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List making is foundational for coordinating activity distributed in time and space. Consider an apparently simple problem of coordination that children in many cultures solve routinely: the treasure hunt. In this game a list of objects is made, usually by an adult, and teams of children are each given duplicate lists. The first team to bring back all the items wins. Even a local, improvised list such as this entails judgment calls: objects should be difficult enough to challenge the children's ingenuity, but not beyond their reach; they should not require impossible resources (e.g., no objects requiring use of a car to fetch). Typically they are things that are odd but not impossibly rarea copy of the front page of the New York Times from June 4 1994; a green high-heeled left shoe. Teams may decide to coordinate their internal work by assigning each person an item, by working in pairs, by moving as a group, and so on. |
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Lists are in themselves a genre of representation (Yates and Orlikowski 1992). Genres are: "typified communicative action performed by members of an organizational community in response to a recurrent situation . . . identified both by their socially recognized communicative purpose and by common characteristics of form" (Yates, Orlikowski, and Rennecker 1997). When lists are used to coordinate important work that is distributed widely over time and space, a correspondingly complex organizational structure and infrastructure evolves. Lists are stitched together with other genres to form what Yates and Orlikowski call genre systems. Genre systems, a very useful concept, encompass both the abstract top-level notion of the genre, in this case the list, and enfold as well the more concrete local variants (such as the list of diseases, the mortality rolls, and the metadata coordinating lists of epidemiological results). "A genre system is an interlocking and interdependent set of genres that, by definition, requires collaboration" (Yates, Orlikowski, and Rennecker 1997, 2). |
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The ICD genre system includes sets of codification practices, medical nomenclature lists as well as the actual numbered labels themselves. Over time, the genre system may achieve a kind of closure, as routines and communications depend on each other. For instance, in the genre system of university admissions procedures, genres of standardized tests, letters of recommendation, grade point averages, and geographical distribution all contribute to the assessment of the candidate. |
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In the case of the ICD, negotiations over the content of the list become reifiedfrozenand often take quantitative form, especially if the items are numerous, costly, or critical for other operations. Down the line, this obscures the nature of the genres being linked together |
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