'Vv

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF

KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION:
THE CASE OF MELVIL DEWEY

Bernd Frohmann, University of Western Ontario, Canada

Abstract: A social constructivist approach to systems of knowledge organization applies

Collins's_ "empirical programme of relativism" to the analysis of the Dewey Decimal
Classification (DOC). The social constructivist programme shows that stability ofthc DDC's
final form depends not upon solutions to epistemological problems. hut upon the successful
negotiation of specific social processes: (1) closing debates about alternative knowledge
organizations; (2) building specific supportive institutions; (3) establishing links with
dominant forms of social organization.

1. Introduction

There have been various attempts to find objective bases for systems of knowl­
edge organization ( SKOs). Scientific approaches judge SKOs according to the
adequacy of their representations of the structure of the natural world. Psychologistic
approaches appeal to adequacy of representation of mental structures, especially
cognitive structures. Linguistic approaches ask how well SKOs map the structure
of language. Pragmatic approaches emphasize the utility of their conceptual or­
ganizations to the social behaviour of system users. Justifications for SKOs some­
times combine all four methods, applying them selectively in the analysis of dif­
ferent regions of a system. Each of these four ways of grounding SKOs are conglU­
ence approaches because they share the assumption that adequacy of knowledge
organization depends upon appeals to external, objectively given structures, whether
the world as known by science, the mind as known by psychology, language as
known by linguistics, or society as known by sociology. For congruence approaches,
the construction of SKOs is an epistemological problem. In each case, whether the
external structure to be mapped be nature, mind, language, Of society, building
SKOs requires that the structure in question be known and adequately represented.
Social constructivism has challenged the stability of various structures hitherto
taken for granted as objective features of the natural world. For example, the struc­
tures of gender, sex, race, and class have been analysed as the products of social
negotiations between actors with unequal access to power. Since the late 19708,
analyses of various social and cultural identities and institutions have given way to
studies of the socially constructed character of even science and technology, the
two fields most exemplary of the externality and objectivity of the "natural world".
According to a social constructivist view of science, producing scientific theories,
hypotheses, facts, and laboratory results is not an epistemological process of com-

Advances in Knowledge Organization, Vo1.4(l994), p. 109� 117

 • 'V

ing to know and adequatelyrepresent an objectively given, external natural world,

but is instead a negotiated social process located firmly in its cultural, political,
and economic context. Scientific and technological outcomes are not solutions to
uniquely scientific and technical problems existing apart from social processes,
but arc as thoroughly social as the outcomes of political campaigns. The problem
of adequacy of representation therefore evaporates: if the "real world" of science
is an artifact of politicized social processes, it is not a natural object external to
scientific systems of representation, The successes or failures of scientific results
or technological apparatuses derive not from congruence with external structures,
but rather from the triumph of specific strategies of social negotiation.
This paper argues for a social constructivist interpretation of SKOs, taking the
Dewey Decimal Classification system (DOC) as its case study. The success ofthe
DOC is not due to its solution to the problems of a specific epistemological field
knowledge organization nor of the representational adequacy of its conceptual
organization, but is due instead to the successful implementation of strategies of
negotiation involving the construction of a social network consisting of many het­
erogeneous elements. The argument for the social construction of the DOC will
employ the following leading ideas of the social constructivist interpretation of
science and technology (designated hereafter by Latour's (1987: 174-175) term
"technoscience"),

2. The Social Constrnction of Technoscience

One of the most important ideas of social constructivism, as Callan explains in the
following remarks, is that technoscience does not form an autonomous realm dis­
tinct from the social:
What I am questioning here is the claim that it is possible to distinguish
during the process of innovation phases or activities that are distinctly
technical or scientific from others that are guided by an economic or com­
mercial logic. For example, it is often believed that at the beginning of the
process of innovation the problems to be solved arc basically technical
and that economic,social, political, or indeed cultural considerations come
into play only at a later stage. However, more and more studies are show­
ing that this distinction is never as clear-cut. This is particularly true in
the case of radical innovations: right from the start, technical, scientific,
social, economic, or political considerations have been inextricably bound
up into an organic whole. (Calion, 83-84).
Thus the intmsion of the social into the construction of any technoscientific arti­
fact, including thc DOC, obsolesces analyses limited to "contextual factors which
'influence' work which in its core is non-contextual" (Knorr-Cetina, 1 24), If
technoscientific work is inherently no different than any other social practice, then
the problem of establishing connections between two distinct realms the social
and the technoscientific by tracing either social "causes" of technoscientific arti-
 III

facts or their "effects", is radically misconccivcd. Social analyses of SKOs that

assume clear distinctions between an autonomous realm of knowledge organiza­
tion and social, cconomic, or political factors limit the analysis of the DDC to
enumerations of the "manifestations" or "reflections" in Dewey's system of the
knowledge and culture of his time. Social constructivist approaches to the DDC
can movc the analysis forward to the constitutivc role of the social in the construc­
tion of SKOs.
A second important part of the social constructivist programme is understanding
"technological innovation and stabilization in terms of a systems metaphor" (Law,
11 2). This use of the metaphor derives from Hughes, who, in his analysis of elec­
tric light and power systems, identified physical artifacts, organizations (e.g. manu­
facturing firms, banks, utility companies), scientific components (e.g. books, arti­
cles, university teaching and research programmes), and legislative artifacts as
some of the major elements involved in its construction. Law and Callan, follow­
ing Hughes, argue that "thc stability and form of artifacts should be seen as a
function of the interaction of heterogeneous clcmcnts as these are shaped and as­
similated into a network" ( Law, 113). The construction, or "association of un help­
ful elements into self-sustaining networks that are ... able to resist dissociation"
( Law, 114) involves the hard work of negotiating and resolving conflict:
Elements in the network prove difficult to tame or difficult to hold in
place. Vigilance and surveillance have to be maintained, or else the ele­
mcnts will fall out of line and the network will start to crumble. . . . there
is almost always some degree of divergence between what the elements of
a network would do if left to their own devices and what they are obliged,
encouraged, or forced to do when they are enrolled within the network.
( Law, 114)
Since technoscientific artifacts stabilize and assume their final form only as pat1s
of socially constructed networks, the DDC is not adequately understood in terms
of abstract, technoscientific problems of knowledge organization, but instead in
terms of the specific heterogeneous elements successfully orchestrated into a rela­
tively durable social system.
A third element of the constructivist programme recognizes that the stability of
artifacts also depends upon effecting large-scale social transformations, a point
emphasized by Latour's studies of Pasteur. Explaining how laboratory results can
be extended outside the laboratory, Latour writes:
In spite of all the niceties written by epistemologists on that point, the
answer is simple: only by extending the laboratory itself. ... [Pasteur's]
vaccination can work only on the condition that the farm chosen in the
village of Pouilly Ie Fort for the field trial be in some crucial respects
transformed according to the prescriptions of Pasteur's laboratory. ( Latour
1983: 115)
The success of Pasteur's cure for anthrax depended upon a general condition for
the success of all laboratory results: the transformation of society to meet the con­
ditions of the laboratory. Thus the orchestration of the heterogeneous elements
 I '"

cited by Callan and Law as crucial to the stability of the artifact involves not only
the local factors required to construct it, but also the large-scale economic and
political characteristics of thc new environment on which it depends for its SUl'­
vival.
A final useful element of social constructivism is the model developed by Collins
to understand the development of technoscientific artifacts, His "empirical pro­
gramme of relativism" (EPOR) involves three stages: (i) showing the "interpretive
flexibility" (Pinch & Bijker, 27) of technoscientific results, a stage of conflict and
uncertainty about the artifact's final form; (ii) describing the social mechanisms
invoked to limit interpretive flexibility and close debate; (iii) showing that the
mechanisms of closure belong to a wider economic, cultural. and political net­
work. Collins's model provides a way to organize the elements of the social
constructivism programme mentioned above, in an analysis of the DDC.

3. The Social Construction of the DDC

Following Collins, the argument for the social construction of the DDC will be
developed by (i) showing the conflicts over interpretations of SKOs in Dewey's
day; (ii) describing how Dewey successfully closed this debate in favour of his
system; (iii) showing that the DOC's success was consolidated by the establish­
ment of links to a wider social and political context.

3.1 The Interpretive Flexibility of "Subjects"

The DDC, like any SKO, intervenes in conflicts of interpretation over the meaning
of "subjects", because SKOs are retrieval languages whose structures articulate
subjects in different, and highly specific ways. The differences between the sub­
jects of Culter's dictionary catalogue (I rely here on Miksa's interpretation of Cut­
tel') and those of the DOC offer an example of the interpretive flexibility of "sub­
jects". For Cutter, their stability depended upon a "societal process in which their
meanings had become stabilized in a name." A subject "referred ... to those intel­
lections ... that had received a name that itself represented a distinct consensus in
usage" ( Miksa 1983a: 60). Thus a subject position in a SKO is discovered, not
created: the Usystematic structure of established subjects" is "resident in the public
realm" ( Miksa 1983a: 69); "[s]ubjects are by their very nature locations in a
classificatory structure of publicly accumulated knowledge" ( Miksa 1983a: 6 1).
The stability of the public realm in turn relics upon natural and objective mental
structures which, with proper education, govern a natural progression from par­
ticular to general concepts.
Since for Cutter, mind, society, and SKO stand one behind the other, each support­
ing each, all manifesting the same structure, his discursive construction of subjects
invites connections with discourses of mind, education, and society. The DDC, by
contrast, severs those connections. Dewey emphasized more than once that his
system maps no structure beyond its own; there is neither a "transcendental deduc-
 o OW

