Categories & Classification Systems
Fall 2024
Outline
Roadmap
First two weeks: focused on how to think about morality; largely framed around individual choices regarding freedom, welfare, and virtue.
Next few weeks: we’ll be thinking about the interplay between individual choice and some of the structures that shape our lives, including:
The Concept of History
The Concept of Identity
The process of making sense of the categories, opportunities, and beliefs that are “in the air” in relation to your own sense of self.
Abigail Thorne
Reading Quiz
Thorne pulls out a quote from Ásta (Icelandic philosopher), that considers whether a property of a person is “socially significant.”
Question 1: Objects and their “properties”
Towards the beginning of the video, Thorne talks about different properties that an object (or a person) can have: intrinsic, relational (physical), relational (based on feelings).
Take a look at the Meta audience categories here
Question 2: Why do we track properties about people?
Categorically Unequal (Douglas Massey)
Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, Princeton
“Categorically Unequal – an explanation of how America’s culture and political system perpetuates inequalities between different segments of the population.”
Chapter 3 – I highly recommend it. Examines how lending and city planning practices categorically denied historically marginalized groups – and African Americans in particular – access to home ownership (which has historically been single most important way that people have been able to build wealth).
Categorization & Classification
It’s something that’s very human – part of our cognitive infrastructure to create categories and put things into them. It’s a very useful practice for living / organizing our daily lives (Massey).
AND
Different rights, privileges, values, etc. are conferred / projected onto different categories (Thorne). These are institutionalized in laws, rules, norms, etc., and are “remarkably durable – “reproduced across time and between generations” (Massey, p. 6).
Those in power set the terms of categorization / classification systems in ways that advantage them / reflect their worldviews.
Bowker & Star Argue (pp. 5-6)
Each standard and each category valorizes some point of view and silences another. This is not inherently a bad thing — indeed it is inescapable. But it is an ethical choice, and as such it is dangerous — not bad, but dangerous...
...We are used to viewing moral choices as individual, as dilemmas, and as rational choices. We have a very impoverished vocabulary for collective moral passages. For any individual, group or situation, classifications and standards give advantage or they give suffering. Jobs as made and lost; some regions benefit at the expense of others. How these choices are made, and how we may think about that invisible matching process, is at the core of the ethical project of this work.
12
Some famous examples...
From the Order of things (Foucault, 1970)
“This book first arose out of a passage in [Jorge Luis] Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage...[which] quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camel hair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’.
In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”
14
The Dewey Decimal System
Started in 1876, the DDC is the most widely used classification system in the world, especially in public libraries:�
15
The Dewey Decimal System
Started in 1876, the DDC is the most widely used classification system in the world, especially in public libraries:�
16
Library of Congress
17
Unemployment Accounting In the US
US government’s Department of Labor only counts someone as unemployed if they have actively looked for work in the past month, effectively removing anyone who has given up on finding work from the unemployed category by assigning them to a “discouraged worker” category.
In 2012 this classification scheme allowed the government to report that unemployment was about 8% and falling, when in fact it was closer to 20% and rising. The political implications of this classification are substantial.
18
Source: The Discipline of Organizing (Ch 7), Glusko, 2016
Redlining
“A” (green) areas were deemed “homogeneous” and in demand as residential areas;
“B” (blue) areas were “still desirable;”
“C” (yellow) areas were characterized as old and at risk of an “infiltration of a lower grade of population”
“D” (red) were said to have detrimental influences and an “undesirable population or an infiltration of it.”
19
Massey Discussion Questions
1-2. Massey: Stratification and Technology
According to Massey, what is the relationship between social stratification and technological progress? (pp. 1-4)
How has social stratification changed across the different technological “eras”?
From Massey’s perspective, is capitalism inherently linked to higher degrees of stratification and income inequality? (pp. 20-23)
3-4. Massey: Fundamental Mechanisms of Stratification
Explain the fundamental mechanisms of stratification (pp. 6-7):
5-6. Massey: Psychology of Classification (pp. 7-13)
7-8. Massey: Social & Cultural Capital (pp. 15-17)
What is social capital?
What is cultural capital?
How do each function in society to reify categorical hierarchies?
Try to come up of an example of each that you’ve seen as you go about your daily life (at UNCA, or elsewhere)
Identity Journal #3
Massey argues that while all human societies divide people into categories, how resources are distributed across these categories can vary greatly (depending on the society). Massey then makes the argument (on pp. 1-4) that historically, technological developments have resulted in more stratification…but that public policy decisions (like the New Deal) can play an important role in reducing stratification.
Considering some of the technologies in our current era (e.g. the Internet, Big Data, ChatGPT, robots, and so forth):