|
|
|
|
|
|
|
4
Classification, Coding, and Coordination |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Introduction: Coordination Work |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Marx referred to technology as "frozen labor"work and its values embedded and inscribed in transportable form. Modern information technologies similarly embed and inscribe work in ways that are important for policymakers, but which, as we have shown, are often difficult to see. Where they are used to make decisions, or to represent decision-making processes, such technologies also act to embed and reify those decisions. The arguments, decisions, uncertainties, and processual nature of decision making are hidden away inside a piece of technology or in a complex representation. Thus, values, opinions, and rhetoric are frozen into codes, electronic thresholds, and computer applications. Extending Marx, then, we can say that in many ways software is frozen organizational and policy discourse. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The purpose of this chapter is to explore this idea theoretically, taking stock of some of the issues in the sociology of technology, and to reflect on how they might contribute to research in organizational policy about classification, standardization, and information systems. We continue to use the example of the ICD. The previous two chapters have looked first at the ICD as a text that can be read for its cultural values and as an historically developing infrastructure. Taken together, these processes display convergence among categories, information technology, and people. In this chapter, we will turn to the ICD as an object that facilitates the coordination of work among multiple agenciesan agent for distributed work and cognition. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The ICD, as we have seen, is an important infrastructural component of medical and epidemiological software. It is increasingly important, as well, for the financial and administrative components of medical care, as it is used (in a number of different forms) to encode |
|
|
|
|
|