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tion systems. By so doing, we take a step back and look at how the various kinds of classification we have discussed knit together to form the texture of a social space. We move from classifying and boundary objects to categorical work and boundary infrastructures, weaving along the way the many strands that our cases have presented. As noted in chapter 1, maintaining a vision that allows us to see the relationships among people, things, moral order, categories, and standards is difficult. It requires a good map and a working compass that we attempt to provide here. |
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The journey begins by clearing away some of the theoretical brush surrounding the very notions of categories and classification. Many scholars have seen categories as coming from an abstract sense of "mind," little anchored in the exigencies of work or politics. The work of attaching things to categories, and the ways in which those categories are ordered into systems, is often overlooked (except by theorists of language such as Harvey Sacks 1975, 1992). |
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We present classification systems in modern organizations as tools that are both material and symbolic. As information technologies used to communicate across the boundaries of disparate communities, they have some unique properties. Next, we present some basic propositions about large-scale information systems, examining how they are used to communicate across contexts. These systems are always heterogeneous. Their ecology encompasses the formal and the informal, and the arrangements that are made to meet the needs of heterogeneous communitiessome cooperative and some coercive. |
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The third part of the journey involves understanding two sets of relationships: first, and analytically, between people and membership, and then between things and their naturalization by communities of practice. |
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The fourth step moves away from the analytical device of single person-single membership and single objectsingle naturalizationto describing a more complex set of multiple relationships. Everyone is part of multiple communities of practice. Things may be naturalized in more than one social worldsometimes differently, sometimes in the same fashion. Both people's memberships and the naturalization of objects are multiple, and these processes are, furthermore, intimately intertwined. |
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The fifth part of the chapter introduces the idea of categorical workthe work that people do to juggle both these multiple memberships and the multiple naturalizations of objects. In this work is the |
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