Malone, Cheryl K., and Fernando Elichirigoity. “Information as Commodity and Economic Sector: Its Emergence in the Discourse of Industrial Classification.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 54, no. 6 (2003): 512–520.
I’m a fan of Elichirigoity’s work. His Planet Management book is a creative analysis of how ocular technology bootstrapped the concept of globalization. He looks at how techniques drawn from systems theory helped to generate that idea. I draw a lot of inspiration from Elichirigoity because he thinks with many of the same theorists I do.
This particular article was published in one of my core journals, and the subject matter is a little bit closer to what I study: classifications, standards, and information infrastructure of the web. I shouldn’t undersell Cheryl Malone, either, who has done some important research on information access and public libraries. I saw Cheryl Malone speak at SLIS in 2008 on Eliza Atkins. Malone gives lucid, intelligent, and inspiring talks. If you’re looking for a library historian to speak, she’s worth getting in contact with.
This article is about the adoption of the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). NAICS was created as a replacement for the existing Standard Industry Classification (SIC) that had been in use in the United States since 1937. NAICS is used by North American government officials and businesses for gathering and organizing information on the economy. As an example, the NAICS is used to collect data for the U.S. Economic Census that’s given every five years. That data is added to the FactFinder site. This data is used to chart economic trends and statisticians and researchers analyze for a variety of purposes.
Malone and Elichirigoity show how the NAICS was organized around one central principle: industry would be organized around production. This isn’t part of their analysis, this is just something that the organizers aspired to. They saw it as a way to create a better classification system (library scientists would likely give you a different opinion).
To say this another way, the NAICS was written so that it could be reduced to one simple rule. To give this idea some legs, consider some of the other ways that industry could be organized. In the ICS, for example, some parts of industry were organized around services or business organizations. In the ICS, Libraries formed a basic classification category. It was listed in terminology consistent with being an organization. In the NAICS, libraries were listed as a subcategory of Information Services and Data Processing Services. In the NAICS, the emphasis is on the process of working with information.
Malone and Elichirigoity say the classification creates a discursive formation that changes the concept of information and its related economies. They take a Foucauldian approach to argue that this creates a new way of knowing, or regime, of informational economics, one that depends on the organizing principle of the NAICS. Because the NAICS is so central for understanding large economies, this regime has significant consequences for the activities being classified.
I like this piece, but not because it’s groundbreaking or new. It combines some old analytic concepts from LIS and discourse analysis into one think piece about the North American economy. It’s clear, well-written, and about a topic that seems particularly timely given the current global economic situation. It would be great to see this analysis extended to include some contemporary data, which wouldn’t be too difficult since the census data is made available to the public. Also, the authors say that this creates a new regime of information economics — it would have been awesome if they provided even a rudimentary critique of how that regime was different than the previous rather than ending with that provocative claim.
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