Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences

by Geoffrey C. Bowker, Susan Leigh Star

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262522953
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	08/25/2000
Series:	Inside Technology
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	392
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.75(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Geoffrey C. Bowker is Professor and Director of the Evoke Lab at the University of California, Irvine. He is the coauthor (with Susan Leigh Star) of Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences and the author of Memory Practices in the Sciences, both published by the MIT Press.

Susan Leigh Star was Doreen Boyce Chair for Library and Information Science, University of Pittsburgh.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: To Classify Is Human
1 Some Tricks of the Trade in Analyzing Classification
I Classification and LargeScale Infrastructures
2 The Kindness of Strangers: Kinds and Politics in
Classification Systems
3 The ICD as Information Infrastructure
4 Classification, Coding, and Coordination
II Classification and Biography, or System and Suffering
5 Of Tuberculosis and Trajectories
6 The Case of Race Classification and Reclassification under
Apartheid
III Classification and Work Practice
7 What Difference a Name Makesthe Classification of Nursing
Work
8 Organizational Forgetting, Nursing Knowledge, and
Classification
IV The Theory and Practice of Classifications
9 Categorical Work and Boundary Infrastructures: Enriching
Theories of Classification
10 Why Classifications Matter

Notes
References
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What People are Saying About This

JoAnne Yates

This book provides a tool to help all of us—from designers of technical systems to users of e-mail—understand and knowledgeably influence the infrastructures that shape our lives.

Endorsement

Sorting Things Out is a brilliant dissection of a fundamental facet of social life. Its analytic comparisons shed new light on familiar problems which plague all the social sciences.

—Howard S. Becker, University of California-Santa Barbara

From the Publisher

This book provides a tool to help all of us—from designers of technical systems to users of e-mail—understand and knowledgeably influence the infrastructures that shape our lives.

—JoAnne Yates, Professor of Communication, Information, and Organization Studies, Sloan School of Management, MIT

Sorting Things Out is a brilliant dissection of a fundamental facet of social life. Its analytic comparisons shed new light on familiar problems which plague all the social sciences.

—Howard S. Becker, University of California-Santa Barbara

Howard S. Becker

Sorting Things Out is a brilliant dissection of a fundamental facet of social life. Its analytic comparisons shed new light on familiar problems which plague all the social sciences.