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in the decision-making process. The judgment calls are still present but now involve multiple actors and their routines, including individuals, organizations, and technologies. The decisions about division of labor remain, but now entail bureaucracies as well as spot judgments. As all the authors cited above have concluded, large-scale coordinated work is impossible without lists. As well, those lists considered as genre systems entrain whole series of substantive political and cognitive changes in the classes they inventory. |
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The ICD, as a functioning means of coordinating information and work highly distributed over space and time, contributes several valuable lessons to understanding the management and use of information technologies in very large multinational organizations and to the study of genre systems: |
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First, there is a permanent tension between attempts at universal standardization of lists and the local circumstances of those using them. |
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Second, this tension should not, and cannot, be resolved by imposed standardization because the problem is recursive. |
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Third, from the point of view of coordination, ad hoc responses to standardized lists can themselves be mined for their rich information about local circumstances: in turn, information technology might be tailored to support those needs, not subvert them. |
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Fourth, this type of list is an example of the sort of object that must satisfy members of communities or organizations with conflicting requirements. In its creation, and later in its use, the complex list is a kind of knowledge representation particularly useful for coordinating distributed work that often contains requirements of this sort. Some, ourselves among them, would argue that they are necessarily conflicting or at least divergent (Hewitt 1985, 1986; Star 1989a). |
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The problems of such knowledge in very large, distributed organizations are increasing as multinational firms confront local variation and definitions of knowledge in their subsidiaries in different countries and with other processes of globalization. The problem here is generic to all such efforts where diversity is the central issue in representing information. |
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To continue in a foundational vein, the ICD can be seen as one of the tools bound up in the origins of the welfare state (Ewald 1986, see chapter 3): the epidemiologists and government statisticians who |
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