THE SOCIOLOGY OF THE INVISIBLE: THE PRIMACY OF WORK IN THE WRITINGS OF ANSELM STRAUSS Susan Leigh Star 15 Introduction Every passionate scientist has a mystery at the center of his or her re- search. In exactly the ancient senses of mystery and passion, there are questions or sets of questions that can never be solved, only wrestled with, embraced, and, one hopes, transformed. The primacy of work is just such a mystery in the work of Anselm Strauss, and his profoundly fertile transfor- mations have given rise to a new way of framing an old sociological! philosophical question: the relationship between the empirical/material on the one hand, and the theoretical/abstract on the other. Here | call this the relationship between the visible and the invisible. The visible things are actions, stuff, bodies, machines, buildings. In social science, as everywhere, we are constantly wrestling with the properties of visible things: they are many, they are resistant to our attempts to change them, they clutter our landscape everywhere. In facing the tyranny of blind empiricism, however, we temper the clutier of the visible by creating invisibles: abstractions that will stand quietly, cleanly, and docilely for the noisome, messy actions and materials. Instead of an enumeration of 750,000 individual bodies, biographies, dwelling places, habits, salaries, diets, we get “San Francisco”; instead of one million Main Streets, boule- vards, metros, offices, traffic lights, we get the abstraction: “‘city.’’ And there stops much social science, although recently there has been a systematic attempt to deconstruct the abstractions and return to the stuff of which, it seems, the abstractions are The central insight of Anselm's research is not that the visible can be restored—for it was never lost—but that the visible and the invisible are dialectically inseparable. Work is the link between the visible and the invisible. Visibles are not automatically organized into pregiven abstrac- tions. Someone does the ordering, someone living in a visible world. Every ordering is itself anchored in a series of contingencies, and every anchoring 265266 Susan Leigh Star embeds a patterning that can be viewed theoretically, Because there are patterns, regularities, boundaries, and shapes, we can detect work by its organization. But not everyone, and especially not the social scientists Anselm criticizes as “grand theorists," remembers the work that goes into making and managing invisibles. Rather, they reify invisibles, creating tran- scendental theories unanchored in experience. Critiques of such reifications are an important part of Anselm's work. Deleting the work can be under- stood by listening to another kind of pattern—patters in the invisibles, such as silences, omissions, areas of neglect. In the words of poet Adrienne Rich (1978217): The technology af silence the blurring of terms silence not absence of words or music or even raw sounds Silence can be a plan rigorously executed the blueprint to a lide tt is a presence it has a history 2 form Do not confuse it with any kind of absence Finding the silent blueprint to a life means looking in areas of darkness. Anselm's methodological maxim for this, said in gentle tones to all of us students searching for the right focus in a welter of visibles and Invisibles, was simply “study the unstudied.” Look at the things that other social scientists have forgotten, the things they consider unimportant, the things behind the scenes—and you're likely to find some important deleted work. Dorothy Smith's essays in feminist sociology similarly locate these dele- tions (she calls them “leached out’) in the neglected problematics of every- day life. She contrasts formal art with womanly crafts: A quilt was made to be used. ee the pieces of her grandmother's dress, her daughter's pinafore—and was sometimes made by © group of women workiog tgether together. The making itself were built inte the design. . ~ Itwas not made to be set in the high wall ala pallor or museum (1967:23) She goes on to link the problematics of everyday life with local, material conditions: “The everyday world is not an abstracted formal ‘setting’ trans- posed by the sociologist’s conceptual work to an abstracted formal exis- The Sociology of the Invisible 267 tence, It is an actual material setting, an actual local and particular place in the world” (p. 97). Because women’s work was for so long considered unimportant, it’s an important place to begin restoring. In 1975 | became interested in linguistics because of my involvement in feminism, and found that many feminist linguists were trying to analyze how language had been and could be oppressive. Julia Stanley's research im- pressed me very much, She made the point that you can’t recover informa- tion about who is doing what if you use certain linguistic forms. She called those forms “truncated agents” and “‘nominalized passives.” For example, phrases like “the data have revealed” (which deletes who revealed) and “elephant meat is edible” (by whom, under what conditions?) are rhetorical weapons that obscure the bases of responsibility and agency (Stanley and Robbins 1977; Stanley 1975, 1978). | developed a habit of trying to “restore” the agency to whatever | read. This proved a useful tool in joining what | was learning from Anselm with ferninist analyses of rhetoric. The trick of restoring the agency becomes very interesting when reading philosophy, philosophy of science in particular. The thing that many philosophers of science delete is the work of creating an observation, a claim, of a judgment. in restoring the work, even in imagina- tion while reading, | was able to do two things: track regularities in the deletions, and use the philosophy of science as an example of the kind of work-deleting that is common everywhere. In this, Anselm's research has been an invaluable aid.’ This essay is a systematic atternpt to explore Anselm's double understand- ing of both the organization of the work and the organization of the deleted work. | identify four of his research contributions, and examine his descrip- tions of both the work organization and the deletion of the work by other people (often social scientists and policymakers, but not always). The four contributions are awareness context, grounded theory, continuity of identi- ty, and articulation work. | conclude with a discussion of some implications and methodological rules of thumb arising from this “sociology of the invisible.” Awareness Context Silences, lies, and secrets are three invisibles that leave their footprints all over the work of caring for the dying patient, as the analysis in Awareness of Dying shows (Glaser & Strauss 1965). The concept of awareness context refers to the nature of information about, in this case, whether a person is dying. The range of possible contexts is from secret to all, to open to some (e.g., the medical staff knows, but the patient and family do not), to a context where there is some suspicion, to an “open awareness context”where everyone knows that the person is dying (and everyone knows that everyone knows). Detecting the way the work is organized in order to create and maintain an awareness context is the first step in restoring the work to what is often seen as a transcendental, taken-for-granted, or even mythological phenome- non. “Physicians and nurses tend to regard such events either in mythologi- cal terms . . . or to discount pattemed events in favor of the uniqueness of events" (1965:ix). Faced with an overwhelming situation—the impending death of a patient—family, doctors, and nurses create silences and secrets to keep their own work orderly, These secrets are often volatile and always are difficult to maintain. Awareness of Dying discusses in vivid detail the work of maintain- ing them, and also explores quite formally the dimensions of the work involved in that maintenance. Instead of a static chessboard with players moving woodenly back and forth, Bamey and Anselm paint an extremely busy, work-filled world where the visible body of the patient and the invisible presence of secret knowledge and sentiment must be “recon- stituted continually, must be ‘worked at,” both according to established values and with the purpose of establishing values to preserve order’ (1965:14), The “behind the scenes" work of negotiated social order falls, as is often the case, on nurses, patients, and families. When physicians decide not to tell patients that they are dying, they pass along a burden of work that must be managed: The most crucial institutional consequence has already been mentioned: able burden is built into the organization of the hospital services that deal with terminal patients. ip. 45) When dying is a secret, the awareness context is inherently unstable, requiring much work on the part of everyone: Family involved in a closed awareness context must collaborate with the staff to keep the patent unaware, and staff members must handle the family members accordingly, making sure they do not leak information to the patient. @. 137) This fiction can be quite elaborate, Glaser and Strauss convey a sense of an elaborate drama being played out, which the authors compare to a mas- querade: “Both situations share one feature—the extensive use of props for sustaining the crucial illusion’ (p. 71). The very work of maintaining the fiction means creating consistency where none naturally exists: The Sociology of the Invisible we They aril comment favorably on his dally appeacance, hoping he will interpret their comments optimistically. Some comments are downeight misrepresenta- tions and others are ambiguous enough to be misread easily. Staff members will attempt to establish a mood consonant less with terminality than with “things that are not so bad even if not yet better.’ (p. 36) The nurses practice sleight of hand, raise false scents, ‘sometimes display- ing elaborate interest in the symptoms” brought up (p. 39). If patients begin to suspect that they are dying, what Glaser and Strauss call a “suspicion context” arises. A different kind of work organization emerges. Here the patient becomes a detective or scientist, and Glaser and Strauss pay sharp attention to the limited resources of patients in conducting such work: “his major problem comes down to this: he must either detect or elicit signs that will confirm his suspicions. He needs crucial information, but how can he get it?” (p. 51, emphasis in original) Because the patient is depicted as actively working, alll transcendental notions of dying fade in the list of verbs describing the interaction between patient, family, and nurses: “he coaxes, wheedles, bargains, persuades, hints, aind uses other forms of negotiation” (p. 94) to get needed resources. And as with scientists or detectives, the patient must check sources: “Can we trust the doctor, can he trust the nurses and aides, to yield him a true account of his story? Or will their account be tinged by deceit and perhaps thoroughly false?” (p. 33) Whether the patient succeeds in breaking the fiction established by a closed awareness context, the burden of work involved in maintaining a Consistent fiction may get to be too much. If the situation moves from secret to frank, for instance, there may be different consequences for the organiza- tion of work, Again, one of those consequences is the burden of work that then falls on the dying patient and the family; A patient who makes it