Bowker, Geoffrey C. and Star, Susan Leigh.
Sorthing things out: classification and its consequences.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999
377 pages. ISBN 0-262-02461-6 $29.95

Reviewed by Sanford Berman

Truth in Reviewing Declaration: An extremely flattering (and gratifying) reference to my own work appears on page 327.

This painstaking and sometimes fascinating work seeks to demonstrate that classification systems spring from cultural, social, and political contexts--and may have definite cultural, social, and political consequences. Given their pervasiveness and growing influence, it is wise to understand how and why these categorizing and naming codes develop, what their effects can be, and how to make them at once more visible and accountable. "Our job," say the authors, "is to find tools for seeing the invisible," to explore "systems of classification as part of the built information environment," and to examine how "classifications and standards give advantage or...give suffering" for specific individuals, groups or situations. They approach these taks by sandwishing detailed studies of discrete systems that have been devised to categorize diseases (ICD), viruses, tuberculosis, race (in Apartheid South Africa), and nursing work (Nursing Intervention Classification) between opening and closing chapters dealing with theory and implications. References to related literature abound, their closely-packed bibliography extending to 32 pages.

Librarians may glean lessons, or cautionary tales, from much of the material, especially the experience of nurses--a similarly feminized and undervalued group--in crafting a veritable inventory of what they actually do in order to establish their worth and professionalism (the product, however, being subject to possible adverse uses by management). And there is explicit recognition of the power of naming, which easily applies to subject cataloging practice. here's one relevant quote: "Many patients feel that one of the greatest burdens of having chronic fatigue syndrome is the name of the illness." A comparable situation has long obtained wiht respect to "leprosy," still a Library of Congress subject heading. Both patients and doctors have argued for replacing the unarguably stigmatizing, Biblical term with "Hansen's Disease," a post-Biblical, medically-approved substitute without negative connotations. Interestingly, Christian missionizing bodies resist the patient-desired change, believing that "leprosy" is far more likely to leverage donations than "Hansen's Disease."

And this maxim (p.32) nicely relates to much library and information technology activity: "Abstract schema that do not take use into account...will simply fail. (That is, common sense will be seen as the precious resource that it is.)" This principle could well ratify or underpin local departures from such standard codes as AACR@ and the Dewey Decimal Classification in order to make resources more easily accessed through catalogs or shelf-browsing. Which raises a problem not fully addressed by Bowker and Star: mistakes in classifying (no matter how splendid or rational the overall scheme) that may render the system ineffectual and even reduce its credibility. An example: classifying a volume titled El Dorado, dealing strictly with the history of South America, emphasizing the importance of mining and working gold, in the DDC number for "El Dorado County, California." Or placing Life lessons from Xena, warrior princess: a guide to happiness, success, and body armor -- unmistakeably marked "A Parody" on the cover -- in the Dewey and LC notations for "Self-help psychology," with an harmonious, single subject tracing: SUCCESS--PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS! Liberating such items from unfindability requires a critical, conscious deviation from standard practice, best undertaken locally as a "work-around."

Although important attention is given to not only the direct impact of classifications on people, but also to how those categories may be valorizingly expressed, framed, or termed (e.g., "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome," "Gay-related Immune Disorder" [precursor to AIDS], "Homosexuality" as a psychiatric condition, and "Bantu race" [chosen, albeit anthropologically wrong, "in preference to African or Black African partly to underscore" South African "Nationalist desires to be recognized as 'really African'"), classificatory bias and its results--right now--merit extended discussion. For instance, F. Allan Hanson notes how disability and sexual orientation have lately been somewhat de-stigmatized due to an increasing appreciation that "people are less responsible for traits or behavioral propensities stemming from heredity or other biological causes than from their upbringing, cultural milieu, or other environmental factors" ("Where have all the abnormal people gone?," Humanist, March/April 2000, p. 29-32). however, he observes that while such "opposition between normal and abnormal weakens," with attendant benefits (i.e. less discrimination and exclusion) to disabled and lesbigay people, the "decline of the normal/abnormal opposition...might not have an entirely happy ending" inasmuch as stigma may then be relocated on the basis of "personal responsibility" to criminals and poor people in particular, producing tougher sentencing guidelines, explosive jail building, and punitive welfare reform. Comments Mary Ann Gleason in that last regard:

