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 Anschluss an Fourcade (2016) identifizieren wir drei solcher Klassifikationsprinzipien: nominale Typologien, kardinale Zählungen und ordinale Rankings. Unsere These ist, dass die gegenwärtigen Gesellschaften durch eine Logik der Ordinalisierung gekennzeichnet sind. Ausdruck dieser Ordinalisierung sind die zunehmende Fluidität von Identitäten, die verbreitete Verwendung von Verfahren der Risikoeinschätzung und eine wachsende politische Polarisierung entlang einer einzigen Dimension, der links/rechts-Achse. Dieser Prozess verläuft jedoch ungleichförmig und ist auch umstritten. Die weiterhin bestehende Bedeutung nominal unterschiedener Gruppen („race“ ist dafür das herausragende Beispiel), der Widerstand, der sich gegen eine um sich greifende Kommensurierung formiert, und eine populistische „kardinale Revolte“, die numerische Mehrheiten zum alleinigen Maßstab für politische Legitimität erklärt, repräsentieren unterschiedliche und mehr oder weniger explizite Formen des Unbehagens an einer zunehmend ordinalisierten Moderne. Unser Zugang liefert einen theoretischen Rahmen, der es erlaubt, den gesellschaftlichen Wandel wie auch Unterschiede zwischen den Ländern in Termini der Klassen von Klassifikationen zu erfassen, die Gesellschaften in Bewegung setzen.
Abstract
Although a rich literature examines struggles between social actors about the content and deployment of categories across institutional domains, we argue that there are also conflicts about underlying metalevel principles of how to carry out the classification process. Following Fourcade (2016), we identify three such principles: nominal typologies, cardinal counts, and ordinal rankings. We argue that contemporary societies are marked by a general logic of “ordinalization” as identities become more fluid, actuarial methods generalize widely, and politics is polarized on a single left–right axis. This process is uneven and contested, however. The continued relevance of nominal groupings (race is a prime example), social resistance against commensuration, and a populist “cardinal revolt” that celebrates the legitimacy of simple numerical majorities represent different, and more or less explicit, forms of discontent with the progress of an ordinalized modernity. Approaching classification in this way provides a framework for characterizing social change and cross-national differences in terms of the classes of classifications that societies set in motion.
Notes
Für eine weitergehende Diskussion siehe Fourcade (2016).
Wie Polanyi (2001) gezeigt hat, löste diese Kardinalisierung eine Gegenbewegung gegen die Kommodifizierung aus.
Auch in anderen Bereichen ist man in Frankreich offensichtlich weniger gewillt, die Blackbox der Expertenurteile zu öffnen: In einer Richtlinie für Psychiater zur Identifikation gefährlicher Patienten warnte das französische Gesundheitsministerium kürzlich davor, „gewisse Skalen zur Vorhersage von Gefährlichkeit“ aus dem anglo-amerikanischen Kontext zu übernehmen (Direction générale de la santé 2012, S. 15).
Arthur Stinchcombe machte 1967 in seinem Klassiker Constructing Social Theories nebenbei die Bemerkung, dass „depressive disorders … account for a relatively small part of mental disease and thus do not affect the overall rates [of mental illness] very much“. Schizophrenie, die nur 1 % der Bevölkerung betrifft, „accounts for the bulk of the variation in overall mental disease rates“ (Stinchcombe 1987, S. 26). Es ist kaum vorstellbar, dass eine solche Behauptung heute noch aufgestellt würde, da nach den offiziellen Kriterien für Depression rund 20 % der Amerikanerinnen und Amerikaner mindestens einmal während ihres Lebens davon betroffen sind (Kessler und Bromet 2013).
Dieser Begriff ist eine Paraphrase von Erving Goffmans (1972) Begriff der „Scheinnormalität“.
Literatur
Abascal, Maria. 2015. Us and them: Black-white relations in the wake of hispanic population growth. American Sociological Review 80:789–813.
Appadurai, Arjun. 2006. Fear of small numbers. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Baldassarri, Delia, und Andrew Gelman. 2008. Partisans without constraint: Political polarization and trends in American public opinion. American Journal of Sociology 114:408–46.
De Beauvoir, Simone. 1989. The second sex. New York, NY: Vintage.
Bell, Daniel. 1996. The cultural contradictions of capitalism. 20th Anniversary. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Boltanski, Luc, und Eve Chiapello. 2005. The new spirit of capitalism. London, UK: Verso.
Boltanski, Luc, und Laurent Thévenot. 2006. On justification: Economies of worth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Boltanski, Luc, und Arnaud Esquerre. 2016. The economic life of things. New Left Review (98):31–54.
