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The processes by which communities of practice manage divergent and conflicting classification systems are complex, the more so as people are all members in fact of many communities of practice, with varying levels of commitment and consequence. Under those conditions a series of questions arise: How are boundary objects established and maintained? Does the concept scale up? What is the role of technical infrastructure? Is a standard ever a boundary object? How do classification systems, as artifacts, play a role? |
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Membership and Naturalization: People and Things |
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As Engeström (1990b) and other activity theorists note so well, tools and material arrangements always mediate activity. People never act in a vacuum or some sort of hypothetical pure universe of doing but always with respect to arrangements, tools, and material objects. Strauss (1993) has recently made a similar point, emphasizing the continuity and permeability of such arrangementsaction never really starts from scratch or from a tabula rasa. Both Engeström and Strauss go to great lengths to demonstrate that an idea, or something that has been learned, can also be considered as having material-objective force in its consequences and mediations. |
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"Object" includes all of thisstuff and things, tools, artifacts and techniques, and ideas, stories, and memoriesobjects that are treated as consequential by community members (Clarke and Fujimura 1992a, 1992b). They are used in the service of an action and mediate it in some way. Something actually becomes an object only in the context of action and use; it then becomes as well something that has force to mediate subsequent action. It is easier to see this from historical examples than it may be to look to contemporary ones. For instance, the category of hysteria was naturalized in medicine and in popular culture at the end of the nineteenth century. People used the diagnosis of hysteria for purposes of social control as well as for medical treatment. It became a category through which physicians, social theorists, and novelists discussed pain and anxiety and, arguably, the changing social status of women. The point is not who believed what when but rather that the category itself became an object existing in both communities. It was a medium of communication, whatever else it may also have been. |
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A community of practice is defined in large part according to the co-use of such objects since all practice is so mediated. The relationship |
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