tion" of its categories nor any reference to Cutter's objective structure of social
consensus. It is content-free: Dewey disdained any philosophical cxcogitation of
the meaning of his class symbols, leaving the job of finding verbal equivalcnts to
others. His innovation and the essence of his system lay in the notation. The DDC
is a purcly semiotic system of expanding nests of tcn digits, lacking any referent
beyond itself. In it, a subject is wholly constituted in terms of its position in the
system. The esscntial charactcristic of a subjcct is a class symbol which refers only
to other symbols. Its verbal equivalent is accidental, a merely pragmatic character­
istic.
Whereas Cutter's dictionary catalogue is a representation, in alphabetic form, of
the "intellections" that properly educated gentlemen agree to name for social use,
thc DDC is a machine performing the technoburcaucratic functions of a specific
institution. Its procedures are standardization, uniformity and mechanization all
instrumental characteristics serving efficiency. Miksa has explained that Dewey
transformed libraries from regional institutions into The Library, a general institu­
tion, a type, one operating according to standard routines and procedures. The
DDC, its abstract system of subject representation allowing for the standardiza­
tion of "subjects" across space and time, provides the discursive resources that
permit the monitoring,calculation, tabulation and data manipulation characteristic
afan institution operating according to the procedures indicated by Miksa (l983a)
in his analysis of Dewey's corporate ideal.
The conflict of interpretations over "subjectsH became explicit in the battles be­
twecn "bibliography" (an approach to subjects having much in common with Cut­
ter's) and Dewey's "close classification". William Fletcher spokc for the scholarly
bibliographer, who exercised his expertise in a stable moral, cultural and social
order whose authorized categories constituted the basis of a properly constructed
SKO. He saw the DDC as a displacement of high cultural authority over the "sub­
jects" of books and those in whom it had been invested, in favour of mechanical
procedure and its operatives. Dewey's classification was "representative of the
whole mischievous system of the new education, so called, which would lead men
through the world of mind by short-cuts on account of the modern lack of time for
culture" (Fletcher, 211). Dewey's systematic procedures "an attempt to substitute
machinery for brains" would "turn out the sorrowing genius of culture from what
should be the citadel of her hopes, and fill her placcwith a set of cogwheels". The
"labor-saving, time-saving and superficial spirit of the times", Fletcher's clear ref­
erence to Dewey's mechanized,uniform and standardized procedures, was resisted
in the name of a cultural mission in the service of "a people the whole current of
whose life is in danger of being drawn out into the straight canal of a fatal speciali­
zation" (quoted in Garrison 1979: 144). Fletcher's "subjects", like Cutter's, re­
ferred to the categories of a fantasized, stable social order, whereas Dewey's sub­
jects were elements of a semiological system of standardized, technobureaucratic
administrative software for the library in its corporate, rather than high culture,
incarnation.
 I I <t

