Sorting Things Out by Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, MIT Press,
$29.95/拢24.50, ISBN 0262024616
WRITING a letter is an act as private and self-expressive as a
t锚te-脿-t锚te. Or is it? Others, after all, have already chosen
the size of paper, envelope and stamps, and set the standards for the
composition of paper, ink and glue. Letter writers don鈥檛 actually see the
constraints. Classifications have benefits: they wouldn鈥檛 be adopted otherwise.
But, as Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star demonstrate in Sorting Things
Out, classification affects the classified and conventions shape reality.
From this trivial example to those involving more vital issues, we may
unwittingly lose a measure of freedom and creativity鈥攁nd more could be at
stake.
A classic example is the International Classification of Diseases, which has
developed over the past century. The ICD is used in clinics, research labs and
businesses in fields such as pharmaceuticals and insurance. Its purpose, like
that of the biological taxonomies on which it is modelled, is to analyse the
universe of disease so comprehensively and precisely that the same category will
always refer to the same ailment.
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The obstacles to achieving this goal are, however, insuperable. Some are
intellectual, the result of shifting scientific understandings. Some result from
the technology of information storage and retrieval. This is another inescapable
and frequently invisible component of classification systems鈥攆or example,
the ICD鈥檚 initial limit of 200 major categories reflects the form used by its
19th-century developers.
Then, some are political: the ICD was developed by Europeans, so it has few
categories for tropical diseases. Religious convictions influenced the
categories and subcategories dealing with abortions and stillbirths. And some
obstacles reflect the fact that categories are applied by individuals whose
usage may be influenced by personal priorities, local needs and conventions.
Doctors may choose a classification for a death certificate with an eye to the
feelings of distraught survivors not to the curiosity of biostatisticians.
The disjunction that arises between any system of classification and the
complex phenomena that it attempts to comprehend has consequences for the
classified, as well as for the classifiers. Bowker and Star explore two
instances where both the power of categorisation and its inevitable failure have
had devastating effects on the lives of individuals.
They show how, when diagnoses of tuberculosis were being considered in the
days before antibiotics, categories such as 鈥渁ctive/inactive disease鈥� or even
鈥渟ick/ well鈥� were deployed with an apparent arbitrariness, consigning many
individuals to indeterminate and often inexplicable hospitalisation. In a more
familiar example, they demonstrate the brutal separations and deprivations that
resulted from the harsh and arbitrary racial categories imposed by South African
apartheid.
Here something crucial comes to light. When the operative system of
classification becomes starkly visible, its authority is sharply contested. The
Nursing Intervention Classification is a taxonomy still being developed in the
US, by the people whose work is its subject. It is designed simply to discover
and analyse what nurses do鈥攁nd it has sparked a debate that raises not
only technical issues, but also political ones.
Acommodating awkward information is a technical problem: how, if at all, is a
nurse鈥檚 use of humour to be classified? There will be political consequences,
too. If the work of nurses is broken down too elaborately into tiny tasks, how
will this put the nursing profession at a disadvantage compared to doctors or
hospital administrators?
Throughout, Bowker and Star manage to clarify issues that often seem
abstract, emphasising the moral, as well as the intellectual and political,
difficulties thrown up by classification. They do not write in a spirit of blind
resistance, however, being fully aware of the necessity of systems of
classification, and resigned to their inevitable shortcomings. But they are
strongly sceptical, in the best sense. In the end, they understand
classification as a sustained negotiation between the material to be classified
and human need.