Star and Griesemer "Institutional ecology, translations and boundary objects

Star and Griesemer (1989) "Institutional ecology, 'translations' and boundary objects: amateurs and professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39". Social Studies of Science 19 (3): 387-420

A case study of the confluence of various differing social worlds in a natural history museum. The idea of 'Boundary Objects' is invoked to explain how the social world communicate and work together.

Boundary Objects =

• Inhabit several intersecting social worlds and satisfy the information needs of each.
• Plastic enough to adapt local needs and constraints, yet robust enough to retain an identity.
• Weakly structured in common use but strongly structured in individual use.
• Abstract or concrete.
• Different meaning in each social world but common structure, so means of translation.
• Used to create and maintain coherence across social worlds.

So they must be abstract and concrete, specific and general conventionalised and customised and internally heterogeneous in order to fulfil their translation and coherence creating role.

When people collaborate from different social worlds , they frequently have to address objects crafted from elements of many different worlds. Each world has a hand in creating them for the next world, and frequently they have different meanings for each world.

When members of different worlds create boundary objects, their different perceptions are resolved into representations. this does not necessarily mean consensus: still clear traces of viewpoints.

For my research, something that is both abstract and concrete, possibly represented differently by both parties and that can also provide very good source of communication between each party, is the customer.

I need to look at how ethnographic methods can be applied to boundary object study: does it compromise disponibilty to assume that something is a boundary object; Star and Griesemer seem to have a functional view of boundary objects where they are created to fulfill some purpose but can I assume that they grow up independent of intention?

I had originally intended to use the procedural wiki as a boundary object, but this seems to concrete. I think that this is an object that is too robust to be a boundary object, partly because library staff have very little sense of propriety over it (I should be cautious of not jumping the gun here), but also because it is not clear the extent to which a shared artifact that is created by both groups could translate between them: that would seem to questions-beg (if it is created by both of them something must have enabled the collaboration, so what did the initial translating?).

The customer as boundary object seems like a more promising example because it is something that both groups have accessed in the past from entirely distinct viewpoints, and will continue to access in the future . The differing views of the customer (if they exist) may enable interesting triangulation towards deep seated assumptions about role and jurisdiction.

See also:
Star (1989) "The structure of ill-structured solutions: boundary objects and heterogeneous distributed problem solving" in Huhs and Gasser (edit.) Readings in Distributed AI 3 Melo Park CA: Morgan Kaufmann.

Osterlund "Documenting Practices"

Osterlund (2003) "Documenting Practices: The indexical centering of medical records". Outlines: Critial Social Studies 2: 43-69. [Online]: http://blogs.iis.syr.edu/osterlund/wp-content/uploads/2006/05/DocumentingPractices.pdf

This paper asks "why is it that senior residents and junior interns in a given hospital use entirely different documentary systems despite dealing with the same patients and coping with the same pressures?"

As far as I'm concerned, this paper is relevant because Osterlund uses ethnographic methods to analyse differences between two groups in an organisation, because he examines objects that are shared by more than one cultural group (the documents are used by both types of docs and potentially by others as well) - i.e. boundary objects, and because my research may involve looking at the use of shared documentation.

It has been argued that knowledge is either:

• messy, heterogeneous, local, situated, concrete

or

• explicit, homogeneous, global, abstracted, non-embedded

It is generally viewed as the case that documentary systems can make the first kind of knowledge into the second and so transportable and communicable, or that they damage this type of knowledge so much as to make it impoverished by the conversion.

To overcome this dichotomy, and to answer the original question, Osterlund deploys the idea of indexical centering, drawing on the work of linguistic anthropologist Hanks (1990)Referential Practice.

The essential idea is that the various indexical tools that we employ in our everyday linguistic life are key drivers in our ability to understand what everyone else is saying. Osterlund believes that the different requirements satisfied by indexicals in the documentary practices discussed here explain their differences and resolve the issue of situated knowledge becoming transferable/transportable:

• The senior residents are not around particular patients as much as the interns. In addition, the interns work very closely together. Thus, the interns require here and now action points, and not the more detailed, richly indexical notes that the residents rely on.
• The indexicals serve as the bridges between documentation at situated practice: they make documents "both in and about practice" and "situated and situating".

I like the deliberate ambiguity in the title: should we stress the first or the second word? The paper is about both ways to document practices and different practices in documenting.