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how it is that values, policies, and modes of practice become embedded in large information systems. This chapter focuses on a classification system directed at nursing work and develops some theoretical notions about the relationship among classification, information systems, work, and organizations. Here we primarily take the point of view of design: what are the problems designers of the system face from their constituencies? The next chapter touches on the implementation of the system in various field sites and its direct impact on nursing work. Here, we examine the upstream dilemmas. These are similar to dilemmas faced by many designers of information systems in a range of application domains. |
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How does one make a successful, practically workable classification scheme of work practice? The problem of how to produce any classification scheme is an old one in the philosophy of knowledge, from Occam's razor to Quine's objects. Blurring categories means that existing differences are covered up, merged, or removed altogether; while distinctions construct new partitions or reinforcement of existing differences. This mutual process of constructing and shaping differences through classification systems is crucial in anyone's conceptualization of reality; it is the core of much taxonomic anthropology. |
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The case studies in Douglas and Hull (1992) point to the ways in which a category can be nonexistent (distributed out of existence) until and unless it is socially created. Thus Hacking (1992) talks about the creation of ''child abuse" during this century. He argues that it is not that there was nothing in the nineteenth century that we would now call child abuse. Rather, that category per se did not exist then and so tended to go by a disaggregated host of other names. |
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Once the category was declared a legal and moral one at a particular historical juncture, it could be entered into the historical record (with much the same problematics as with AIDS). Another consequence follows from the canonization of a category: people then socialize themselves to the attributes of the category. Thus, people who abused children could now learn socially how to be a child abuser and what attributes in themselves they might identify as such. Reports in the media would teach them what was expected of the abuser personality. This is similar to Becker's analysis of how to become a marijuana user and what it takes to learn to read the signs of being stoned (195354). Naïve users must be taught to read their bodily signs to become intoxicated. Another similarity may be found in how UFO abductees |
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