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and usable in a wide range of different infrastructural technologiesdatabases, decision support systems, and so forth. They are complementary, in that NIC concentrates on work practice-information technology and the ICD on information technology-domain specific knowledge (although clearly all three factors are significant for each). NIC is associated with the traditionally ''invisible work" which is often gender and status-linked (Star 1991a), while the ICD is linked with highly visible medical knowledgeyet each are being merged into seamlessly integrated infrastructures.
There is a close relationship among inscriptions, work practice, and standards, as Bruno Latour's work demonstrates. As seen in chapter 2, Latour in Science in Action (1987) developed the concept of immutable mobiles to explore the ways in which scientific knowledge travels from a local, messy field site into the laboratory and out into textbooks. The development of NIC displays the force of both of his analytic points: indeed the work of holding classifications stable and enrolling allies in their use has been central.
Equally important are notions of accounting and quantifying as forms of social order. Foucault's work on "governmentality" (Porter 1994) discusses the rise of statistics as a new mode of government; and following this, Ewald (1986) examined the rise of the welfare state as a form of govenment of the body and soul. A similar theme arises in the work of Rose (1990), whose argument that accounting systems reflect a moral order and help define the self has been widely adopted in critical social studies of accounting (see, for example, the journal Accounting, Management and Information Technologies; Boland and Day 1989; Boland and Hirscheim 1987). Central here is the recognition that statistics and other numbers, invariably based on classification systemsand recognized by WHO and the NIC designers as a key product of their own systems, are socially and politically charged.
The case of NIC is used here to discuss the three dimensions of work classification systems that form pragmatic challenges for designers and users: comparability, visibility, and control.
Comparability: The Need for Standard Descriptions in Research
The construction of a nursing interventions classification implies a drive to abstract away from the local, the particularto make nursing the same entity wherever it may appear. Ideally, local terminology and the idiosyncrasies of each ward and each staff nurse should change

 
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