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shape their experience to fit the general cultural consensus about flying saucers and medical experiments. |
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The result of the change in category, and its place in social order, is a shifting of balances of distinctions, a change in the architectural relationships. Every newly constructed difference, or every new merger, changes the workability of the classification in the ecology of the workplace. As with all tools and all knowledge, such classification schemes are entities with consequences, to be managed, negotiated, and experienced all at once. |
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"Difference"distinctions among thingsis the prime negotiated entity in the construction of a classification system. Differences enter the work stream in a subtle and complex fashion. The practices to be classified do not disappear with new classification schemes. The work of categorizing itself, however, may cause shifts that in turn present challenges to the designers of the scheme (faced with decisions about how fine-grained it should be), to users (filling out forms and encoding diagnoses), and consumers (assessing the viability of the scheme). In this process, work itself is neither created nor destroyed, yet may be radically reshaped to fit into the emerging matrix. The larger contexts within which these classification shifts occur commonly include professionalization, automation, and informatization, and the creation of international research and recordkeeping procedures. |
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There are three main areas of challenge in crafting a classification scheme that will fit the work stream and agendas created by these larger contexts: |
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1. Comparability. A major purpose of a classification system is to provide good comparability across sites to ensure that there is a regularity in semantics and objects from one to the other, thus enhancing communication. If "injection" means giving medication by needle in one country and by suppositories in another, for example, there is no use trying to count the number of injections given worldwide until some equivalence is reached by negotiation. The more intimate the communication setting, the less necessary are such negotiations for a variety of reasons, including that they may already exist historically or by convention; or they are more private and less subject to regulatory scrutiny. |
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2. Visibility. How does one differentiate areas of work that are invisible? While they are invisible, they are by definition unclassifiable except as the residual category: "other." If work "just gets done" |
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