There is a lot of material on ordering of matrix rows and
columns in the older CA material. Guttman has his work
on the perfect scale. There is also Schriever's dissertation.
Reordering is becoming important these days in numerical
analysis, where we sometimes have to deal with very large
and very sparse matrices, and in DNA sequencing, where
the problem can be formulated in terms of large adjacency
matrices of graphs. "Spectral" methods are being studied
here (often this is connected with archeological or developmental
seriation).