The late Susan Leigh Star, an enormously influential sociologist of
information and former president of the Social Studies of Science, and
James Griesemer introduced the concept of boundary objects in 1989,
through an ecological analysis of work in an institution, the Berkeley
Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. The concept, which became a classic of
the STS literature, drew the feminist standpoint theory of Sandra Harding
and Donna Haraway's notion of subjugated histories into the mainstream
of science studies methodology. Noting that scientific work is intersectional
and hetereogeneous, requiring different actors (humans and animals,
amateurs and professionals, functionaries and visionaries) and involving
disparate viewpoints, Star and Griesemer proposed a method for grasping
science work in its heterogeneity rather than seeing it as primarily the
product of the dominant forces in the system (the managerial viewpoint,
for example). Two kinds of activities, they proposed, are central to the
performance of science work: method standardization, and the
development of 'boundary objects,' abstract or concrete frameworks that
are adaptable to different viewpoints yet robust enough to maintain a
provisional identity over time and across different worlds. Weakly
structured in common use, boundary objects become strongly structured
in individual sited use. Whether abstract or concrete, boundary objects are
often internally heterogeneous and have different meanings in different
social worlds yet they are recognizable and coherent. They serve as a
means of translation across intersecting worlds and among groups that
compete, cooperate, and engage in conflict. The concept of boundary
objects, interpreted through an ecological perspective, allowed Star and
Griesemer to trace the flows of objects and concepts through networks in
an anti-reductionist way that maps the multiplicity of passage points and
perspectives and accounts for translation in the many-to-many dynamic,
resisting the tendency to emphasize a dominant passage point (the chief
scientist or entrepreneur and his viewpoints or agendas, for example) or
the reduction of an object to a single meaning. Their account provided a
model for holding in mind the multiple standpoints that inform scientific
worlds and the heterogeneity of objects of inquiry, which are constituted
as both flexible and resilient, mutable but coherent.We can further
propose that boundary objects learn in the sense that their transmutations
are not simply substitutive or accumulative. Rather, mutation entails
getting smarter in the sense that an RNA virus which exists in a could of
quasispecies mutates, avoiding detection and eradication, precisely to
survive as itself--as a new internally heterogeneous and changed form of
itself, and not as an entirely new virus. Boundary objects are in this way
smart, entities that learn as a means of survival.
See Star, Institutional Ecology, 'Translations' and Boundary Objects:
Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology,
1907-39 (1989, co-written with James Griesemer) and This is Not a
Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept (2010).
By Lisa Cartwright