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challenges will not be necessary. In the end, there will be an information infrastructure for medical work that contains an account of nursing activity. The move to informational panopticons is overwhelming in this profession as in many others. With projects like NICwhich offer new classification systems to embed in databases, tools, and reportswe get to see what is at stake in making invisible work visible. |
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This section has explored two strategies, clearance and erasure. Some of the points made here in the context of organizational forgetting relate to arguments within the sociology of science about scientific representations of nature. These include the idea of deleting the work (Star 1991a, Shapin 1989) and the deletion of modalities in the development of scientific texts (Star 1983, Latour 1987). That is, as a scientific statement gets ever closer to being accepted as fact, historical contingencies get progressively stripped from its enunciation. |
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Why, then, talk at all about memory and forgetting when representation and its literature can do much of the same work? The concept of representation tends naturally to abstract away the ongoing work of individual or organizational agents (compare here Woolgar 1995, 163). It is difficult to express the fact that the representation can have different meanings at different times and places in the organization in a language that has been used rather to demonstrate the conjuring of a single articulation of ''fact." The act of remembering a fact organizationally involves not only mobilizing a set of black-boxed allies (in Latour's terms) but also translating from the context of storage to the present situation (one might store a fact for reason x but recall it for reason y). This is a central problem for most classification systems operating as information storage tools. Within an organizational context, it is easier to explore the distribution of memory and forgetting than the distribution of representation. |
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Finally, there it is always a temptation when talking of representation to fall into a cognitivist trap of assuming the primacy of thinking. By concentrating on "following the actors," sociologists of science have as a rule produced a language that privileges the scientific "fact" and its circulation. They have in this put the infrastructure supporting that fact relatively into the background (what goes on inside the black box, or indeed what black boxes look like, is seen as irrelevant). From the perspective of organizational memory, a modality can be deleted in a number of different ways. It might be distributed (held in another part of the organization than in that which produces the text); it might be |
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