easy for himself also makes his death easier for his family. So far as awareness #s accompanied by acceptable dying, it reduces the strain that would otherwise be imposed on kinsmen by closed of suspicion awareness, {the patients able to attain a kind of paychotogical closing for his otherwise unacceptably, his family would doubtless have preferred to have kept him unaware of his terminality. (p. 104) Glaser and Strauss push the constant-comparative method later discussed in The Discovery of Grounded Theory (1967) by doing a figure/ground gestalt switch on the very phenomenon they are describing. Awareness ‘contexts seem so important in the dying situation; they wonder whether ‘there are any situations in which they are not important, There are some,270 Susan Leigh Star which they call “discounting of awareness," and they go on to discuss the case in which nurses, family, of doctors discount the problem of awareness comtext—for example, vis-a-vis an infant in a coma. They also discuss a curious failure to discount, that is, the fact that a person is dead, in referring to treatment of a corpse as a sort-of person: ‘For instance, nurses who have gotten deeply involved with a patient will sometimes back away from Postmortem care of the body” (p. 113). In this case, the visible entity is the deceased body; the invisible is a sense of the person's continuing existence, and here again, Glaser and Strauss are able to pinpoint the work that joins the visible body and the invisible identity. This works includes special care of the body, managing relatives, arranging clothing. Awareness of Dying provides a framework for joining that which is invisible in the presence of the dying person (secrets, lies, “passing” as less gravely ill) with the visible body, via the work of caring for oneself of others to produce the concept awareness context. The ethical aspect of the book is evident throughout: there are Consequences to assuming the right and power of disclosure. Glaser and Strauss offer no simple answers—for the decision to tell a patient may be equally fraught with negative conse- quences. Rather, their intention is to make the work organization visible by making it processual, by looking at hidden or devalued work such as that done by nurses and patients themselves, and by examining the conse- quences of a given set of decisions. Grounded Theory The oxymoron contained in the label “grounded theory” is a clue that this method is a way of wrestling with that which joins the visible ground with the invisible abstraction. That the “glue” is work appears in various ways throughout the discussion, focusing on the work of the analyst and the work done by the people being studied. As James Grieserner (1988) has cogently argued, the material arrangements of specimens in biological science reflect the order of abstractions in biological theory. Arrangements order abstrac- tions. For grounded theory, teaching and research arrangements are both a reflection of the commitment to the primacy of work. As a student learning grounded theory, |, like many others, first encoun- tered a place to: work as a social scientist that was both public and sheltered, The big oval table in our classroom in the school of nursing seated just enough people to listen to each other, The rules seemed simple: each week, ‘one person would bring iin his or her data and accompanying memos (or sometimes send them ahead of time). We would all join in the coding, arguing with each other and with Anselm or Bamey. There were no mistakes as such, and this was a very important feature of the arrangement. A student The Sociology of the Invisible a7 could “try an idea on for size” —name a dimension or code in the data, put it metaphorically and literally on the table, and invoke the help of the others in pushing it through the data. Sometimes the data would push it back out! Or rather, there sometimes came a moment when the ring of conviction would leave the student's voice, and he or she would begin quickly speak- ing in the conditional, or in a heavily passive style. “Look, let's try this” was replaced by “according to x, it might be the case that other studies might have revealed.” Our work in the class was to listen for this shift in terminol- ogy and retrieve the grain of recognition that had come with the first idea, then rename it, and try it in another matrix. This meant listening for reifica- tions and indicators of deleted work. it is difficult to describe the spirit of gentleness that pervaded these interactions under Anselm's direction, but | think it is intimately linked with his focus on the primacy of work. Most of us carried bruises from aur former encounters with academic invisibles—grand theories created by individuals in private in which the process of production was a complete mystery. | have not known anyone trained in traditional sociology who took the grounded-theory courses and did not experience that slight feeling of shame and exposure the first time it was their own data being discussed, or of the consequent relief when public inspection did not find them idiots, fakers, or otherwise hopeless. The passionate denunciation of grand theory in Glaser and Strauss’s The Discovery of Grounded Theary (1967) speaks to issues such as the impos- sibility of falsification in nonempirical theories and the characterization of qualitative research as “unsystematic” by Merton” “|He] opposes our posi- tion that a theory should fit and work, that is, be relevant to the area it purports to explain. . . . His reasoning leads to the position that data should fit the theory, in contrast to our position that the theory should fit the data” (p. 261). But there was an equally passionate yet implicit polemic in the