conception of individuality in a world where measurement is the fundamental social mechanism. They argue that we are witnessing “a resurgent politics of authenticity, understood as the public assertion of a distinctive form of personal sovereignty” (189). This politics of authenticity manifests itself in three main ways. First, there has been a redefinition of privacy: whereas early internet culture equated privacy with anonymity, the rise of social media such as Facebook has normalized “privacy as authenticity,” encouraging users to appear under real rather than pseudonymous identities. Second, epistemic authority has shifted from institutionalized experts (academics, editors, journalists) to the market, expressed through algorithmic curation and the cultivation of individualized expertise. Fourcade and Healy highlight the emergence of a new “searching disposition,” whereby individuals “explore the web of information available to them” (210). Finally, this movement culminates in the rise of the “self-organization man”: a “sovereign individual”—as imagined in James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg’s 1977 book (a work famously admired by Peter Thiel, the US entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and conservative-libertarian thinker who has become one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley and, more recently, in Washington)—who seeks emancipation from state structures and acts primarily through market logics. In the ordinal society, this new ideology of “selfdom” marks the triumph of libertarianism, underpinned by a distinctly masculinist ethos. As the authors argue elsewhere (Fourcade and Healy, 2025), such sovereign individuals are not ordinary users but dominant figures—exemplified by Thiel or Elon Musk—who are able to capture institutions for their own benefit.

10Chapter 7 turns to a central question of political sociology: How do individuals belong to the ordinal society? Fourcade and Healy argue that “social inclusion depends on the universal and precise measurement of imprecise ideals of intrinsic equality, personal merit, and social value” (232). This condition of “ordinal citizenship” rests on a new vision of equality and merit, detached from collective identities and reduced to supposedly individual attributes—most prominently, one’s credit score. Here the critical stakes of the book come into full view. In the ordinal society, group characteristics are erased from the calculus of value. Yet they persist in structuring access to jobs, housing, or social services. Scoring systems that purport to evaluate only “individual” qualities thus inevitably reproduce social biases. The authors emphasize that neither educating people to “game” algorithms nor tweaking the algorithms themselves can overcome the structural inequalities that shape outcomes. In this sense, value as measured by scoring diverges fundamentally from any ethical notion of worth. What results is “a kind of universal personalization. Each and every person’s value is determined by methods that are in one sense quite general but in another very specifically tailored” (253). Taken together, Chapters 6 and 7 reveal the polity of the ordinal society: a polity without government or state, organized through the market, in which individuals’ social value is incessantly calculated through biased variables and opaque procedures.

11Building on Bourdieu’s theory of practice, the authors conclude by reflecting on the “twofold truth” of the ordinal society: individuals simultaneously aspire to succeed within the game of rankings and to stand outside of it. They further emphasize that the “will to progress” and the “will to power” are inseparable among ruling elites. The ordinal society illustrates this duality perfectly: the tech elites who design and own the infrastructures of ranking present themselves as advancing general social progress (the subjective truth), while in reality consolidating unprecedented forms of economic and political power (the objective truth). Finally, Fourcade and Healy underline that social scientists are not external observers of this process but active participants. Perhaps more than other groups, they harbour the dream of measuring the social world without technical or ethical limits—a dream that the ordinal society seems, paradoxically, to make more attainable.

12This book already reads like a classic. It is indispensable for anyone seeking a holistic understanding of digital capitalism, offering both a conceptual framework and a sociological genealogy of how ranking, scoring, and measurement reorganize social life. The central concept of the “ordinal society” is particularly convincing. Its strength lies in the way Fourcade and Healy anchor their argument in the canon of sociology: by drawing on Mauss, Weber, and Bourdieu, they remind us that the classical toolkit remains highly relevant for grasping phenomena as seemingly novel as digital technologies.

13At the same time, the book’s relationship to the literature on digital capitalism raises important questions. Fourcade and Healy explicitly use the expression but never directly theorize it, leaving aside ongoing debates on whether we should speak of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019), platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2016), or cognitive capitalism (Vercellone, 2005). One might even be grateful that they resisted the temptation to entitle the book Ordinal Capitalism. Still, their analysis implicitly suggests that the ordinal society is the social order emerging out of digital capitalism, which in turn raises the question of whether digital capitalism should be read as a “variety” of capitalism or as the next major stage in its historical development. The picture that emerges from their account is paradoxical: on the one hand, digital capitalism does appear as a new order; on the other, it is profoundly entangled with financial capitalism, which they document with precision, albeit without explicitly using the term.

14Finally, one of the most original—and ironic—twists of their theorization lies in their notion of eigencapital. Unlike other forms of capital, most notoriously Bourdieu’s symbolic capital, which resist operationalization, eigencapital is by design a quantitative measure. Its very definition rests on the aggregation of measurable traces into a composite score. In this sense, the ordinal society paradoxically makes the work of social scientists easier: it produces its own classificatory infrastructures, complete with ready-made—if partial and deeply problematic—metrics of privilege. This paradox captures both the intellectual provocation and the political urgency of Fourcade and Healy’s contribution: they invite us to recognize how deeply embedded we already are in an order of measurement, even as we strive to understand and critically assess it.

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Bibliographie

Fourcade, Marion and Kieran Healy. 2013. Classification Situations: Life-Chances in the Neoliberal Era. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 38(8): 559-572. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aos.2013.11.002

Fourcade, Marion and Kieran Healy. 2025. Tales of Light and Darkness: A Response to Comments on The Ordinal Society. Journal of Cultural Economy, 1-3. https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2025.2523767

Srnicek, Nick. 2016. Platform Capitalism. Hoboken: Wiley.

Vercellone, Carlo. 2005. The Hypothesis of Cognitive Capitalism. Paper presented at Towards a Cosmopolitan Marxism, Historical Materialism Annual Conference, Birkbeck College and SOAS, London, 4-6 November.

Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New-York: PublicAffairs.

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Céleste Bonnamy, « Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy, The Ordinal Society »Œconomia, 15-3 | 2025, 515-521.

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Céleste Bonnamy, « Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy, The Ordinal Society »Œconomia [En ligne], 15-3 | 2025, mis en ligne le 01 septembre 2025, consulté le 18 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/oeconomia/19287 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15caz

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Céleste Bonnamy

Sciences Po Lille, Ceraps. celeste.bonnamy@sciencespo-lille.eu

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