Das Unbehagen an der Ordinalisierung

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.