conduct of the grounded-theory seminars: stretch your imagination by applying your inewborn theory to Comparative Cases, not lo extensions of theory, of worse, mindless applications of someone else's theory, And do stretch your imag- ination, else you have gone native, To go native meant not to attend to the primary job of the sociologist: to listen to all the voices in a situation (as much as possible), including your own, But if you want to track the invisi- bles, you must listen to them all, your own being not least among the silenced ones. The concepts and theories developed from such a project, argued Glaser and Strauss, would be both analytic and sensitizing: “By analytic we mean that they are sufficiently generalized to designate the properties of concrete entities—not the entities themselves—and by sensitizing we mean that they yield a meaningful picture” [for the actors themselves] (p. 263; emphasis in272 Susan Leigh Star original). Meaningfulness for the actors is a difficult notion if part of the job of the student is not to go native, or worse, also is a native.’ There was a constant tussling back and forth in the class between our desire to ‘get it right’ according to the native, and to push the frame of our description into adjacent spaces and thus enrich the model, Those of us who studied scientists or doctors also had to contend with the conviction of many of our respondents that there was indeed one good model, and theirs was scien- tifically better than ours. This meant walking a tightrope, described as follows in Awareness of Dying: They should mot be so abstract as to lose their sensitizing aspect, but yet must be abstract enough to make our theory a general guide conditional, ever-changing daily situations . . . we have tried to make the theory flexible enough to make a wide variety of changing situations under- standable, and also flexible enough to be readily reformulated, virtually on the spot, when necessary, that is, when the theory does not work. (1965:265) i In a sense, to study a world without going native and without resorting to preconceived theories is at the heart of the mystery of work. "The field worker who has observed closely in this social world has had, in a profound sense, to live there... . His informed detachment has allowed him to benefit both as a sociologist and as a human being who must ‘make out’ in that world” (Glaser and Strauss 1967:226). Because of the stress on the primacy of work both in the teaching of grounded theory and in the kinds of variables that get picked out as theo- retically important, the organization of research around this mystery is very low-key and pragmatic. We leamed to work in groups. We leamed to hesitate before invoking invisibles and to search instead for the work in- volved. We learned that a person’s status was unrelated to his or her ability to give us useful heuristics or dimensions of our data. And we leamed something that had been veiled from us—being a good sociologist was hard work and involved the recognition of the hard work of others. Continuity of Identity There are many ways to conceptualize how people continue to be the same over time, as Anselm states in the beginning of Mirrors and Masks (1969). One can claim an essentialism, in which outward signs or behaviors may have changed radically, but an inner essence of the person remains the same. Or, one can envision time or human development as a fixed set of rungs up a ladder, of as turns in a precarved road, and thus discussion of continuity is cast in terms of a person's progression up or over them (p. 90). The Sociology othe Ive ms Yet, Yat bn the Nowe of Ws eves, such explanations create an invisible: es- sence, predetermined structure, to explain the visible chaos of changed behaviors, bodies, or locations. The work of joining ther is deleted.‘ lin Anselm's terms: Development, then, is commonly viewed either as attainment, of as sets of variations on basic themes. In either case, you as the observer of the develop- mental patiern are omniscient; you know the end against which persons are Se Tae ee Lan Sears on wrth weviotone ove Caravans Newther metaphor tentative, exploratory, hypotheti- cal, caplet “devious Oe oreeable a and only partly-unified character of human courses of action. (p. 91) The work involved in managing the open-ended character of dewelop- ment or change is primarily that of ordering and constantly reclassifying one’s biography (or collective biography). It is a work not just of reconstruct- ing pasts, but constructing futures and managing presents. People do not magically stay the same, either in their private biographies or in the interac- tional biographies constructed as part of a group. Rather, there is always renegotiation of the meaning of past events—what Dewey called recon- struction—which takes a good deal of thought, bargaining, and coaching. The work of managing the Continuity of identity in a pragmatic fashion is taken up in a later work by Glaser and Strauss (1971), Status Passage. The formal properties of many kinds of status passages, both individual and collective, are elucidated there. About continuity of identity, they have this fo say: Maintaining continuity during change of the present passage is a primary reason for instituting sentimental-instrumental recapitulations about the desir- able features of the past passages. This comparative perspective between past and present gives agents and passagees a greater insight into the desirability of specific current changes and continuities. ... Its continued forward thrust may require such continual reviews into at least the short-term past, for hing the present and giving direction at least to the short-term future. This process is