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"being ordinary." It's not that somebody is ordinary, it's perhaps that that's what their business is. And it takes work, as any other business does. And if you just extend the analogy of what you obviously think of as workas whatever it is that takes analytic, intellectual, emotional energythen you can come to see that all sorts of normalized thingspersonal characteristics and the likeare jobs which are done, which took some kind of effort, training, etc.. So I'm not going to be talking about an "ordinary person" as this or that person, or as some average, i.e., a nonexceptional person on some statistical basis, but as something that is the way somebody constitutes themselves, and, in effect, a job that they do on themselves. Fate and the people around may be coordinatively engaged in assuring that each of them are ordinary persons, and that can then be a job that they undertake together, to achieve that each of them, together, are ordinary persons. (1992, vol. 2, 216) |
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The performance of this job includes the ability to choose the proper categories under which to operate, to perform this ordinariness. The power of Sack's work, like that of John Dewey (e.g. 1929), is that he draws attention to the ways in which the ordinaryand the interruption to the expected experienceare delicate constructions made and remade every day. |
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Science and technology are good places to study the rich mix of people and things brought to bear on complex problem-solving questions, although the points made here are more generally applicable as well. Categories and their boundaries are centrally important in science, and scientists are especially good at documenting and publicly arguing about the boundaries of categories. Thus, science is a good place to understand more about membership in communities. This point of departure has led us to try to understand people and things ecologically, both with respect to membership and to the things they live with, focusing on scientists (Star 1995a). One of the observations is that scientists routinely cooperate across many communities of practice. They thus bring different naturalized categories with them into these partnerships. |
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In studying scientific problem solving, we have been concerned for a number of years to understand how scientists could cooperate without agreeing about the classification of objects or actions. Scientific work is always composed of members of different communities of practice (we know of no science that is not interdisciplinary in this way, especially ifas we doyou include laboratory technicians and janitors). Thus, memberships (and divergent viewpoints or perspectives) |
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