/classifications

We would hate to have to assign a Dewey classification number to this book, which straddles sociology, anthropology, history and information systems, and design. Our modest hope is that it will not find its way onto the fantasy shelves

Where do categories come from? How do they span the boundaries of the communities that use them?

they are ubiquitous and infrastructural, continually remade and refreshed

One cannot directly see relations such as membership, learning, ignoring, or categorizing. They are names we give to patterns and indicators. If someone is comfortable with the things and language used by a group of others, we say that he or she is a member of that group. In this sense, categories—our own and those of others—come from action and in turn from relationships

classification systems as historical and political artifacts very much as part of modern Western bureaucracy

Assigning things, people, or their actions to categories is a ubiquitous part of work in the modern, bureaucratic state. Categories in this sense arise from work and from other kinds of organized activity, including the conflicts over meaning

how the various kinds of classification we have discussed knit together to form the texture of a social space. We move from classifying and boundary objects to categorical work and boundary infrastructures

The work of attaching things to categories, and the ways in which those categories are ordered into systems, is often overlooked (except by theorists of language such as Harvey Sacks 1975, 1992