Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Inside Technology)

Bowker, Geoffrey C.; Star, Susan Leigh

ISBN 10: 0262522950 / ISBN 13: 9780262522953

Published by The MIT Press, 2000

About this Item

Acceptable condition, no observable damage to cover, pages, or binding/spine. Cover art bright and clear, though some light smudges on front cover, mainly towards edges. Pages in acceptable condition, markings in pen throughout book, though tears. Binding still fully intact, some light signs of wear/damage from previous use. Paperback copy. EG.

Seller Inventory # D26363

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Inside Technology)
• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Publication Date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262522950
• ISBN 13: 9780262522953
• Binding: paperback
• Condition: Fair
• Weight: 22 ounces
• Seller catalogs:
  • Sociology

About this title

Synopsis

A revealing and surprising look at how classification systems can shape both worldviews and social interactions.

What do a seventeenth-century mortality table (whose causes of death include "fainted in a bath," "frighted," and "itch"); the identification of South Africans during apartheid as European, Asian, colored, or black; and the separation of machine- from hand-washables have in common? All are examples of classification—the scaffolding of information infrastructures.

In Sorting Things Out, Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star explore the role of categories and standards in shaping the modern world. In a clear and lively style, they investigate a variety of classification systems, including the International Classification of Diseases, the Nursing Interventions Classification, race classification under apartheid in South Africa, and the classification of viruses and of tuberculosis.

The authors emphasize the role of invisibility in the process by which classification orders human interaction. They examine how categories are made and kept invisible, and how people can change this invisibility when necessary. They also explore systems of classification as part of the built information environment. Much as an urban historian would review highway permits and zoning decisions to tell a city's story, the authors review archives of classification design to understand how decisions have been made. Sorting Things Out has a moral agenda, for each standard and category valorizes some point of view and silences another. Standards and classifications produce advantage or suffering. Jobs are made and lost; some regions benefit at the expense of others. How these choices are made and how we think about that process are at the moral and political core of this work. The book is an important empirical source for understanding the building of information infrastructures.

About the Author

Geoffrey C. Bowker is Professor and Director of the Evoke Lab at the University of California, Irvine. He is the coauthor (with Susan Leigh Star) of Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences and the author of Memory Practices in the Sciences, both published by the MIT Press.

Susan Leigh Star was Doreen Boyce Chair for Library and Information Science, University of Pittsburgh.