Bonikowski, Bart. 2017. Ethno-nationalist populism and the mobilization of collective resentment. The British Journal of Sociology 68:181–213.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Brubaker, Rogers. 2016. Trans: Gender and race in an age of unsettled identities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Brubaker, Rogers. 2017. Why populism? Theory and Society 46:357–85.
Carson, John. 2007. The measure of merit: Talents, intelligence, and inequality in the French and American Republics, 1750–1940. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Debord, Guy. 2000. Society of the spectacle. Detroit, MI: Black & Red.
Direction générale de la santé. 2012. Plan psychiatrie et santé mentale, 2011–2015. Paris, Frankreich: Direction générale de la santé.
Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and danger: An analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo. London, UK: Routledge.
Durkheim, Emile. 1997. Suicide. New York, NY: The Free Press.
Durkheim, Emile, und Marcel Mauss. 1987. Über einige Formen von Klassifikation. Ein Beitrag zur Erforschung der kollektiven Vorstellungen. In Emile Durkheim. Schriften zur Soziologie der Erkenntnis, Hrsg. Hans Joas, 169–256. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.
Elliott, Carl. 2004. Better than well: American medicine meets the American dream. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.
Emigh, Rebecca Jean, Dylan Riley und Patricia Ahmed. 2016. Changes in censuses from imperialist to welfare states: How societies and states count. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
England, Paula, Emma Mishel und Monica L. Caudillo. 2016. Increases in sex with same-sex partners and bisexual identity across cohorts of women (but not men). Sociological Science 3:951–970.
Espeland, Wendy Nelson, und Mitchell L. Stevens. 1998. Commensuration as a social process. Annual Review of Sociology 24(1):313–343.
Espeland, Wendy Nelson, und Michael Sauder. 2007. Rankings and reactivity: How public measures recreate social worlds. American Journal of Sociology 113:1–40.
Esposito, Elena, und David Stark. 2019. What’s observed in a rating? Rankings as orientation in the face of uncertainty. Theory, Culture & Society 36: 3–26.
Eubanks, Virginia. 2017. Automating inequality. How high-tech tools profile, police and punish the poor. New York, NY: St Martin’s Press.
Eyal, Gil. 2010. The autism matrix. Cambridge, MA: Polity.
Fourcade, Marion. 2012. The vile and the noble. The Sociological Quarterly 53:524–545.
Fourcade, Marion. 2016. Ordinalization. Sociological Theory 34:175–195.
Fourcade, Marion, und Kieran Healy. 2013. Classification situations: Life-chances in the neoliberal era. Accounting, Organizations and Society 38:559–572.
Fourcade, Marion, und Kieran Healy. 2014. Credit scores and the moralization of inequality. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association.
Gerlitz, Carolin, und Celia Lury. 2014. Social media and self-evaluating assemblages: On numbers, orderings and values. Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 15: 174–188.
Goffman, Erving. 1972. Stigma. Über Techniken der Bewältigung beschädigter Identität. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.
Grob, Gerald N. 1991. From asylum to community: Mental health policy in modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hirschman, Daniel, Ellen Berrey und Fiona Rose-Greenland. 2016. Dequantifying diversity: Affirmative action and admissions at the University of Michigan. Theory and Society 45:265–301.
Horwitz, Allan V. 2001. Creating mental illness. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Jansen, Robert S. 2011. Populist mobilization: A new theoretical approach to populism. Sociological Theory 29:75–96.
Johnson, Austin H. 2019. Rejecting, reframing, and reintroducing: Trans people’s strategic engagement with the medicalisation of gender dysphoria. Sociology of Health & Illness 41:517–532.
Johnston, Josée. 2008. The citizen-consumer hybrid: Ideological tensions and the case of whole foods market. Theory and Society 37:229–270.
Kessler, Ronald C., und Evelyn J. Bromet. 2013. The epidemiology of depression across cultures. Annual Review of Public Health 34:119–138.
King, Marissa D., Jennifer Jennings und Jason M. Fletcher. 2014. Medical adaptation to academic pressure schooling, stimulant use, and socioeconomic Status. American Sociological Review 79:1039–1066.
Kinsey, Alfred C., Wardell B. Pomeroy und Clyde E. Martin. 1998. Sexual behavior in the human male. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Krippner, Greta R. 2017. Democracy of credit: Ownership and the politics of credit access in late twentieth-century America. American Journal of Sociology 123:1–47.
Labbé, Thomas. 2011. La revendication d’un terroir viticole: La Côte-de-Beaune à la fin du XVIIIe siècle. Histoire & Sociétés Rurales 35: 99–126.
Lakoff, George. 2002. Moral politics: How liberals and conservatives Think. 2nd ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Lamont, Michèle. 1992. Money, morals, and manners: The culture of the French and the American upper-middle class. Chicago und London: University of Chicago Press.
