The book also explores systems of classification as part of the built information environment. Much as a city planner or urban historian would leaf back through highway permits and zoning decisions to tell a city's story, we delve the dusty archives of classification design to understand better how widescale classification decisions have been made
_Sorting Things Out stands at the crossroads of the sociology of knowledge and technology, history, and information science. The categories represented on our desktops and in our medicine cabinets are fairly ad hoc and individual, not even legitimate anthropological folk or ethno classifications. ... everyone uses and creates them in some form, and they are (increasingly) important in organizing computer based work
When finally the murderer met this psychic, he burst into his impassioned plea for an explanation of what he was doing. "Why am I compelled to kill all these people," the salesman responded in a world-weary tone such as one might take with a slow child: "Don't you get it, son? You're a homicidal maniac." The maniac was delighted with this insight. He then proceeds to try to kill again. (p1)
Anthropologists have studied classification as a device for understanding the cultures of others—categories such as the raw and the cooked have been clues to the core organizing principles for colonial Western understandings of "primitive" culture.
The ubiquity described by Foucault appears as an iron cage of bureaucratic discipline against a broad historical landscape. But there is much more to be done, both empirically and theoretically. No one, including Foucault, has systematically tackled the question of how these properties inform social and moral order via the new technological and electronic infrastructures. Few have looked at the creation and maintenance of complex classifications as a kind of work practice, with its attendant financial, skill, and moral dimensions. These are the tasks of this book. (p5)
our job here is to find tools for seeing the invisible, much as Émile Durkheim passionately sought to convince his audience of the material force of the social fact—to see that society was not just an idea—more than 100 years ago (Durkheim 1982). (p5)
(Bowker and Star’s Sorting Things Out is an entire book devoted to what I call circumrationality, with many detailed and fascinating examples, some of which I’ll probably reuse.)