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9
Categorical Work and Boundary Infrastructures: Enriching Theories of Classification |
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Where do categories come from? How do they span the boundaries of the communities that use them? How can we see and analyze something so ubiquitous and infrastructuralsomething so "in between" a thing and an action? These questions have been at the heart of much of social science over the past 100 years. Sociology and history are both concerned with relationshipsthat are invisible except through indicators such as the actions people perform. One cannot directly see relations such as membership, learning, ignoring, or categorizing. They are names we give to patterns and indicators. If someone is comfortable with the things and language used by a group of others, we say that he or she is a member of that group. In this sense, categoriesour own and those of otherscome from action and in turn from relationships. They are, as sociologists like Aaron Cicourel (1964) remind us, continually remade and refreshed, with a lot of skilled work. The cases in this book are framed in dialogue with an extensive literature on language, group membership, and classification. |
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This chapter makes several aspects of that dialogue more explicit. Our goal here, however, is much more modest than a thoroughgoing analysis of categorization and language. We examine classification systems as historical and political artifacts very much as part of modern Western bureaucracy. Assigning things, people, or their actions to categories is a ubiquitous part of work in the modern, bureaucratic state. Categories in this sense arise from work and from other kinds of organized activity, including the conflicts over meaning that occur when multiple groups fight over the nature of a classification system and its categories. |
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This chapter picks up the theoretical strands of the cases in this volume to begin to develop a more general notion of these classifica- |
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