fundamentally interactive in character, requiring coaches, people to help guide and control the tricky passages: “This support is necessary for underwriting viable continued controls over the passage. Without the support, controls do not work well with agents or passages, who may avoid, ignore, or rebel against them" (p. TOT). There are some important philosophical fundamentals for the sociology of the invisible in Anselm’s work on continuity of identity, The most important concerns the nature of change as Continuous, and as involving work:274 Susan Leigh Star M1 identities are changing, if relationships are reconstituted by action; then any persons’ possession of another person's regard or lowe of envy is imperma- tert. - Final possessions would mean death; it would mean to fix forever, like killing the person you lave so that can ever change or mar the relationshap. People have been known to do The gist of all this és that involvements are evolvements—in the course of which parties and their relationships become transformed (Strauss 1969, pp. 37-38) It is precisely this continual necessity for reassessment that permits the innowa- tion and novelty of human life. . . . Innovation, in fact, rests upon ambiguous, confused, not wholly defined situations. . » Emergent valuation is hardly a serene process, for the reassessment of experience is apt to be quite stressful, (p. 26) Anselm's work here explicitly owes much to the pragmatist philosophy of Mead and Dewey. Dewey's argument about the nature of particularly in Reconstruction in Philosophy (1951) and The Quest for Certainty (1929) was quite similar to that elaborated in Mirrors and Masks, although written as a philosopher and thus without a detailed analysis of social structure. Dewey wrote about facts as being born from reflections on “interruptions to experience.” That is, you go along doing something. then something else gets in your way, Being stopped, you are forced to examine your experience and draw on the conditions around you to make sense of it. The interruption to experience is in fact a description of the relation between the visible and the invisible. The wording és slightly different: Dewey's emphasis was on conditions and communities. He did not divide conditions and matter. In Dewey's words, “matter means conditions,” and conditions include communities of experience, which dialectically create meaning. One can be interrupted by conditions, visible or invisible—it is the joint activity of the community that gives meaning to the interruption. This is a highly processual, evolving vision of the world and of fact- making, and Dewey, like Anselm, was also fascinated with the observation that most people didn’t want to perceive it that way. In The Quest for Certainty and Reconstruction in Philosophy, he wrote at length about reifi- cation and the consequences of erasing the process of examination and communal/historical meaning-making, He attributes the erasure in part to the search for antecedents instead of consequences. People want certainty, universal truths and forms that will endure past their horizons; thus they construct fictions that will produce those things. Those fictions take the form of stories about the necessary antecedents of experience, which can then be predicted, controlled, and sold. Mirrors and Masks and Status Passage elaborate these themes, and also unfold the work of managing both the fictions and the experiences, By unseating the stand-alone invisible, universal development and instead linking interactions and development with work, they add another impor- tant dimension to the sociology of the invisible. The Sociology othe Ive ws Articulation Work The concept of articulation work is perhaps Anselm's most important contribution to the sociology of the invisible. Articulation work is work that gets things back “on track” in the face of the unexpected, and modifies action to accommodate unanticipated contingencies. The important thing about articulation work is that it is invisible to rationalized models of work. Those representations of work and production that consider a smooth, unproblematic sequence of events as an adequate representation cannot, and will not, admit of local, unique, unexpected solutions to problems, This is why the concept of articulation has caught on in some of the more progressive reaches of computer science (Bendifallah and Scacchi 1987; Gasser 1986), in that one of their arguments against ultrarigid, pure logic— based computational models is that they can never account for all the contingencies faced by users in the real world. The counterpoint to articulation work is routine: that which is packaged up, taken for granted, black-boxed. Only routine work, of assemblages of routines, can be rationalized and thus protected from the need for articula- tion. It is no semantic accident that the components of computer programs are called routines and subroutines! Fujimura’s (1987) discussion of the relationship between ‘‘doable” scientific problems, routines, and packaging shows the interrelationship between work in different spheres and the status of a problem. The advantages of routine, or “standard operating procedure” (SOP), are enormous in complex work situations such as those found in the hospital. In Social Organization of Medical Work, Anselm and his colleagues (1985) State that: “there is a strong tendency toward maximizing the use of SOP and toward constructing some of it when it is not already established . . . the necessity for doing it, especially for the head nurses since there are so many comtingencies and trajectory complexities that destroy her easy reliance on SOP" (p. 158). They speak of a “veritable hurricane’ of problems for the head