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look over a long enough period of time, the formal and the informal are completely mingled in infrastructure. |
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There has been a recent trend in social informatics and science studies to move away from dichotomizing the formal and the informal.
11 In the early 1980s, the original éclat of discovering the failures of formalisms led to a kind of enthusiastic debunking. People do not really follow formal rules; they make up their own. They tailor rigid computer systems to their everyday working needs. Expert systems do not formally model people's thoughts as they fail to capture tacit knowledge. People do not devise formal, abstract plans and goals and then execute them, as the old cognitive model of Miller, Galanter, and Pribram (1960) would have it. Rather, they use a dynamic and situated improvisation (Suchman 1987) where plans are resources and are renegotiated as circumstances warrant. Suchman's situated action perspective constituted a powerful critique of artificial intelligence's claim that the mind could be formally specified. |
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Building on this initial set of findings and especially Suchman's notion that plans are also material resources for actionwhether or not people follow them exactlya more sophisticated model has emerged in recent years. Although it is true that maps do not fully capture terrains, they are powerful technologies (Becker 1986). They help to find one's way, as originally formally intended. And they serve as resources to structure all sorts of collective actiondreams of vacations, crossword puzzle solutions, explanations of social distance (Schmidt 1997, Zorbaugh 1929). Marc Berg analyzes the formalisms of medical decision making in use as powerful both formally and as spurs to informal action (1997b 1998). Just because people do not do exactly what they say will, does not mean they are doing nothing. Nor does it mean that they do not believe in the stated formal purpose and tailor their behavior to it. Obvious as this point may appear from a common sense perspective, it has not been obvious in scientific writing about cognition and classification. |
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In this book we offer a balanced reconsideration of classifications as formal and informal resources, often annealed together. People juggle vernacular (or folk) classifications together with the most formal category schemes (as detailed in Atran 1990). They subvert the formal schemes with informal work-arounds. Indeed, the various approaches are often so seamlessly pasted together they become impossible to distinguish in the historical record. For instance, a physician decides to diagnose a patient using the categories that the insurance company |
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