[NORSLIS] Fwd: Call for papers on "Hegemonies in classification processes"

[Sanna K Talja]

Please distribute. Apologies for cross-postings

Sanna T.

CALL FOR PAPERS
HEGEMONIES IN CLASSIFICATION PROCESSES
CASES FROM HEALTH CARE AND ONLINE INTERACTIONS

Special Issue of the Language and Society Newsletter
International Sociological Association - Research Committee 25 on
Language and Society

Classifications serve as shared systems to organize and handle
knowledge in a given domain. They act as infrastructures that
"[enforce] a certain understanding of context, place, and time"
(Bowker and Star 1999: 82). We therefore look at classifications as
being one of the means to "establish, maintain, and transform
mechanisms of power" (Foucault 2007: 2), while these same mechanisms
of power are at the same time deeply inscribed into classifications.
This mutual dependency of power and classifications raises the
question how changes in the roles of the actors who negotiate
classifications affect and maybe challenge power relations and
hegemonies in a wider sense. The negotiation of classifications
through discursive practices is one of the ways in which
classifications depend on language. Language also takes on a central
role in establishing, applying, and reproducing classifications. The
repeated reproduction through language is necessary for
classifications to stabilize and to gain recognition and explanatory
power. Last but not least, language provides labels for
classifications. The interpretation of a class crucially depends on
the label and its connotations. Whether a specific illness is, for
instance, referred to as GRID (gay-related immune disorder) or as AIDS
(acquired immune deficiency syndrome) has implications that go far
beyond health care organizations.

The role of classifications in coordinating formal and informal social
activities is becoming more evident with the spread of information and
communication technologies (ICT). Since communication processes are
increasingly taking place between dispersed individuals and groups,
common understanding and coordination are not facilitated by
co-location. Thus, classifications (are expected to) keep patterns of
action aligned. Health care activities provide a clear example:
information about patients needs to travel with and beyond the
patients themselves, in order to allow consequent actions to be
performed by a variety of actors (different specialized physicians,
nurses, pharmacists, relatives, lab technicians, sometimes local
communities and public opinion...). However, classifications do not
travel across different contexts without being reinterpreted or
changed. Instead, they are often locally renegotiated and given a
different meaning, resulting in unplanned actions and consequences.

Other examples of dispersed settings for social activities can be
found in online communities, which enable the communication and
collaboration of actors who do not share the same physical place. The
Internet and related communication technologies provide laypersons
with access to information, possibilities for participation, and
reception by large audiences, which used to be restricted to experts
only. Knowledge collections like encyclopedias and dictionaries, which
used to be compiled by small groups of highly instructed experts, are
now written collaboratively online by large numbers of dispersed
laypersons. Such collaborative authoring requires explicit and tacit
negotiation of shared classifications - a process which sometimes even
becomes a goal in itself, for instance in creating meta-information to
organize the abundance of information online through social
bookmarking (Bruns 2008: 171-178).

The role of laypersons in classification processes is thus becoming
one of great interest: empirically because of increasing use of ICT in
accessing, manipulating, and sharing information; theoretically
because of the consequences for a constructionist view, which include
the question of shifts in power between the different actors and the
effects of this on hegemonic classifications. It becomes apparent that
classifications are not 'natural' since they are themselves the
product of negotiation and/or enforcement (Bowker and Star 1999: 44,
131). Therefore the "double hermeneutic" between those who are usually
termed 'subjects' and 'objects' has to be revised, mutual dependency
between classifications and their objects needs to be highlighted.
Thus, we are not only interested in the way classifications construct
their objects, but also in the co-construction of objects and
classifications, in the unfolding exercise and unfinished task of
mixing force and consent that create and support hegemonies, or
challenge them.

The consequences of this stance for health care and online
interactions are not obvious. For the health domain, for instance,
this would mean to go beyond the point of arguing that medicine
constructs the patients. Rather, we would like to understand how and
why patients and their environments enter into an active interplay
with health delivery services, and the way they 'slice' reality,
because the dynamics and power relations of the interaction between
laypersons and experts can change considerably.

Given this frame, we invite submissions about how classifications are
established and applied, as well as about their planned and unexpected
effects. We especially welcome empirically rich research accounts from
the field of e-health (exploring relations beyond physicians and
patients, and including families, homes, social environment,
technologies, etc) and online interactions in collaborative settings
(addressing how dispersed social actors rely on and negotiate
classifications and definitions). The articles could take their
starting point from one of the following questions:

- Where are the "loci of negotiation" of classifications and their
meanings? How are negotiations affected by the respective locus?
  - E.g. in medical research vs. at the "shopfloor" of health
delivery; in medical institutions vs. in
physicians-patients-families-society interactions; online vs.
'offline'; among experts vs. among laypersons...
- How does an increase in the accessibility of information affect
power relations in classification processes?
- What role does language play in the construction and application of
classifications?
  - How are power shifts between actors manifested in linguistic
practices of negotiating and applying classifications?
  - How does the lexical meaning of labels influence classes and their
applications?
- What potential do role changes of experts and laypersons imply?
  - Instead of assuming that 'empowerment' of laypersons leads to a
loss of cultural values (Keen 2007) or to a shift towards more
democracy: how do the changing roles affect the interplay of consent
and coercion which "co-exist in a complex and shifting dynamic based
on complex tactics of attempted domination and clever local
resistance, conflict and alliance, imposition of meaning through
discourse and antagonism" (Nicolini 2007)?

LOGISTICS
Please submit your article as a MS Word or Rich Text Format files
(8000 words maximum, reference list excluded) to the newsletter editor
and to both guest editors:

NEWSLETTER EDITOR
Isabella Paoletti
paoletti at crisaps.org
Centro di Ricerca e Intervento Sociale
P.O. Box 131 06100, Perugia
Italy

GUEST EDITORS
Gianluca Miscione
miscione at itc.nl
Department of Urban and Regional Planning and Geo-Information Management
International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation
Hengelosestraat 99 P.O. Box 6 7500 AA Enschede
The Netherlands

Daniela Landert
daniela.landert at es.uzh.ch
Department of English
Universität Zürich
Plattenstrasse 47
CH - 8032 Zürich
Switzerland

Schedule:
31/03/09                            Deadline for contributions
30/06/09                            Feedback to authors
30/09/09                            Deadline for revised versions
End of 2009                     Publication

References:
Bowker, Geoffrey C., Susan Leigh Star (1999). Sorting things out:
classification and its consequences. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Bruns, Axel (2008). Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond. From
Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang.

Foucault, Michel (2007). Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at
the Collège de France 1977-1978. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Keen, Andrew (2007). The Cult of the Amateur How Today's Internet Is
Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy. London: Nicholas
Brealey.

Nicolini, Davide (2007). "Hegemony". In: James R. Bailey and Stewart
Clegg (eds.) International Encyclopedia of Organization Studies.
London: Sage.

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-- 
Sanna Talja
University of Tampere
Department of Information Studies
FIN-33014 University of Tampere
Finland
email: sanna.k.talja at uta.fi
Homepage http://www.info.uta.fi/talja
phone: +358 (0)40 595 8919 (mobile)
phone: +358 (0)3 3551 8062 (office)
fax: +358 (0)3 3551 6560

phone: +358 40 595 8919
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