Sorting things out: classification and its consequences

Citation: Bowker, G. C, Star, S. L (1999) Sorting things out: classification and its consequences. Sorting things out: classification and its consequences (RSS)
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Sorting things out: classification and its consequences
Tagged: Sociology (RSS) classification (RSS), categories (RSS), apartheid (RSS), medical classification (RSS)

Summary

Bowker & Star derive their broad-based investigation of classification from three empirical examples: the ICD (International Classification of Diseases), a large-scale classification infrastructure, Apartheid, the intersection of classification and biography, and the NIC (Nursing Interventions Classificaton), a story of the intersection of classification and work practice(s).

Classification systems, the authors hold, are designed to be invisible and powerful; they are designed to both enable and constrain human thinking and action, and we notice them only when they “break down or become objects of contention”. For all our consideration of their power (e.g. Foucault), Bowker & Star remind us that we have little formal understanding of the “social and moral order” that they both create and draw upon for their creation.

Bowker & Star explore the invisibility of classification systems, their role in the larger information environment and the moral/ethical implications of these systems (in that they highlight one set of voices and silence others). They concern themselves with four broad questions: • What work do classifications and standards do? • Who does that work? How do they do it? • What happens to the cases that do not fit?

The authors identify three characteristics of classification: it is Ubiquitous, it is Material (i.e. "built into and embedded in every feature of the built environment"), and it secures the "Indeterminacy of the Past" (i.e. we revise the past in response to our revisions of classification systems in the present).

In their quest to articulate classification, they explore a distinction between Aristotelian classification (according to pure types not found in nature) and Practical classification (how people classify their everyday situations). Previous perspectives emphasized one or the other, thereby reinforcing a dualistic view. The authors take an almost structurational perspective on the matter, indicating that they "detect rather a conconstruction of nature and society than a projection of the social onto the natural." This perspective of mutual constitution and dynamic intra-relation pervades the entire book, and is one of the key ways in which the authors generate and substantiate novel perspectives on matters of classification.

Theoretical and Practical Relevance

This book is clearly a masterwork of two mature scholars with complementary interests. By and in large, its main contribution is additional theoretical insights and perspectives for scholars interested in matters of classification, though many of the perspectives they offer can be gainfully deployed in other sociological domains.