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on. The control of standards is a central, often underanalyzed feature of economic life (see the work of Paul Davidfor example David and Rothwell 1994for a rich treatment). It is key to knowledge production as well. Latour (1987) speculates that far more economic resources are spent creating and maintaining standards than in producing "pure" science. There are a number of histories of standards that point to the development and maintenance of standards as being critical to industrial production. |
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At the same time, just as with classifications, these dimensions of standards are in some sense idealized. They embody goals of practice and production that are never perfectly realized, like Plato's triangles. The process of building to a standardized code, for example, usually includes a face-to-face negotiation between builder(s) and inspector(s), which itself includes a history of relations between those people. Small deviations are routinely overlooked, unless the inspector is making a political point. The idiom "good enough for government use" embodies the common-sense accommodations of the slip between the ideal standard and the contingencies of practice. |
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In this and in many other ways, then, classifications and standards are two sides of the same coin. Classifications may or may not become standardized. If they do not, they are ad hoc, limited to an individual or a local community, and/or of limited duration. At the same time, every successful standard imposes a classification system, at the very least between good and bad ways of organizing actions or things. And the work-arounds involved in the practical use of standards frequently entail the use of ad hoc nonstandard categories. For example, a patient may respond to a standardized protocol for the management of chronic back pain by approximating the directions and supplementing them with an idiosyncratic or alternative medical classification scheme. If the protocol requires a number of exercises done three times a day, patients may distinguish good days from bad days, vacation days from working days, and only do the exercises when they deem them necessary. |
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Classifications and standards are related in another sense, which concerns the use of a classification by more than one social world or community of practice, and the impact that use has on questions of membership and the taken-for-grantedness of objects (Cambrosio and Keating 1995). Throughout this book, we speak of classifications as objects for cooperation across social worlds, or as boundary objects (Star and Griesemer 1989). Drawing from earlier studies of |
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