nurse that make it important to build a kind of library of SOPs, or articulation strategies, that help with the ordering of local chaos. The invocation of articulation strategies in the face of breakdowns of rational models is the first important implication for the sociology of the invisible. As | have elsewhere argued (Star 1989a), the problem of the escape of nature from the straitjacket of formalism is a never-ending process—one formally discussed by Gédel in one sense, and lately in another as the basis of a computational model by Carl Hewitt (1986). At heart, the problem is this: every attempt to formalize some phenomenon ina complete, consistent, and closed sense itself resists formalization, That is because there are always choices to be made in the formalization process, including those made about targets for formalization. There are always276 Susan Leigh Star authors—people creating, using, archiving, and revising the formal models, and which at some level themselves have no formal algorithm by which to choose them or to model the articulation work they do—and so on indefi- nitely, Sociologically, and with respect to rational models of organizations, the problem becomes the old one of social order: quis formabit formatores? {Who will formalize the formalizers?) And the more bureaucratized and formalized social organization becomes, the closer we get to the original question, Who will guard the guardians? The reification of the invisible, abstract formal madel, as over and against the visible local contingencies and actions, is both dangerous and political, when joined with complex technologies that have power over human lives. That is, the deletion of the work from the formal model leads to the need for articulation work, which is also invisible to the model. The discussion of “cumulative mess trajectories” in the Social Organization of Medical Work is a vivid example of the breakdown of SOP and, by extension, of the SOPs embodied in various medical technologies (Strauss et al. 1985, pp. 160— 81). Cumulative messes occur in the trajectory of a given patient in a hospital when the side effects, u events, and types of work in different aspects of care begin colliding, until the patient and the staff are enveloped in chaos. It is a breakdown of routine in so many critical spheres that no order really remains. “Additional tasks are called forth by other kinds of illness developments, which are conceived as necessitating further diag- nostic and treatments not originally envisioned. Each of those diagnostic and treatment tasks require further articulation” (p. 179). The work of patients, nurses, and family is clearly analyzed in case after case, But “much of their work is quite invisible to the physicians, nurses and technicians, because that work is. not actually seen, is kept secret, oc if it is seen, is not defined as work but just as patients’ activity or general participa- tion in their own care” (p. 191). The concept of “invisible work’ also appears in Corbin and Strauss’s book on the work of caring for chronically ill spouses and lovers at home. There, they emphasize the constant attention and continuity involved in the work: Thus, much of the “invisible work” and many of the insidious consequences accompanying the maintenance of a stable phase are actually derived from constant adjustments and shifts in routines, shifts made in response to manage- ment obstacles presented by illness, biography, or everyday contingencies, These shifts are vitally necessary. (Corbin and Strauss 1988:209, emphasis in original) Another cause of the permanence of articulation work appears more subtly but pervasively in Anselm's writings. This is the fundamental plural- ism in workplaces, including multiple trajectories of work, which gives rise to incompatible viewpoints about what should be done in a situation. ‘The Sociology of the tnvisible 277 Rationalization does not really encompass a fundamental pluralism—the different but equal status of paths of action leaves indeterminate the direc- tion of action. So, in the case of Anselm's work, the fact that nurses, patients, families, doctors, hospital administrators, or salespeople for medi- cal instruments have basically different goals and ways of working is para- mount. It is this fundamental pluralism that has, in turn, led to Anselm’s many studies of the unstudied. A nurse is mo less an author or respondent than a doctor; a spouse no less a worker than a nurse; a patient no less than an insurance underwriter. Pluralism means conflict and negotiation—both inimical to the perpetuation of reified invisibles. Some Rules of Thumb for the Sociology of the Invisible Based on the considerations outlined above, Inow address how we might approach the study of invisible things. In doing, a grounded-theory analysis of some of Anselm's work, the following methodological rules of thumb appeared as dimensions useful for this work, 1, The rule of continuity: There is no such thing as dualism By this | mean that any idea that there are two domains that proceed in tandem (the mind and the brain; technology and society; science and imerests; gender and socialization) and somehow “affect” each other is silly and should be rejected. Phenomena are continuous, of in Dewey's words, “experience is a seamless web.” People make invisible entities by positing tandem domains, as for in- stance in the idea that thoughts are caused by society. Such a formulation of the problem immediately involwes one in the search for the conjoining mechanisms: How are they causes? Where do they touch? The easy reifica- tions of society, social class, or power lack powerful explanatory frame- works and render much of the work of constituting the world