Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star. Out is a sociological work that explains how individuals sort perceived characteristics into categories and the consequences of those choices. The authors, George C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, describe how the use of classification influences human behavior towards standardizing the physical world.
Classification is the systematic categorization of entities into meaningful content.
Selecting how the physical world is categorized is a human element dependent upon one's judgment, yet it also allows us to segregate undesirable qualities. Bowker and Star analyze social and medical classification schemes to best illustrate how the use of categorizing influences our society. Classifying the physical world has both positive and negative effects. Unlike taxonomy, there is no official classification system for medicine, so interpreting morbidity and mortality data is a challenge for clinical researchers. The authors conclude that uniform terminology created by clinicians to standardize medical vocabulary is essential if health organizations want to communicate with each other without language barriers or cultural misunderstandings.