* If my memory serves me L* argues that boundry infrastructure is the
more common especially among things we might call an activity system. In
other words, for a "boundry object" to exist, the communities must be in
an equal power relationship, and the "boundry object" must be somewhat
dynamic.
It seems to me that they (object and boundry object) are complementary,
at least in the sense, that one picks up where the other leaves
off. Some of us find Activity Theory useful because of our involvement
in historical activity systems, but then there are activities that do
not have this clear object, motive etc and here the notion of boundry
object appears very useful.
I would be curious on how "boundary object" and "object" were used?
http://weber.ucsd.edu/~gbowker/classification/
3.1 Boundary Objects
Science and technology are good places to study the rich mix of people
and things brought to bear on complex problem solving questions,
although the points made here are more generally applicable as well.
Categories and their boundaries are centrally important in science, and
scientists are especially good at documenting and publicly arguing about
the boundaries of categories. Thus, in turn, science is a good place to
understand more about membership in communities. This point of departure
has led us to try to understand people and things ecologically, both
with respect to membership and with respect to the things they live
with, with a focus on scientists (Star, 1995a). One of the observations
is that scientists routinely cooperate across many communities of
practice. They thus bring different naturalized categories with them
into the partnerships.
In studying scientific problem solving, we have been concerned for a
number of years to understand how scientists could cooperate without
agreeing about the classification of objects or actions. Scientific work
is always composed of members of different communities of practice (we
know of no science that is not interdisciplinary in this way, especially
if - as we do - you include laboratory technicians and janitors). Thus,
memberships (and divergent viewpoints, or perspectives) present a
pressing problem for modeling truth, the putative job of scientists. In
developing models for this work, Star coined the term 'boundary objects'
to talk about how scientists balance different categories and meanings
(Star and Griesemer, 1989; Star, 1989b). Again, the term is not
exclusive to science, but science is an interesting place to study such
objects because the push to make problem-solving explicit gives one an
unusually detailed amount of information about the arrangements.
Boundary objects are those objects that both inhabit several communities
of practice and satisfy the informational requirements of each of them.
Boundary objects are thus both plastic enough to adapt to local needs
and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough
to maintain a common identity across sites. They are weakly structured
in common use, and become strongly structured in individual-site use.
These objects may be abstract or concrete. Star and Griesemer (1989)
first noticed the phenomenon in studying a museum, where the specimens
of dead birds had very different meanings to amateur bird-watchers and
professional biologists, but "the same" bird was used by each group.
Such objects have different meanings in different social worlds but
their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them
recognizable, a means of translation. The creation and management of
boundary objects is a key process in developing and maintaining
coherence across intersecting communities.
Another way of talking about boundary objects is to consider them with
respect to the processes of naturalization and categorization we
discussed above. Boundary objects arise over time from durable
cooperation between communities of practice. They are working
arrangements that resolve anomalies of naturalization without imposing a
naturalization of categories from one community or from an outside
source of standardization. (They are therefore most useful in analyzing
cooperative and relatively equal situations; issues of imperialist
imposition of standards, force and deception have a somewhat different
structure.) In terms of this book, sets of boundary objects arise
directly from the problematics created when two or more differently
naturalized classification systems collide. Thus nursing administrators
create classification systems which serve hospital administrators and
nursing scientists; soil scientists create classifications of soil to
satisfy geologists and botanists (Chatelin, 1979). Other outcomes of
these meetings are explored as well - the dominance of one over another;
how claims of authority may be manipulated to higher claims of naturalness.
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, 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?
Bill Barowy wrote:
> I heard it rumored around n'orleans that some clarification of "object" could
> be possible on xmca. Given that one of L*'s paper on boundary objects
> (institutional ecology...) does not reference Leont'ev, we could assume the
> L* boundary "object" to be distinct from the Leont'ev "object". I suspect
> that there is more than just a coincidence in words and a difference in
> paradigm here. Can it just be the case that a boundary object is an artifact
> shared between/among activity systems? Could it really be that simple? Or
> is there more? If so, what? What can we draw upon to decide?
>
> bb
>
>
-- There is no hope of finding the sources of free action in the lofty realms of the mind or in the depths of the brain. The idealist approach of the phenomenologists is as hopeless as the positive approach of the naturalists. To discover the sources of free action it is necessary to go outside the limits of the organism, not into the intimate sphere of the mind, but into the objective forms of social life; it is necessary to seek the sources of human consciousness and freedom in the social history of humanity. To find the soul it is necessary to lose it. A.R. Luria
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