When I talk about global information architecture, I always talk a lot about how categories are cultural (even when they’re not).

A lot of my thoughts around cultural categories come from this one book: Sorting things out - classification and its consequences, by Susan Leigh Star and Geoffrey Bowker. (at Amazon.com)

In it, the authors look at some famous classification systems, and how the act of classifying affects people, is political and cultural and so on. It’s the kind of book you have to read a few times to really get all the rich ideas in it - at least I had to. (Partly, actually, because its, let’s be nice, academic writing style, that can be hard to work your way through, and if you think this sentence was dense, well, try some of the sentences in this book.)

The main points that it makes are (or at least some of them):

• Researching classifications can be boring like hell (unless you are a category geek perhaps).
• Classifications embed values.
• Classifications are infrastructure: they tend to disappear into the background, yet they profoundly shape (through their embedded values) our lives. 
• Classifications affect lives: jobs are lost, regions benefit at the expense of others, money is moved around and judgements are made.

A blog post can’t do justice do the ideas in this book, at least this blog post can’t. In fact, it’s so good I think I’m gonna read it again right now.