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The decision procedures for characterizing social phenomena are buried in implicit common sense assumptions about the actor, concrete persons, and the observer's own views about everyday life. The procedures seem intuitively "right" or "reasonable" because they are rooted in everyday life. The researcher often begins his classifications with only broad dichotomies, which he expects his data to ''fit," and then elaborates on these categories if apparently warranted by his "data." (1964, 21) |
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The hermeneutic circle is indeed all around us. |
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There is no simple unraveling of the built information landscape, or, pace Zen practice, of unsettling our habits at every waking moment. Black boxes are necessary, and not necessarily evil. The moral questions arise when the categories of the powerful become the taken for granted; when policy decisions are layered into inaccessible technological structures; when one group's visibility comes at the expense of another's suffering. |
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There are as well basic research questions implied by this navigation into infrastructural space. Information technology operates through a series of displacements, from action to representation, from the politics of conflict to the invisible politics of forms and bureaucracy. Decades ago, Max Weber wrote of the iron cage of bureaucracy. Modern humans, he posited, are constrained at every juncture from true freedom of action by a set of rules of our own making. Some of these rules are formal, most are not. Information infrastructure adds another level of depth to the iron cage. In its layers, and in its complex interdependencies, it is a gossamer web with iron at its core. |
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We have looked at several sets of classification schemesthe classifications of diseases, viruses, tuberculosis, race, and of nursing work. These are all examples of working classification systems: they are or have been maintained by organizations, governments, and individuals. We have observed several dances between classifier and classified, but have nowhere seen either unambiguous entities waiting to be classified or unified agencies seeking to classify them. The act of classification is of its nature infrastructural, which means to say that it is both organizational and informational, always embedded in practice (Keller and Keller 1996). |
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In our interviews of public health officials, nurses, or scientists, we have found that they recognize this about their own classification systems. At the same time, there is little inducement to share problems across domains. Because of the invisible work involved in local struggles with formal classification systems and standards, a great deal of what sociologists would call "pluralistic ignorance" obtains. There is |
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