Sorting Things Out

Abstract

A revealing and surprising look at how classification systems can shape both worldviews and social interactions. What do a seventeenth-century mortality table (whose causes of death include "fainted in a bath," "frighted," and "itch"); the identification of South Africans during apartheid as European, Asian, colored, or black; and the separation of machine- from hand-washables have in common? All are examples of classification—the scaffolding of information infrastructures. In Sorting Things Out, Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star explore the role of categories and standards in shaping the modern world. In a clear and lively style, they investigate a variety of classification systems, including the International Classification of Diseases, the Nursing Interventions Classification, race classification under apartheid in South Africa, and the classification of viruses and of tuberculosis. The authors emphasize the role of invisibility in the process by which classification orders human interaction. They examine how categories are made and kept invisible, and how people can change this invisibility when necessary. They also explore systems of classification as part of the built information environment. Much as an urban historian would review highway permits and zoning decisions to tell a city's story, the authors review archives of classification design to understand how decisions have been made. Sorting Things Out has a moral agenda, for each standard and category valorizes some point of view and silences another. Standards and classifications produce advantage or suffering. Jobs are made and lost; some regions benefit at the expense of others. How these choices are made and how we think about that process are at the moral and political core of this work. The book is an important empirical source for understanding the building of information infrastructures.

The Balanced Scorecard and its Possibilities: The Initial Experiences of a Singaporean Firm

“…How can we make sense of these different perspectives? It has been argued that viewing the BSC as a ‘boundary object’ (Fischer and Reeves 1995, Bowker and Star 1999) can help in understanding the ways in which the BSC sustains different possibilities for its translation.…”

“…Fischer and Reeves (1995) describe boundary objects, such as a BSC, as objects which broker and support exchanges between different social worlds (of scientists, engineers, accountants, etc.). Boundary objects are able to broker these different world views because, as Bowker and Star (1999, p. 296) indicate, they are ‘plastic enough to adapt to local needs’ (enabling diverse possibilities to coexist) but ‘robust enough’ to maintain some unifying identity (for example, consistently portraying the BSC as a way of balancing the four perspectives on organisational performance). Indeed, as will be argued later in the paper, the ambiguous and loosely structured nature of the BSC is necessary to sustain it across and within organisations, but it is the local translations of the BSC that enable it to achieve its ‘workability’ in different situations.…”

Algorithmic IF … THEN rules and the conditions and consequences of power

“…Achieving Conditions -Classifications: Both projects depended on classification work to bring about a condition necessary for the algorithmic system to asymmetrically divide relevant data from irrelevant data. However, classification systems are necessarily incompletethere is always something that 'falls through the cracks' (Bowker and Star, 2000). This incompleteness means that ambiguity about the objects and subjects to which algorithms refer is inserted into the development process.…”

Theory Matters: Representation and experimentation in education

“…‘Naturalisation means stripping away the contingencies of an object's creation and its situated nature. A naturalised object has lost its anthropological strangeness’ (Bowker & Star, 1999, p. 299). It is this view of things that led Heidegger (2009, p. 122) to argue that there is a need to ‘step back from the thinking that merely represents—that is, explains—to the thinking that responds and recalls’.…”