Sorting Things Out Classification and Its Consequences

by Bowker, Geoffrey C.; Star, Susan Leigh

• ISBN13: 9780262522953
• ISBN10: 0262522950
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-08-25
• Publisher: The MIT Press

Summary

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 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. Sorting Things Outhas 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.

Author Biography

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	ix
Introduction: To Classify is Human	1	(32)
Some Tricks of the Trade in Analyzing Classification	33	(18)
I Classification and Large-Scale Infrastructures	51	(112)
The Kindness of Strangers: Kinds and Politics in Classification Systems	53	(54)
The ICD as Information Infrastructure	107	(28)
Classification, Coding, and Coordination	135	(28)
II Classification and Biography, or System and Suffering	163	(64)
Of Tuberculosis and Trajectories	165	(30)
The Case of Race Classification and Reclassification under Apartheid	195	(32)
III Classification and Work Practice	227	(56)
What a Difference a Name Makes--the Classification of Nursing Work	229	(26)
Organizational Forgetting, Nursing Knowledge, and Classification	255	(28)
IV The Theory and Practice of Classifications	283	(44)
Categorical Work and Boundary Infrastructures: Enriching Theories of Classification	285	(34)
Why Classifications Matter	319	(8)
Notes	327	(8)
References	335	(32)
Name Index	367	(6)
Subject Index	373