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.

https://www.reciis.icict.fiocruz.br/index.php/reciis/article/download/794/1436

Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences

As both technologies and organizations undergo dramatic changes in form and function, organizational researchers are increasingly turning to concepts of innovation, emergence, and improvisation to help explain the new ways of organizing and using technology evident in practice. With a similar intent, I propose an extension to the structurational perspective on technology that develops a practice lens to examine how people, as they interact with a technology in their ongoing practices, enact structures which shape their emergent and situated use of that technology. Viewing the use of technology as a process of enactment enables a deeper understanding of the constitutive role of social practices in the ongoing use and change of technologies in the workplace. After developing this lens, I offer an example of its use in research, and then suggest some implications for the study of technology in organizations.

Using Technology and Constituting Structures: A Practice Lens for Studying Technology in Organizations

The wealth of networks : how social production transformsmarkets and freedom

This paper describes the theory of the actor-network, a body of theoretical and empirical writing which treats social relations, including power and organization, as network effects. The theory is distinctive because it insists that networks are materially heterogeneous and argues that society and organization would not exist if they were simply social. Agents, texts, devices, architectures are all generated in, form part of, and are essential to, the networks of the social. And in the first instance, all should be analyzed in the same terms. Accordingly, in this view, the task of sociology is to characterize the ways in which materials join together to generate themselves and reproduce institutional and organizational patterns in the networks of the social.

Notes on the theory of the actor-network: ordering, strategy and heterogeneity.

This article asks methodological questions about studying infrastructure with some of the tools and perspectives of ethnography. Infrastructure is both relational and ecological—it means different ...

/pdf/the-ethnography-of-infrastructure-15neil7ram.pdf

The Ethnography of Infrastructure

In controversies about technology and society, there is no idea more pro vocative than the notion that technical things have political qualities. At issue is the claim that the machines, structures, and systems of modern material culture can be accurately judged not only for their contributions of efficiency and pro ductivity, not merely for their positive and negative environmental side effects, but also for the ways in which they can embody specific forms of power and authority. Since ideas of this kind have a persistent and troubling presence in discussions about the meaning of technology, they deserve explicit attention.1 Writing in Technology and Culture almost two decades ago, Lewis Mumford gave classic statement to one version of the theme, arguing that "from late neo lithic times in the Near East, right down to our own day, two technologies have recurrently existed side by side: one authoritarian, the other democratic, the first system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable, the other man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable."2 This thesis stands at the heart of Mumford's studies of the city, architecture, and the his tory of technics, and mirrors concerns voiced earlier in the works of Peter Kropotkin, William Morris, and other nineteenth century critics of industrial ism. More recently, antinuclear and prosolar energy movements in Europe and America have adopted a similar notion as a centerpiece in their arguments. Thus environmentalist Denis Hayes concludes, "The increased deployment of nuclear power facilities must lead society toward authoritarianism. Indeed, safe reliance upon nuclear power as the principal source of energy may be possible only in a totalitarian state." Echoing the views of many proponents of appropri ate technology and the soft energy path, Hayes contends that "dispersed solar sources are more compatible than centralized technologies with social equity, freedom and cultural pluralism."3 An eagerness to interpret technical artifacts in political language is by no means the exclusive property of critics of large-scale high-technology systems. A long lineage of boosters have insisted that the "biggest and best" that science and industry made available were the best guarantees of democracy, freedom, and social justice. The factory system, automobile, telephone, radio, television, the space program, and of course nuclear power itself have all at one time or another been described as democratizing, liberating forces. David Lilienthal, in T.V.A.: Democracy on the March, for example, found this promise in the phos 121

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/20024652.pdf

Do Artifacts Have Politics

"The questions he poses about the relationship between technical change and political power are pressing ones that can no longer be ignored, and identifying them is perhaps the most a nascent 'philosophy of technology' can expect to achieve at the present time." David Dickson, "New York Times Book Review" ""The Whale and the Reactor" is the philosopher's equivalent of superb public history. In its pages an analytically trained mind confronts some of the most pressing political issues of our day." Ruth Schwartz Cowan, "Isis""

The whale and the reactor : a search for limits in an age of high technology

The truth of the matter is that our deficiency does not lie in the want of well-verified "facts." What we lack is our bearings. The contemporary experience of things technological has repeatedly confounded our vision, our expectations, and our capacity to make intelligent judgments. Categories, arguments, conclusions, and choices that would have been entirely obvious in earlier times are obvious no longer. Patterns of perceptive thinking that were entirely reliable in the past now lead us systematically astray. Many of our standard conceptions of technology reveal a disorientation that borders on dissociation from reality. And as long as we lack the ability to make our situation intelligible, all of the "data" in the world will make no difference. From the Introduction

Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought

The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology, Second Edition

What do philosophers need to know about technology? What kind of knowledge do we need to have? And how much? Perhaps it is enough simply to have lived in a society in which a wide variety of technologies are in common use. Drawing upon an everyday understanding of such matters, one can move on to develop general perspectives and theories that may enable us to answer important questions about technology in general. The problem is that one's grasp may be superficial, failing to do justice to the phenomena one wants to explain and interpret. One may seize upon a limited range of vaguely understood examples of technical applications-a dam on a river, a robot in a factory, or some other typification-and try to wring universal implications from a sample that is perhaps too small to carry the weight placed upon it. An alternative would be to focus one's attention more carefully, becoming expert in the technical knowledge of a specific field, attaining the deeper understanding of, say, a worker, engineer, or technical professional. Even that may prove limiting, however, because the experience available in one field of practice may not be useful in comprehending the origins, character, and consequences of technical practices in other domains. The sheer multiplicity of technologies in modern society poses serious difficulties for anyone who seeks an overarching grasp of human experience in a technological society. Yet another strategy might be to study particular varieties of technology in a scholarly mode, drawing upon existing histories and contemporary social studies of technological change as one's base of understanding. And one

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/689726.pdf

Langdon Winner

Papers

Do Artifacts Have Politics

The whale and the reactor : a search for limits in an age of high technology

Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought

The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology, Second Edition

Upon Opening the Black Box and Finding It Empty: Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Technology: