Geoffrey C. Bowker is an American scholar of information science and infrastructure studies, based at the University of California, Irvine. His work examines how classification systems and information infrastructure shape knowledge, practice, and power.
Core ideas
- Classification is political: every classification system makes some things visible and others invisible. The categories chosen privilege certain ways of understanding and disadvantage others. Bowker and Star demonstrated this through case studies of medical classification (ICD), racial classification under apartheid, and nursing work (Bowker & Star, 1999).
- Infrastructure studies: infrastructure is not a neutral substrate — it embeds values, assumptions, and power relations. It becomes invisible to those it serves well and visible only to those it fails.
- Boundary objects: objects that inhabit several communities of practice and satisfy the informational requirements of each, without being identical in meaning across communities. (Concept developed primarily by Star, refined in collaboration with Bowker.)
Notable works
- Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (1999, with Susan Leigh Star)
- Memory Practices in the Sciences (2005)
Related
- Susan Leigh Star — his primary collaborator on classification and infrastructure
- faceted classification — one approach to the classification problems he analyzes
- controlled vocabulary — another organizational technology he examines critically
Bowker, G. C., & Star, S. L. (1999). Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. MIT Press.