invisible. One ‘ends up chasing little invisible things around, asymptotically, until the ‘society can somehow be forced or finessed into the person, if we begin with the premise that space and time are continuous, and that work is involved in separating one domain from another, then causality shifts from the invisible to the experienced, as both Bentley and Marx were fond of pointing out. Objects, from this point of view, are created not by reacting to something but by overleaving stratified networks originating from radically different points (see also Star 1989b:15—25). We can understand power then as the imposition of position in such stratified networks, Objects are more or less viscous, and have different rhythms depending on where and when they are situated in networks,278 Susan Leigh Star 2, The rule of no omniscience: Nobody is exempt from having a viewpoint and everybody has several Another kind of fiction that makes invisible things hard to study, and sometimes creates invisible things, is the idea that somebody has the big picture. This idea has been attacked a lot in philosophy of science, espe- cially social science, under the heading of the objectivity/subjectivity split and its impossibility, But hardly anybody really knows what to do with it. There’s a kind of guilty feeling that the observer should be “put back in,”” and that everybody has values that they should confess to or be proud of. Anselm's work points a methodological and substantive way around this dilemma: restore the work, the practice. What is important about this approach is not that everybody has values but the egalitarian nature of viewpoints. That is the key to putting the observer back in. if we really adopt the position that nobody knows quali- tatively more than anybody else, we lose the Copernican brittleness of our Philosophy of science, There are no exemptions, Thus, every viewpoint is a part of some pécture, but not the whole picture, The implications are that only in the articulation of viewpoints can we understand anything about truth; that is, that truth is a fundarnentally interactional, social phenomenon. 3. The rule of analytical hygiene: Concepts are verbs, mot nouns Some of the worst reifications of invisible things involve creating a com cept such as “workplace” or “class’* and then freezing its meaning. When subsequent evidence does not fit the previously reified categories, it is discarded or made invisible to the analysis. If instead of reifications, we build concepts to encompass the tension between what Anselm calls “‘sensi- tizing” and “analysis.” They must be dynamic and reconfigurable (verbs, Mot nouns), yet not so infinitely plastic that they lose individuation. Two examples of concepts of this nature are boundary objects and the zone of proximate development. Boundary objects is a concept | have used to analyze heterogeneous scientific work—objects used by more than one social world simultaneously (Star and Griesemer 1989; Star 1988), Zone of proximate development was developed by Soviet psychologist Vygotsky to explain how children learn dialectically and collectively; it has been picked up by a number of developmental psychologists, including Engstrém (1987), who uses it to discuss “expansive research,” 4. The sule of sovereignty: Every standpoint has a cost The idea that resources are critical to work is a constant thread throughout Anselm's work, from the resources required to reconstruct a biography depicted in Mirrors and Masks to the resources required by the caretaker- spouse in his latest chronic illness research. If we join this perception with The Sociology of the Inisibfe m7 the fundamental pluralism in Anselm's writings (inherited from the Chicago school) and the volatile nature of so many resources, we see that indepen- dence of viewpoint is a costly thing indeed. In fact, every standpoint—every juncture of trajectories—has a cost, In order to analyze the costs and nature of these standpoints, we need closely to attend to the flow of resources and the negotiations involved therein. 5. The rule of invisibility: Successful claims to pure invisible phenomena require the assertion of power—the more successful, the more violent As the work of negotiating, resource management, and many other pro- cesses are deleted from representations, one group's interests begin to take Precedence over another's, subverting the fundamental pluralism of human interaction. Anselm's work points to one mechanism of this dominance or oppression: rendering certain kinds of work invisible, reifying invisible things, and then secretly, privately, or duplicitously claiming the resources rightfully belonging to the work. Thus, doctors get paid and a patients’ spouse does not, in part because of the invisibility of the work spouses perform privately in the home. Nurses inherit an unfair burden of the consequences of a closed awareness context-—because their work is tradi- tionally invisible by virtue of its lower status (and in a natural induction, because of their lower status as [predominantly and traditionally} female). Yet the more the work is rendered deleted and the more invisibles are invoked as explanations, the more suffering there is. Conclusions: The Importance of the Invisible Many provocative threads from the topics in Anselm's writings are identi- fied in this essay, especially those concerning power and theory-making, invisibility, and voice. The idea of the primacy of work as explicated in a series of insightful investigations gives us a tool to track work made invisible and to understand the mechanisms of power that are tied in to the deletion of certain kinds of work. This work has spoken to me as a feminist about the obscuring of women’s voices, traditionally