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the contrary, they were devout positivists, bent on intellectual and moral recruitment to one medical truth. Yet as the capital 'T' "truth" remained elusive, they did develop pragmatic, workable compromises, many of which used those same features. |
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Some guidelines emerge here that are instructive for the analysis of any large-scale, infrastructural system: |
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1. In the face of incompatible information or data structures among users or among those specifying the system, attempts to create unitary knowledge categories are futile. Rather, parallel or multiple-representational forms are required. So, for example, instead of trying to represent a disorder of energy diagnosed with acupuncture as a nervous disease in western medical terms, a parallel representational scheme will avoid imposing inappropriate categories. |
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2. Pragmatically, the Occam's razor of the coding of information means that too few categories will result in information that is not useful.
23 For instance, alive or dead, while having the virtues of simplicity and [near] exhaustiveness, do not tell us much about disease in the world. On the other hand, too many categories will result in increased bias, or randomness, on the part of those filling out the forms. An ICD with five million category labels may be more ideally scientifically accurate, but most doctors would not even look at the resulting death certificate. Thus, at the level of encoding, tools need to be sensitive to the working conditions of those encoding the data. |
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3. Imposed standards will produce work-arounds. Because imposed standards cannot account for every local contingency, users will tailor standardized forms, information systems, schedules, and so forth to fit their needs. A good summary of this appeared some years ago on a feminist button proclaiming, "One size does NOT fit all!" Gasser (1986) identified three major classes of such informal responses to imposed standards: fitting, augmenting, and working around. When designing tools for distributed, organizational decision, and policymaking, a detailed catalogue and analysis of such responses could become part of the designers' tool kit; incorporated in the system, it could point out styles of work-arounds at the level of coding. |
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4. Identifying the granularity of the problem, then encoding it in the system where appropriate, would complement existing organizational information processing. For example, in natural history work, biologists are often classed as lumpers versus splitters. Lumpers tend to |
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