Marion Fourcade

• University of California, Berkeley

Voluntary association membership varies dramatically among nations, by both the number and the type of associations that people join. Two distinctions account for much of this variation: (1) the distinction between statist versus nonstatist (sometimes called “liberal”) societies, and (2) the distinction between corporate versus noncorporate societi...

Correspondence: marion.fourcade@gmail.com The Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) was born in 1989 out of the normative aspiration to anchor economic institutions and processes in communitarian values as opposed to egoistic ones. The name socioeconomics was chosen explicitly to signal this commitment, and mark a rejection, almost...

Zusammenfassung Es gibt eine breite Literatur, die die Auseinandersetzungen untersucht, die in vielen institutionellen Kontexten über den Inhalt und Einsatz von Kategorien geführt werden. Demgegenüber argumentieren wir, dass nicht nur die Art der Kategorien umstritten ist, sondern auch die ihnen zugrundeliegenden Klassifikationsprinzipien. Im Ansch...

Swimming in Honey - Iddo Tavory, 2016. Summoned. Identification and Religious Life in a Jewish Neighborhood (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2016) - Volume 58 Issue 3 - Marion Fourcade

This SASE Presidential address given at UC Berkeley in 2016 discusses the entanglement between morality and capitalism. Moral sentiments-and especially what Adam Smith called the sense of propriety, the sense of merit and the sense of justice-play a productive role in organizing the extraction of economic value. Conversely, relative valuations in t...

This paper traces the career of Michael Jensen, a Chicago finance PhD turned Harvard Business School professor to reveal the intellectual and social conditions that enabled the emergence and institutionalization of what we call the “neoliberal common sense of capital,” what others have called the “shareholder value” view of the American firm. Jense...

What do markets see when they look at people? Information dragnets increasingly yield huge quantities of individual-level data, which is analyzed to sort and slot people into categories of taste, riskiness, or worth. Developed to better understand and improve customer experience, these tools deepen the reach of the market and define new strategies...

This article examines the stratifying effects of economic classifications. We argue that in the neoliberal era market institutions increasingly use actuarial techniques to split and sort individuals into classification situations that shape life-chances. While this is a general and increasingly pervasive process, our main empirical illustration com...

Scores and classifications are dual to one another. Cardinal and ordinal measures are repeatedly used to produce nominal classifications of essential worth. Conversely, presumptively natural kinds provide the basis for new measurement and scoring systems. Over time, the iterative application of nominal classifications and quantifying measures produ...

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 und...

Undoing the Undoing of the Demos - Brown Wendy , Undoing the Demos. Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York, Zone Books, 2015) - Volume 57 Issue 3 - Marion Fourcade

We can think of three basic principles of classificatory judgment for comparing things and people. I call these judgments nominal (oriented to essence), cardinal (oriented to quantities), and ordinal (oriented to relative positions). Most social orders throughout history are organized around the intersection of these different types. In line with t...

We offer an integrated study of political participation, bridging the gap between the literatures on civic engagement and social movements. Historically evolved institutions and culture generate different configurations of the political domain, shaping the meaning and forms of political activity in different societies. The structuration of the poli...

In this essay, we investigate the dominant position of economics within the network of the social sciences in the United States. We begin by documenting the relative insularity of economics, using bibliometric data. Next we analyze the tight management of the field from the top down, which gives economics its characteristic hierarchical structure....

In this essay, we analyze the dominant position of economics within the network of the social sciences in the United States. We begin by documenting the relative insularity of economics, using bibliometric data. Next we analyze the tight management of the field from the top down, which gives economics its characteristic hierarchical structure. Econ...

This article examines the stratifying effects of economic classifications. We argue that in the neoliberal era market institutions increasingly use actuarial techniques to split and sort individuals into classification situations that shape life-chances. While this is a general and increasingly pervasive process, our main empirical illustration com...

This article presents the results of a poll made among the members of the editorial and advisory boards of Valuation Studies. The purpose is to overview the topic that is the remit of the new journal. The poll focused on three questions: 1. Why is the study of valuation topical? 2. What specific issues related to valuation are the most pressing one...

Karl Marx observed long ago that all economic struggles invite moral struggles, or masquerade as such. The reverse may be true, too: deep moral–political conflicts may be waged through the manipulation of economic resources and the design of policy devices. Using the recent financial and Eurozone crises as empirical backgrounds, the short papers pr...

Karl Marx observed long ago that all economic struggles invite moral struggles, or masquerade as such. The reverse may be true, too: deep moral-political conflicts may be waged through the manipulation of economic resources and the design of policy devices. Using the recent financial and Eurozone crises as empirical backgrounds, the short papers pr...

