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layers up and becomes doubly, triply invisible. Sherry Ortner's (1974) classic essay on "man: culture-woman: nature" shows that this has held for the subjugation of women even where specific cultural circumstances vary widely, and her model of the phenomenon rests on the persistent misunderstanding of borderlands and ambiguity in many cultures. Before her, Simone de Beauvoir (1948) wrote of the ethics of ambiguity, showing the powerful negative consequences of settling for one naturalized mode of interaction. We need an ethics of ambiguity, still more urgently with the pressure to globalize, and the integration of systems of representation through information technologies worldwide. |
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We have presented here a model of memberships, naturalizations, and the work we do in managing their multiplicity. Further analysis is needed to examine different types of categorical work and how they emerge under different circumstances. The next section continues with a discussion of boundary infrastructures. |
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Any working infrastructure serves multiple communities of practice simultaneously be these within a single organization or distributed across multiple organizations. A hospital information system, for example, has to respond to the separate as well as the combined agendas of nurses, records clerks, government agencies, doctors, epidemiologists, patients, and so forth. To do so, it must bring into play stable regimes of boundary objects such that any given community of practice can interface with the information system and pull out the kinds of information objects it needs. |
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Clearly boundary infrastructures are not perfect constructions. The chimera of a totally unified and universally applicable information system (still regrettably favored by many) should not be replaced by the chimera of a distributed, boundary-object driven information system fully respectful of the needs of the variety of communities it serves. To the contrary, as we saw in the case of NIC, nurses have needed to make a series of serious concessions about the nature and quality of their data before hoping to gain any kind of entry into hospital information systems. These difficulties generalize, though they are to some extent counterposed by processes of convergence. |
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Boundary infrastructures by and large do the work that is required to keep things moving along. Because they deal in regimes and networks of boundary objects (and not of unitary, well-defined objects), |
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