Lamont, Michèle. 2000. The dignity of working men: Morality and the boundaries of race, class, and immigration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Liebler, Carolyn A., Sonya R. Porter, Leticia E. Fernandez, James M. Noon und Sharon R. Ennis. 2017. America’s churning races: Race and ethnicity response changes between census 2000 and the 2010 census. Demography 54:259–284.
Loveman, Mara. 2014. National colors: Racial classification and the state in Latin America. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Marx, Karl. 1972. Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Erster Band, Berlin: Dietz Verlag.
Monk, Ellis P. 2015. The cost of color: Skin color, discrimination, and health among African-Americans. American Journal of Sociology 121:396–444.
Mora, G. Cristina. 2014. Cross-field effects and ethnic classification. American Sociological Review 79:183–210.
Morning, Ann. 2008. Ethnic classification in global perspective: A cross-national survey of the 2000 census round. Population Research and Policy Review 27:239–272.
Morning, Ann. 2014. Does genomics challenge the social construction of race? Sociological Theory 32:189–207.
Murphy, Mike. 2018. Jeff Bezos thinks his fortune is best spent in space. Market Watch. 1. Mai. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/jeff-bezos-thinks-his-fortune-is-best-spent-in-space-2018-05-01 (Zugegriffen: 05. Sept. 2019).
O’Neil, Cathy. 2016. Weapons of math destruction: How big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. New York, NY: Crown.
Padawer, Ruth. 2014. When women become men at Wellesley. The New York Times, October 15.
Phillips, Christopher. 2019. Scouting and scoring: How we know what we know about baseball. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Piore, Michael J., und Charles F. Sabel. 1984. The second industrial divide: Possibilities for prosperity. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Polanyi, Karl. 2001. The great transformation. 2nd ed. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Porter, Theodore M. 1996. Trust in numbers: The pursuit of objectivity in science and public life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Powell, Justin J. W. 2010. Change in disability classification: Redrawing categorical boundaries in special education in the United States and Germany, 1920–2005. Comparative Sociology 9:241–267.
Rodríguez-Muñiz, Michael. 2017. Cultivating consent: Nonstate leaders and the orchestration of state legibility. American Journal of Sociology 123:385–425.
Rose, Nikolas, und Joelle M. Abi-Rached. 2013. Neuro: The new brain sciences and the management of the mind. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Roth, Wendy D., und Biorn Ivemark. 2018. Genetic options: The impact of genetic ancestry testing on consumers’ racial and ethnic identities. American Journal of Sociology 124:150–184.
Schiebinger, Londa L. 1993. Nature’s body: Gender in the making of modern science. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Schnittker, Jason. 2017. The diagnostic system: Why the classification of psychiatric disorders is necessary, difficult, and never settled. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Schradie, Jen. 2019. The revolution that wasn’t. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Schüll, Natasha Dow. 2016. Data for life: Wearable technology and the design of self-care. BioSocieties 11:317–333.
Scott, James. 1998. Seeing like a state. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Scoville, Caleb. 2019. Hydraulic society and a ‘stupid little fish’: Toward a historical ontology of endangerment. Theory and Society 48:1–37.
Simon, Jonathan. 1988. The ideological effects of actuarial practices. Law & Society Review 22:771–800.
Skocpol, Theda, und Vanessa Williamson. 2016. The Tea Party and the remaking of republican conservatism. 2nd ed. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Star, Susan Leigh, und James R. Griesemer. 1989. Institutional ecology, translations and boundary objects: Amateurs and professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39. Social Studies of Science 19:387–420.
Starr, Paul. 1992. Social categories and claims in the liberal state. Social Research 59:263–295.
Stinchcombe, Arthur L. 1987. Constructing social theories. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Telles, Edward. 2004. Race in another America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Tilly, Charles. 1990. Coercion, capital, and European states: AD 990-1990. Cambridge, UK: Blackwell.
Weyland, Kurt. 2013. The threat from the populist left. Journal of Democracy 24:18–32.
Whooley, Owen. 2016. Measuring mental disorders: The failed commensuration project of DSM‑5. Social Science & Medicine 166:33–40.
Wylie, Christopher. 2019. Mindf*ck. Cambridge Analytica and the plot to break America. New York, NY: Random House.
Zerubavel, Eviatar. 1996. Lumping and splitting: Notes on social classification. Sociological Forum 11:421–433.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Der Beitrag orientiert sich in Struktur und Inhalt an Fourcade (2016).
Übersetzung
Martin Bühler und Bettina Heintz
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Barnard, A.V., Fourcade, M. Das Unbehagen an der Ordinalisierung. Köln Z Soziol 73 (Suppl 1), 113–135 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11577-021-00743-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11577-021-00743-1