If nothing else, welfare reform has taught us that as long as we insist on naming those who are poor as unworthy, lazy, self-inflicting of their own plight, people to be shunned or punished, we only drove them into psychological spaces that could neither improve their lives, nor bring hope to their children. ("From this corner of the reflecting pool,"Safety Network [National Coalition for the Homeless], Jan./Feb. 2000, p. 3)

Who benefits? Who loses? Those seem key questions to pose with respect to both new and old classifications.

There's doubtless much more of value here to librarians and their professional kin, but it's frankly hard to know. Because the work is crippled by its own density and almost occult, inaccessible language. It is dizzyingly awash in definitions and theoretical formulations, too often stated in impenetrable infosci jargon. And there are far too many annoying "foreignisms" and run-to-the-dictionary terms--like "de novo," "perfervid," "impbrigated," and "eclat"--that violate Goerge Orwell's sensible guidelines (in "Politics and the English language") for writing clarity. These are merely a few instances of nearly unreadable prose:

This categorical saturation furthermore forms a complex web. Although it is possible to pull out a single classification scheme or standard for reference purposes, in reality none of them stand alone. So a subproperty of ubiquity is interdependence, and frequently integration (p. 38).

We advocate here a pragmatic methodological development--pay more attention to the classification and standardization work that allows for hybrids to be manufactured and so more deeply explore the terrain of the politics of science in action. (p. 48).

Each type of memory that has been distributed in space will also be sequenced in time. The plenum is contained by the overarching organization constituted by the scientific community precisely through a controlled program of first clearance and then continuing erasure (p. 278).

An important theme in recent feminist theory is resistance to such imperializing rhetoric and the development of alternative visions of coherence without unconscious assumption of privilage... The narratives she analyzes are in one sense meant to reconcile the heterogineity of multiply naturalized object relations in the person, where the objects in question are stories - depictions of life events (p. 303).

Transparency is in theory the endpoint of the trajectory of naturalization, as complete legitimacy or centrality is the endpoint of the trajectory of membership in a community of practice. Due to the multiplicity of membership of all people, however, and the persistence of newcomers and strangers as well as the multiplicity of naturalization of objects, this is inherently nonexistent in the real world (p.311).

What-in-hell are they talking about? Is there a perhaps unwitting wish to limit readership exclusively to members of the infosci mystery cult?

Lastly, while the heavily detailed and concept-laden tome concludes with name and subject indexes, the latter is lamentably Spartan and incomplete. As random examples, no entries appear for:

Aristotelian classification, 61-66, 201, 322

"Bantu" classification, 197, 200, 203

Capital crimes, 48

Chartres Cathedral, 14

Chronic fatigue syndrome, 66-67

"Coloured" people (South Africa), 206-212, 221-222

English Revolution (1640), 41

Griquas, 218

International Classification Society, 59

Interracial persons, 43, 203-306, 223-224, 300. See also "Coloured"

Library classification systems, 11

Mixed race persons. See Interracial persons.

Multiracial persons. See Interracial persons.

NSS interventions, 249, 269

"No Shit, Sherlock" interventions. See NSS interventions.

"One drop" rule, 43

Prototype classification, 61-66, 201, 322

Psychoanalysis, 46-7

Schizophrenia, 49

Absent from the name indes is:

Pasteur, Louis, 48

And these entries--in both indexes--lack relevant page-citations:

Foucault, Michel, 42

International Classification of Diseases, 55-57, 68-69, 192-193, 201, 239

Laing, Sandra, 222

World Health Organization, 53

These are serious and surprising shortcomings in an "information science" study bearing the prestigious MIT imprint.

 

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