Customer Reviews

Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Inside Technology)

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This tragic book is full of important ideas and significant research, but it's so poorly written you hardly notice. Other reviews kindly describe its style as "academic," but it's just bad writing. It's really shocking that publishers still consider this kind of jargon-filled nonsense acceptable to publish outside of the UMI thesis-reprint circuit. (I write professionally, so I'm not unqualified to make this assertion.)

After making a cogent point with examples and internal references, the authors feel the need to bridge to the next section with this clotted delight:

"Leaking out of the freeze frame, comes the insertion of biography, negotiation, and struggles with a shifting infrastructure of classification and treatment. Turning now to other presentation and classification of tuberculosis by a novelist and a sociologist, we will see the complex dialectic of irrevocably local biography and of standard classification."

Wha? What you mean to say is:

"This tension between personal experience and clinical priorities plays a large part in our current understanding of 'tuberculosis.' To further examine this tension, we will now examine the personal tuberculosis stories of a novelist and a sociologist."

The former kind of self-important, get-it-all-down academic writing is as embarrassing to read as adolescent poetry; they're both driven by a desire to make sure the reader gets every last nuance, and the lack of subtlety makes you want to toss the book across the room.

But the ideas buried within this book...the ideas are so sweet. If only they'd had the sense to ghostwrite this book. It could be a classic.

Most everything in modern societies rests on rules, standards, and regulations of one kind or another. Where do these endless detailed lists and definitions come from? This book is really unprecedented in the way it takes apart the practice of rule-making and nomenclature, to show us that there is a social and cultural process that lies behind the faceless lists. For me, it was like having the curtain of OZ lifted aside, so I could see for once the messy, petty, and often political way that things are sorted into categories and labeled.

I disagee that the book is badly written. I found it better than the average academic title in studies of technology and society, where thick jargon is the primordial soup. This was one of the most original books about technological systems I have read in years, with wide application in many different fields.

This is a quintessentially academic book: Much of the subject matter is absolutely fascinating, particularly the chapter on the fraught process of distinguishing black from white in South Africa under apartheid, where many fell into a mixed-race purgatory unrecognized by the state apparatus; yet most of the authors' analysis is less interesting than they presume. They ask the right questions about the problematic nature of categories, but provide few answers, instead falling back to arching assertions such as "all category systems are moral and political entities," a statement that is so plainly false that the authors don't even bother to justify it.

I would recommend the apartheid section of this book to anyone interested in that chapter of history, but the other examples the authors use (the ICD and the DSMIV) have been explored elsewhere to greater effect.

Well, the topic is interesting. Standards, classifications, information infrastructures, etc. Susan Leigh Star explains that growing up as a Jew in a Catholic neighbourhood in New Jersey made her having problems with classifications. Perhaps this is her way of doing a public self-analysis by talking endlessly about standards and classifications, and the problems that such structures do not exist in a social vacuum, does not really add much insight onto the phenomenon. What's the point of this text? Does it help us improving the way we make standards and classifications? No. This is descriptive writing without any practical use.

This is an excellent book on classification as discourse. The authors do an excellent job of discussing this topic in terms of its social, political, and professional history and implications. It is an important title in the cultural studies of information and should be familiar to all concerned with this area of study.