Dissertation Research: The scientization of risk management in the finance industry through credit scoring technology and the production of socio-economic order in the U.S.

这笔科学和技术论文改进补助金将资助美国和法国的研究，以完成一篇论文，该论文将寻求将STS研究人员开发的用于分析科学实践和技术发展的工具扩展到经济技术研究。经济技术不是制造事实，而是为构建理性的资本主义市场创造信息。正如STS展示了如何通过社会技术实践为自然界构建普遍秩序一样，这个项目将展示这些相同的实践如何同样地产生有助于稳定社会世界秩序的对象(如信用评分)。经济技术建设背后的智力、组织、基础设施和政治过程，与STS传统上分析的过程惊人地相似。在目前的情况下，美国统计局的评分系统源于整合来自信用局金融机构的全国信用偿还数据的信息基础设施、单一创造性分析公司(.Fair Isaac Corporation)的专有统计模型和利润最大化的精神之间的联系。在考分局得分的历史上，核心是运筹学的故事。运筹学是一种源自物理学和军事的科学化认识方式，如何被费尔艾萨克这样的公司转变为商业产品，并在20世纪后半叶出售给金融行业，以解决管理不可预测的人类行为的问题。这个案例展示了科学技术如何被大型资本主义企业吸收，以产生一种科学的评估原则，使社会和经济系统保持一致。为了追溯FICOTM评分的历史，联合PI将通过采访Fair Isaac和信用局员工(包括副总裁、运营研究人员和风险分析师)收集数据，这些员工是通过可用性和滚雪球抽样确定的。将分析公平的艾萨克公司通讯(1975-现在)，以及公司、贸易、流行、商业、政府和基于网络的与信用和评分有关的文献(1950-现在)。为了加强分析，将使用NSF博士论文研究改进补助金来为该项目增加一个关键的国际层面。对Fair Isaac将标准化信用评分模型扩展到法国的失败尝试的实地研究将有助于突出导致该公司在美国成功的特定表述。该项目的结果将对信用行业对技术和技术转让的偶然性以及公众在FICOTM评分系统中的利益的理解产生更广泛的影响。该项目的智力价值将来自STS和经济社会学的结合，以分析风险管理的科学化，消费者在资本主义市场的参与，以及经济技术在创造21世纪社会变革中的作用。

This Science and Technology Dissertation Improvement Grant will fund research in the U.S. and France toward the completion of a dissertation that will seek to extend the tools developed by STS researchers for the analysis of scientific practice and technological development to the study of economic technologies. Instead of producing facts, economic technologies produce information for the construction of rational capitalist markets. Just as STS has shown how universal orders are constructed for the natural world through socio technical practices, this project will show how these same practices can equally produce objects (like the credit score) that serve to stabilize order in the social world. The intellectual, organizational, infrastructural, and political processes behind the construction of economic technologies, are strikingly similar to the ones STS has traditionally analyzed. In the current case, the U.S. bureau scoring system arises out of the articulation between an information infrastructure that consolidates nationwide credit repayment data from financial institutions in the credit bureaus, the proprietary statistical model of a single creative analytics company (.the Fair Isaac Corporation), and the ethos of profit maximization. Central to the history of bureau scores is the story of how Operations Research, a physics- and military--derived, scientized way of knowing., was transformed by companies like Fair Isaac into a commercial product and sold to the finance industry in the latter part of the 20th C to solve the problem of managing unpredictable human behavior. The case shows how science and technology has been enrolled by large-scale capitalist enterprise to produce a scientific principle of evaluation that aligns the social and economic systems. To trace the history of the FICOTM score, data will be collected by the co-PI through interviews with Fair Isaac and credit bureau employees, including VP's, operations researchers and risk analysts, identified through availability and snowball sampling. Fair Isaac corporate newsletters (1975-present) will be analyzed, as well as corporate, trade, popular, business, government and web based literatures related to credit and scoring (1950-present). To strengthen the analysis an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant will be used to add a crucial international dimension to the project. Field research on Fair Isaac's frustrated attempts to extend a standardized credit scoring model to France will serve to highlight the particular articulations that have led to the company's success in the U.S. The project's results will have a broader impact on the credit industry's understanding of the contingency of technology and technology transfer, as well as on the understanding of the public's stake in the FICOTM scoring systems. The project's intellectual merit will come from the uniting of STS and economic sociology to analyze the scientization of risk management, the participation of consumers in capitalist markets, and the role of economic technology in creating social change in the 21st century.