Marion Fourcade

Professor

474 Social Sciences

(510) 643-2707

Research Interests

Economic sociology, culture, political sociology, comparative methods, knowledge and science, digital society

Marion Fourcade received her PhD from Harvard University (2000) and taught at New York University and Princeton University before joining the Berkeley sociology department in 2003. A comparative sociologist by training and taste, she is interested in variations in economic and political knowledge and practice across nations. Fourcade is the author of Economists and Societies (Princeton University Press 2009), which explores the distinctive character of the discipline and profession of economics in three countries. A second book, The Ordinal Society (with Kieran Healy, forthcoming, Harvard University Press) investigates new forms of social stratification and morality in the digital economy. Other research focuses on the valuation of nature in comparative perspective; algorithmic societies (with Jenna Burrell; with Fleur Johns; with Henry Farrell); the digitization of states (with Jeff Gordon) and their moral regulation by financial markets (with Caleb Scoville); primitive accumulation in digital capitalism (with Daniel Kluttz); the comparative study of political organization (with Evan Schofer and Brian Lande); the microsociology of courtroom exchanges (with Roi Livne); the sociology of economics, with Etienne Ollion and Yann Algan, and with Rakesh Khurana; the politics of wine classifications in France and the United States (with Rebecca Elliott and Olivier Jacquet).

Fourcade is also an External Scientific member of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, and a past President of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (2016).

Representative Publications

2024 The Ordinal Society (with Kieran Healy). Harvard University Press.

2021 Pandemic Exposures. Economy and Society in the Time of Coronavirus. (edited, with Didier Fassin, HAU).

2009 Economists and Societies: Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain and France, 1890s-1990s (Princeton University Press)

Selected articles, book chapters and essays

Forth "Rationalized Stratification" (with Kieran Healy) In N. Dahir, C. Daviss and D. Grusky (eds) Inequality Reader.
2023 "We are all political economists now." Socioeconomic Review (part of symposium on the field of socio-economics)
2023 "The Moral Economy of High-Tech Modernism." (with Henry Farrell), Daedalus.
2021 "The Society of Algorithms" (with Jenna Burrell). Annual Review of Sociology.
2021 "Ordinal Citizenship." British Journal of Sociology.
2020 "Learning Like a State: Statecraft In the Digital Era" (with Jeffrey Gordon). Journal of Law and Political Economy.
2020 "Loops, Ladders and Links: The Recursivity of Social and Machine Learning" (with Fleur Johns). Theory and Society.
2020 "A Maussian bargain: Accumulation by Gift in Digital Capitalism" (with Daniel Kluttz). Big Data and Society.
2018 "Economics: The View From Below." Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics 154(5).
2017 "The Fly and the Cookie: On the Moral Economy of 21st Century Capitalism." (SASE Presidential Lecture). Socio-Economic Review 15(3): 662-678.
2017 "Seeing Like a Market" (with Kieran Healy). Socio-Economic Review 15(1): 9-29.
2017 "The Social Trajectory of a Finance Professor and the Common Sense of Capital." (with Rakesh Khurana). History of Political Economy 49(2): 347-381.
2017 "State Metrology: The Rating of Sovereigns and the Judgment of Nations." In Kimberly Morgan and Ann Orloff, The Many Hands of the State, Cambridge University Press.
2016 "Ordinalization", Sociological Theory 34(3) 175-195
2016 “Political Structures and Political Mores: Varieties of Politics in Comparative Perspective.” (with Evan Schofer). Sociological Science 3: 413-443.
2016 “Political Space and the Space of Polities. Doing Politics Across Nations.” (with Brian Lande and Evan Schofer) Poetics 55: 1-18.
2015 "The Superiority of Economists" (with Etienne Ollion and Yann Algan), Journal of Economic Perspectives 29(1): 89-114.
2013 "Classification Situations: Life Chances in Neoliberal Society." (with Kieran Healy) Accounting, Organizations and Society 38: 559-572.
2013 “From Social Control to Financial Economics: The Linked Ecologies of Economics and Business in Twentieth-Century America.” (with Rakesh Khurana) Theory and Society 42: 121-159.
2012 “The Vile and the Noble: On the Relationship between Natural and Social Classifications in the French Wine World.” The Sociological Quarterly 53: 524-545.
2011 "Cents and Sensibility: Economic Values and the Nature of ‘Nature’ in France and America." American Journal of Sociology 116(6): 1721-1777
2007 "Theories of Markets, Theories of Society" American Behavioral Scientist 50(8): 1015-1034.
2007 "Moral Views of Market Society" Annual Review of Sociology 33: 285-311 (with Kieran Healy).
2006 "The Construction of a Global Profession: The Transnationalization of Economics." American Journal of Sociology 112(1): 145-195.
2002 "The Rebirth of the Liberal Creed: Paths to Neoliberalism in Four Countries." American Journal of Sociology 108(9): 533-579 (with Sarah Babb).
2001 "The Structural Contexts of Civic Engagement: Voluntary Association Membership in Comparative Perspective." American Sociological Review 66(6): 806-828 (with Evan Schofer).
2001 "Politics, Institutional Structures and the Rise of Economics: A Comparative Study." Theory and Society 30(3): 397-447.