3.2 Closing the Debate

Fletcher's comments show how much more there is at stake in the construction of
SKOs than solutions to problems of knowledge organization. The DDC intervenes
not just in technoscientific problems, but in social contests for the control of intel­
lectual capital. For a new technoscientific artifact such as the DDC to stabilize and
realize its final form, the conflict of interpretations must be resolved in its favour.
Specific social mechanisms must be mobilized to close the debate. For the DDC to
succeed, the authority to define "subjects" must be wrested away from the guard­
ians of a passing cultural order and turned over to a new professional class of
managers and technical experts.
Latour has shown that Pasteur's microbes became the cure for anthrax only when
they became actors in a social network. Their visibility, definition and subsequent
stability as a cure depended upon the construction of specific institutional forms,
especially the transformation of the farm by taking on the characteristics of the
laboratory. In similar fashion, without a sustaining environment of supporting in­
stitutions, the DDC remains a mere notational curiosity, as successful perhaps in
its solutions to purely technoscientific problems of knowledge organization as
Pasteur's microbes were in passing laboratory tests, but as incapable of becoming
a SKO as the microbes, without their social network, were in becoming a cure.
Dewey's seemingly inexhaustible energy in building the requisite social network
of modern Iibrarianship belongs to library legend. He saw the need for profes­
sional organizations, journals, and university training; he standardized library
materials and equipment; he propagandized enthusiastically for Iibrarianship's
importance to culture and society; he edited Library Journal and was a principal in
the American Library Association. In addition, as Miksa has explained, he had a
vision of the library as a vast corporation, firmly linked to commercial book distri­
bution networks and also a consumer of specialized library materials, from cata­
logue cards to furniture.
Less noticed is the relationship between these efforts and the transformation of a
notational curiosity into a SKO. A system ruled by imperatives of standardization,
uniformity, mechanization and efficiency has as little chance of organizing knowl­
edge for a regional library tended by a scholarly bibliographer as Pasteur's mi­
crobes have of effecting cures in farms failing to follow laboratory procedures.
The DDC's "subjects" arc not visible in the scholarly bibliographer's library be­
cause the discourses of high culture disclose altogether different kinds of subjects:
malleable, tacitly understood,requiring less differentiation and each more capable
of addressing a range of less sharply defined tasks. The DDC's subjects inhabit a
different world, but that world had first to be built. Its construction required en­
rolling professional allies who understood the benefits of counting, measuring,
tabulating and collecting data. It enlisted those who understood the Taylorization
of the workplace, and who felt an affinity with the newly emerging professional
class of managers and experts. It required creating cadres of clerks trained to per­
form standardized tasks according to standardized procedures. It required, most
of all, the transformation of regional libraries driven by a nostalgia for service as
cultured conversation between scholarly bibliographers and their gentlemanly
peers, into a general type that functions according to universal tcchnobureaucratic
procedures. The DDe's "subjects", those abstract, decontextualized positions in
a semiotic system, became the means whereby reader's "wants" could he recorded,
their uses of library materials monitored, the system's functioning surveyed, its
efficiencies tabulated all according to standardized and mechanized procedures
applicable to any library, from the smallest to the largest, anywhere in the world.
The debates about "subjects" closcd because Dewey and his allies were successful
in constructing an environment in which the technobureaucratic triumphs of the
DDC not only ensured its progression from conception to delivery, but also its
survival as a fully-fledged SKO.

3.3 The nne in Technobllreallcratic Society

The transformation of the DDC's historically contingent and highly contested con­
struction of subjects into natural and objcctivc elcmcnts of a SKO requires more,
however, than building specific supportive institutions to close debatcs about al­
ternatives. The complex nctwork consisting of the DDC, professional library or­
ganizations, libraries transformed according to technobureaucratic imperatives,
institutionalized training in Iibrarianship, and standardizcd and routinized library
work, remains a marginal social form preoccupied with neutralizing threats of dis­
integration unless linked to dominant and hegemonic social macrostructures. The
final element in the stability of the DDC is its discursive alliance with the triumph
of mechanization, scientific management, uniformity and standardization in late
nineteenth century American social organization.
The link between the success of the Deweyan library and the shift from an aristo­
cratic cultural order to one dominated by managcrs and professionals exercising
increasingly specialized knowledge has been noted by several commentators (e.g.
Garrison, Miksa). But less noticed is thc importancc of the congruence between
the discursive c1cments of the DDC, by which "subjects" are constructed stand­
ardization, uniformity, mechanization, efficiency and the use of the same elements
in the discursive construction of new social values and a new social order. These
elements are used not only to tell the truth about subjects in the Deweyan library,
but also to tell the truth about social identity in a new organization of society. The
forms of efficiency, scientific management, calculation, system, and instrumental
reason became the means by which social proccsscs wcrc constructed, and through
which they bccame visible, and important. The degree of universality gained by
the DDC a characteristic essential to its stability does not depend upon how close
the problems it addresses approach the logical or technoscientific fundamentals of
knowledge organization, but by the dcgrcc of hcgcmony achieved by its discursive
resources. The DDC became a natural, objective, and fully-fledged SKO because
the discursive elements by which it constructs its "subjects" were the same as
those used to construct both its network of specific supportive institutions and the
dominant and hegemonic social forms of Dewey's day.
3. Conclusion

A social constructivist approach to SKOs shows that their final form derives from
solutions to social, not epistemological, problems, Their social character is not the
result of "influences" that can be avoided by appeals to an external, objective
reality. since they are no more socially constructed than "objective reality"' itself.
The social constructivist approach to knowledge organization docs not, therefore,
offer alternatives to specific systems, but shows the social character of any SKO.

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