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This book is the first to directly address the question of how to
bridge what has been termed the "great divide" between the
approaches of systems developers and those of social scientists to
computer supported cooperative work--a question that has been
vigorously debated in the systems development literature.
Traditionally, developers have been trained in formal methods and
oriented to engineering and formal theoretical problems; many
social scientists in the CSCW field come from humanistic traditions
in which results are reported in a narrative mode. In spite of
their differences in style, the two groups have been cooperating
more and more in the last decade, as the "people problems"
associated with computing become increasingly evident to everyone.
The authors have been encouraged to examine, rigorously and in
depth, the theoretical basis of CSCW. With contributions from field
leaders in the United Kingdom, France, Scandinavia, Mexico, and the
United States, this volume offers an exciting overview of the
cutting edge of research and theory. It constitutes a solid
foundation for the rapidly coalescing field of social informatics.
Divided into three parts, this volume covers social theory, design
theory, and the sociotechnical system with respect to CSCW. The
first set of chapters looks at ways of rethinking basic social
categories with the development of distributed collaborative
computing technology--concepts of the group, technology,
information, user, and text. The next section concentrates more on
the lessons that can be learned at the design stage given that one
wants to build a CSCW system incorporating these insights--what
kind of work does one need to do and how is understanding of design
affected? The final part looks at the integration of social and
technical in the operation of working sociotechnical systems.
Collectively the contributors make the argument that the social and
technical are irremediably linked in practice and so the "great
divide" not only should be a thing of the past, it should never
have existed in the first place.
This book is the first to directly address the question of how to
bridge what has been termed the "great divide" between the
approaches of systems developers and those of social scientists to
computer supported cooperative work--a question that has been
vigorously debated in the systems development literature.
Traditionally, developers have been trained in formal methods and
oriented to engineering and formal theoretical problems; many
social scientists in the CSCW field come from humanistic traditions
in which results are reported in a narrative mode. In spite of
their differences in style, the two groups have been cooperating
more and more in the last decade, as the "people problems"
associated with computing become increasingly evident to everyone.
The authors have been encouraged to examine, rigorously and in
depth, the theoretical basis of CSCW. With contributions from field
leaders in the United Kingdom, France, Scandinavia, Mexico, and the
United States, this volume offers an exciting overview of the
cutting edge of research and theory. It constitutes a solid
foundation for the rapidly coalescing field of social informatics.
Divided into three parts, this volume covers social theory, design
theory, and the sociotechnical system with respect to CSCW. The
first set of chapters looks at ways of rethinking basic social
categories with the development of distributed collaborative
computing technology--concepts of the group, technology,
information, user, and text. The next section concentrates more on
the lessons that can be learned at the design stage given that one
wants to build a CSCW system incorporating these insights--what
kind of work does one need to do and how is understanding of design
affected? The final part looks at the integration of social and
technical in the operation of working sociotechnical systems.
Collectively the contributors make the argument that the social and
technical are irremediably linked in practice and so the "great
divide" not only should be a thing of the past, it should never
have existed in the first place.
Standardization is one of the defining aspects of modern life, its
presence so pervasive that it is usually taken for granted. However
cumbersome, onerous, or simply puzzling certain standards may be,
their fundamental purpose in streamlining procedures, regulating
behaviors, and predicting results is rarely questioned. Indeed, the
invisibility of infrastructure and the imperative of standardizing
processes signify their absolute necessity. Increasingly, however,
social scientists are beginning to examine the origins and effects
of the standards that underpin the technology and practices of
everyday life.Standards and Their Stories explores how we interact
with the network of standards that shape our lives in ways both
obvious and invisible. The main chapters analyze standardization in
biomedical research, government bureaucracies, the insurance
industry, labor markets, and computer technology, providing
detailed accounts of the invention of "standard humans" for medical
testing and life insurance actuarial tables, the imposition of
chronological age as a biographical determinant, the accepted means
of determining labor productivity, the creation of international
standards for the preservation and access of metadata, and the
global consequences of "ASCII imperialism" and the use of English
as the lingua franca of the Internet.Accompanying these in-depth
critiques are a series of examples that depict an almost infinite
variety of standards, from the controversies surrounding the
European Union's supposed regulation of banana curvature to the
minimum health requirements for immigrants at Ellis Island,
conflicting (and ever-increasing) food portion sizes, and the
impact of standardized punishment metrics like "Three Strikes"
laws. The volume begins with a pioneering essay from Susan Leigh
Star and Martha Lampland on the nature of standards in everyday
life that brings together strands from the several fields
represented in the book. In an appendix, the editors provide a
guide for teaching courses in this emerging interdisciplinary
field, which they term "infrastructure studies," making Standards
and Their Stories ideal for scholars, students, and those curious
about why coffins are becoming wider, for instance, or why the
Financial Accounting Standards Board refused to classify September
11 as an "extraordinary" event.
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.
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