Comment from class blog page

To add to Barbara's and Nate's observations, I'm impressed by the social/ethical focus of the book, and how, by choosing to look at classification, it comes in under the radar of some thorny ideological problems with information labor.

The book seems to take the position that classification is normative, and to proceed to explore the resulting problems. Using the discussion on p. 13 about the work of classification as a starting point, I would argue that work creates labor, which produces class consciousness, which is a form of self-reclassification by a constituency. So the question is whether the presence of classification, standards, and so forth, in the world, is enough social work, or whether we need that additional consciousness of class by laboring people to make political sense of it all.

Bourdieu's work on the self-classification of social groups in France in his book about Distinction is a valuable contribution to understanding this issue.