Knowledge and Practice Knowledge and Practice Knowledge systems
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Knowledge and Practice
Knowledge and Practice • Knowledge systems developed by ‘communities of practice’ • to enable coordination among multiple organizations (bureaucracies, professional groups operating within institutions) and movement of records created by organizations • to enable movement of knowledge through time (remembering) • Knowledge systems (=information infrastructures, classification systems)
Knowledge and Practice • STO gives examples and analyses of concrete social classifications that affect how individuals’ lives are shaped, shows link between society and institutions • bureaucracies, classifications, forms shape information as it circulates in the knowledge system
Knowledge and Practice • information infrastructures for medical knowledge (medical classification systems: tuberculosis, ICD) • tendency to present ways of knowing that are absolute, not focusing on process • needs to be able to be abstract and uncover the underlying reality, therefore not contingent and historical • ‘torques’ the biographies of individuals • spatial only, temporal only
Knowledge and Practice • Why study classification of tuberculosis, ICD, racial classifications? “Because it allows to explore the seamless web of science and society, of nature and knowledge, to an analysis of information infrastructure that acts as matrix for the web. The web itself is textured in ways by the available modes of information storage and transfer. … In general, the information infrastructure holds certain kinds of knowledge and supports certain varieties of network; we believe that it is a task of some urgency to analyze which kinds of knowledge and network. ” (Sorting Things Out, p. 193)
Knowledge and Practice • formal systems of knowledge representation and informal, experiential, empirical and situated experience are qualitatively different • important to study the limitations of these systems of knowledge • the ‘warping factor’ for each (e. g. , medical knowledge as it reshapes other kinds of experience of the patient) • how hegemony meets information systems
Knowledge and Practice • classification systems reveal tensions between knowledge systems and experienced reality, and interests among communities of practice: • biography (Ch. 5: tuberculosis, Ch. 6: apartheid racial classification) • work practice (Ch. 7: classification of nursing work, Ch. 8: organizational forgetting)
Knowledge and Practice • study of classification systems in their social context allows for: • understanding information systems as they shape individuals’ lives • understanding information systems as powerful social forms encasing certain types of knowledge and privileging it over others (Ch. 9: boundary objects as means of communication across systems, naturalization, wildness) • intervention in the construction of infrastructures as critics and as designers (Ch. 10: Why Classifications Matter)