In this short piece, I return to the articles in this special issue to examine the relationship between the material reality of the concept of BRICs and its symbolic place in the world economy today. Aside from the facts that the BRIC countries have been ready to depart from the Washington consensus on certain key elements (state intervention), whi...

Wie Pierre Bourdieu einst bemerkte, muss jedes Verständnis sowohl der Form, in der sich ein bestimmtes Feld darstellt, als auch der hinter seiner Dynamik liegenden Kräfte und der Bedingungen, die seine Zukunft formen, mit einer Hinwendung auf die Geschichte dieses Felds beginnen – im Spezielleren muss man die Entstehungsbedingungen (die Genesis) de...

This article relies on an analysis of the institutionalization of economics worldwide during the twentieth century to argue that the logic of professional development in this particular field has come to be increasingly defined in global terms. Connections to (mainly) US-based standards of work and professional practice are routinely used in the lo...

This article examines the concept of terroir—a French word that captures the correspondence between the physical and human features of a place and the character of its agricultural products. Tied to the protection of economic rents threatened by competition and fraud, the practice of classifying certain lands, grapes, and properties both substantiv...

OntheCommodificationofBodyParts - SteinerPhilippe, La Transplantation d’organes. Un commerce nouveau entre les êtres humains (Paris, Gallimard, 2010). - Volume 51 Issue 3 - Marion Fourcade

How do we attribute a monetary value to intangible things? This article offers a general sociological approach to this question, using the economic value of nature as a paradigmatic case, and oil spills litigations in France and the United States as real world empirical illustrations. It suggests that a full-blown sociology of economic valuation mu...

Economists and Societiesis the first book to systematically compare the profession of economics in the United States, Britain, and France, and to explain why economics, far from being a uniform science, differs in important ways among these three countries. Drawing on in-depth interviews with economists, institutional analysis, and a wealth of scho...

This article draws on historical material to examine the co-evolution of economic science and business education over the course of the twentieth century, showing that fields evolve not only through internal struggles but also through struggles taking place in adjacent fields. More specifically, we argue that the scientific strategies of business s...

Upon what kind of moral order does capitalism rest? Conversely, does the market give rise to a distinctive set of beliefs, habits, and social bonds? These questions are certainly as old as social science itself. In this review, we evaluate how today's scholarship approaches the relationship between markets and the moral order. We begin with Hirschm...

Starting from the objectively dominant position of the sociology of markets in economic sociology, this article suggests that markets have served as a privileged terrain for the development and application of general theoretical arguments about the shape of the social order. I offer a critical overview of the sociology of markets as it relates to o...

The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences is an extraordinary book. It is extraordinary for the sheer amount of intellectual ground covered in the individual chapters and for its significance. By historicizing and provincializing each human science in turn, The Politics of Method opens the door to a true reflexivity, which is the necessary condi...

The articles by Carruthers and Halliday and by Hagan, Levi, and Ferrales in the present issue of Law and Social Inquiry provide a wonderful opportunity to carry out a brief reflection on the broader field of research on globalization and law. As the discussant and organizer/chair, respectively, of a panel on “Law between Globalization and National...

This article relies on an analysis of the institutionalization of economics worldwide during the 20th century to argue that the logic of professional development in this particular field has come to be increasingly defined in global terms. Connections to ( mainly) U.S.based standards of work and professional practice are routinely used in the local...

List of Abbreviations vii List of Tables and Figures ix Preface xiii CHAPTER ONE: Neoliberalism and the Globalization of Economic Expertise 1 CHAPTER TWO: The Origin of Mexican Economic 23 CHAPTER THREE: Marxism, Populism, and Private-Sector Reaction: The Splitting of Mexican Economic 48 CHAPTER FOUR: The Mexican Miracle and Its Policy Paradigm: 19...

Since the 1970s, market-based economic policies have been institutionalized as a nearly global policy paradigm. Using four national case studies, this article shows that economic and financial globalization played a critical role in fostering the transition to neoliberal policies, but that local institutional conditions were decisive in shaping the...

Voluntary association membership varies dramatically among nations, by both the number and the type of associations that people join. Two distinctions account for much of this variation: (1) the distinction between statist versus nonstatist (sometimes called "liberal") societies, and (2) the distinction between corporate versus noncorporate societi...

Our modernity has been a witness to the dramatic rise of economics around the world. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, the study of the economy has evolved from a loose discursive "field," with no clear and identifiable boundaries, into a fully "professionalized" enterprise, relying on both a coherent and highly formalized disciplinary fr...

Thesis (Ph. D., Department of Sociology)--Harvard University, 2000. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 379-413).