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phone book. One does not encounter the dramatic stories of battle and victory, of mystery and discovery that make for a good read. |
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In an introductory chapter we laid the theoretical framework for the discussion of classification as an infrastructural practice, stressing the political and ethical texturing of classification schemes. In part I we examined the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) as a large-scale, long-term system ingrained in the work practices of multiple organizations and states. We argued that their organizational roots and operational exercise texture such systems. Such texture is an inescapable, appropriate feature of their constitution, and it is a feature that merits extended consideration in a discussion of the politics of infrastructure. In part II, we looked at the intersection between classification and individual biography in the case of the classification of tuberculosis and of race classification under apartheid in South Africa. Generalizing the arguments made in these chapters, we maintained that individuals in the modern state operate within multiple classification systems, from the small-scale, seminegotiated systemas with the informal classification of tuberculosis patients negotiated with doctorsup to enforced universal systems such as race classification. We drew attention to the torquing of individual biographies as people encounter these reified classifications. Finally, we examined classification and work practice, taking the example of the classification of nursing work. We argued that multiple tensions between representation and autonomy, disability and discretion, forgetting the past and learning its lessons, make such classifications a key site of political and professionalization work. We are all called upon to justify our productivity when we are embedded in complex modern organizations. The dilemma faced by nurses in accounting for their work is omnipresent in the modern organization. Even children are not exempt. |
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We have seen throughout this book that people (and the information systems they build) routinely conflate formal and informal, prototypical and Aristotelian aspects of classification. There is no such thing as an unambiguous, uniform classification system. (Indeed, the deeper one goes into the spaces of classification expertisefor example, librarianship or botanical systematicsthe more perfervid one finds the debates between rival classificatory schools.) This in turn means that there is room in the constitution of any classification system with organizational and political consequencesand few schemes if any are without such dimensionsfor technical decisions about the scheme to systematically reflect given organizational and political po- |
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