Classifications and Social Groups: Old and New Systems Compared

On 4 and 5 September 2025, USI will host the annual conference of the Economic Sociology Network of the Swiss Sociological Association, titled "From Classes to Classifications: How new (and Old) Systems of classification, scoring, segmentation, and matching shape social groups and markets", organised by the network’s coordinators Prof. Lena Pellandini-Simanyi (USI) and Prof. Philip Balsiger (University of Neuchatel), in collaboration with the Swiss National Science Foundation project “Social Patterning of Economic Subjectivities and the Digital Transformation of Retail Finance in Switzerland” conducted at USI.

This year’s theme is “From classes to classifications: How new (and old) systems of ranking, scoring, segmentation and matching shape social groups and markets”.

The conference will feature Professor Markus Giesler (Schulich School of Business, York University, Canada) and Professor Karen Lai (Durham University, United Kingdom) as keynote speakers and a special session dedicated to the work of Professor Donald MacKenzie (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom). The encounter will open with a speech by the Pro-Rector for Education and Students' Experience Prof. Gabriele Balbi.

The conference will reflect on the growing role of algorithms in creating everyday experiences, social groups and inequalities. This research strand originally focused on how people are classified for the purposes of credit scoring and how such classifications affect their objective economic life chances. In recent years, however, the research scope has expanded to look at classification more broadly, such classification used by companies for targeting advertisements and media contents; predictive algorithms used by the policy to foresee who is more likely to commit a crime; or by HR departments to predict who will make a good employee. These classifications increasingly determine people’s access to economic opportunities and cultural contents, and represent a new force in shaping social groups in society.

The conference will explore these processes, focusing among others, on the following aspects:

• How do organisations design and use data infrastructures to create consumer groupings and how do they allocate specific outputs – such as credit scores, advertising contents, and even user experiences - to specific consumers?
• What are the social groups “seen” by algorithms beyond the traditional groups based on age, gender, social class? How are media contents, advertising and product offers customised and matched for these groups?
• What kinds of uses and users do (different) platforms assume and encourage, often unintentionally?
• What forms of stratification, inequalities, exclusion but also, inclusion, are created through algorithmic classifications and matching?

Please refer to the conference website for the Call for Papers, open until 1 April 2025, and further details.