Living by the Score

: Classificatory Power and Digital Infrastructures of Inequality

Abstract

This PhD by publication curates 14 journal articles and chapters published between
1997 and 2025, selected from a corpus of 180 published across four decades, to
show how digital classification increasingly produces and sustains social inequality.
The selection maximises thematic coherence and methodological range across four
strands: the methodological implications of digitisation for sociological research;
data infrastructures and metric governance; elite spatial strategies and cultures of
wealth; and the political imaginaries that animate technological exit and rule by code. A 1997 prefigurative article employs social science fiction, drawing on William
Gibson as a social theorist, to anticipate later concerns about how computational
logics and commercial data practices influence institutional reasoning.
Across the portfolio, metrics, rankings and predictive scores are treated not as
neutral phenomena but as instruments that order people, places and practices.
Classificatory systems are obviously not the sole engines of stratification; yet they
now act as influential infrastructures that interact with markets, states, and
organisations to shape allocation, visibility and priority-setting in everyday and
institutional life. Empirically, the work tracks classification in action across various domains: early analyses of geodemographics; studies of higher education’s metric assemblages;investigations of algorithmic curation and cultural legitimacy; and research that reverses the classificatory gaze to examine conflict between elites in London’s Alpha Territories and the volumetric politics of basement urbanism. Later outputs interrogate ideological underpinnings among segments of the technology elite behind these systems, including governance visions, exit strategies and justificatory narratives that seek to naturalise computational authority.
Methodologically, the research combines statistical and geospatial analysis,
qualitative interviewing, ethnography and the repurposing of administrative and
commercial datasets. It also includes methodological papers that examine how digital classification, big data and predictive analytics are reshaping social research methods. The candidate’s contributions include conceptual framing, study design, data synthesis and the articulation of a unifying analytic that links data infrastructures to elite strategies.

Date of Award	20 Jan 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Karen West (Supervisor)