silenced in the academy, in the professions, and in the home, When women’s work, in the home, in emotional articulation, in childbearing, in support, becomes invisible, then silence ensues. As Tillie Olsen said so eloquently: ‘What is it that happens with the creator, to the creative process, in that lime? ‘What are creation’s needs for full functioning? Without intention of or preten- sion to liserary scholarship, | have had special need to learn all | Could of this260 Susan Leigh Star ‘over the years, myself so nearly remaining mute and having to let writing die over and over again in me, These are not natural silences, . . . The silences | speak of here are unnatu- ral: the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot. (19656) Olsen goes on to speak of various kinds of silences: of censorship, of lack of resources, of being made crazy or thought to think one’s words are not worthwhile. The invocation of the invisible order of nature, of various erasures of women’s work has led to a vast silencing from which we are only beginning to recover, Daniels’s (1988) complex, sensitive analysis of the effects of invisibility on the lives of women volunteers, and what it means to have an “invisible career," carries Olsen's analysis into the sociology of work. Anselm’s work has given me an important tool with which to help in the process of recovering the work, a way of systematically attending to the work, Another domain where the primacy of work in Anselen’s writing is impor- tant is in looking at formal models, abstractions, and quantification. Sal Restive has been concerned with this question from the point of view of the genesis, cost, and uses of abstract thought, particularly in mathematics and mysticism (1983). Restivo's argument, in brief, is that what we call “pure thought” is. no different from other manipulations of the material world. Lave’s work on “everyday arithmetic” makes a similar point about the impossibility of understanding decontextualized learning (Lave 1988). There is a tinkering, sculpting process rooted in experience that is the same whether you're making an algorithm or a cake. What is different is the kind of social structures that support the two kinds of activities and the ideology of abstraction, These matters are important in understanding the claims made about the power of “pure mathematics” of “pure thought.” Often such claims point to expensive, elitist institutional arrangements, which screen out the invisible work that supports them. For example, theoretical physics and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton supported claims of the primacy of physics and mathematics; Restivo has linked these claims with elitism and the permission to develop oppressive social structures. | agree, and would link that directly with the deletion of work involved in such claims, One outcome of the claims to purity is that as they become more credible (with capturing of resources by claimers and developing density of social worlds; with elite patronage relationships such as between kings and court mathematicians), the work of creating the abstraction is erased. Applying Anseim’s methods, we would ask, not only cui bono, but who else is doing the work involved? Who was interacting with whom, not just at the level of great thinkers meeting in seminars, but administrators negotiating for funds, The Sociology of the Invisible 281 accepting some people and turning down others, doing maintenance on the building where the math seminars are held, and so on. Becker's research on the various kinds of work involved in creating a “school of thought” or esthetic in art reflects many of the same Concerns (1982): Who are all the people working on a given production? How does it change our understand- ing of art, or science, or technology, when we restore all the work? Clarke's work both on the material of science and the process of tinkering with scientific ideas suggests a similar analysis (1987). Animal breeders, lab technicians, secretaries, and salespeople are as important to many of the processes of scientific work as Ph.D scientists, Shapin's pathbreaking work, “The Invisible Technician,” makes a similar point (1989); we can't under- stand science as a process without restoring the technicians and assistants to the story. To do a sociology of the invisible means to take on the erasing process as the central human behavior of concer, and then to track that comparatively across domains, This is, in the end, a profoundly political process, since so many modern forms of social control rely on the erasure or silencing of various workers, on deleting their work from representations of the work. Acknowledgments. The research and comments of Geof Bowker, Adele Clarke, Arlene Kaplan Dan- iels, Alain Desrosiéres, Joan Fujimura, James Griesemer, Bruno Latour, and Steve helpful substantive and editorial suggestions, | gratefully acknowledge their contri- [ Notes out to me that | use invisibility in two senses in this 2. Written welll before the “death and dying’ movement of the 1970s, and perhaps a force in it. 3. This was the case with many of us at the University of California, San Francisco. There were nurses studying the conduct of medical care, and social scientists studying the practice of science, etc. 4. See Lindesmith and Strauss (1950) for a critique of these theories in the then- current “culture and personality’ literature.262 Susan Leigh Star References Becker, Howard S, 1982, Art Worlds, Berkeley: University of California Press, Bendifallah, Sallah and Walt Scacchi. 1987. “Understanding Software Maintenance Work.” (EEE Transactions om Software Engineering SE-143):311-23. 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