Star considers infrastructures to be both essential collaboration as well as inherently limiting the degree to which collaboration is possible. This is ascertainable by looking at the way she thinks about infrastructure’s following characteristics:
_ Embeddedness. Infrastructure is sunk into, inside of, other structures, social arrangements and technologies;
_ Transparency. Infrastructure is transparent to use, in the sense that it does not have to be reinvented each time or assembled for each task, but invisibly supports those tasks;
_ Reach or scope. This may be either spatial or temporal—infrastructure has reach beyond a single event or one-site practice;
_ Learned as part of membership. The taken-for-grantedness of artifacts and organizational arrangements is a sine qua non of membership in a community of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991; Star 1996). Strangers and outsiders encounter infrastructure as a target object to be learned about. New participants acquire a naturalized familiarity with its objects as they become members;
_ Links with conventions of practice. Infrastructure both shapes and is shaped by the conventions of a community of practice, for example, the ways that cycles of day–night work are affected by and affect electrical power rates and needs. Generations of typists have learned the QWERTY keyboard; its limitations are inherited by the computer keyboard and then by the design of today’s computer furniture (Becker 1988);
_ Embodiment of standards. Modified by scope and often by conflicting conventions, infrastructure takes on transparency by plugging into other infrastructures and tools in a standardized fashion.
_ Built on an installed base. Infrastructure does not grow de novo; it wrestles with the inertia of the installed base and inherits strengths and limitations from that base. Optical fibers run along old railroad lines; new systems are designed for backward-compatibility; and failing to account for these constraints may be fatal or distorting to new development processes.
_ Becomes visible upon breakdown. The normally invisible quality of working infrastructure becomes visible when it breaks: the server is down, the bridge washes out, there is a power blackout. Even when there are back-up mechanisms or procedures, their existence further highlights the now-visible infrastructure.
_ Is fixed in modular increments, not all at once or globally. Because infrastructure is big, layered, and complex, and because it means different things locally, it is never changed from above. Changes take time and negotiation and adjustment with other aspects of the systems involved. (Star 2010, 611)
Epistemic cultures are akin to Star’s concept of “Social Worlds” or what she also refers to as “communities of practice.” Boundary objects mediate cooperative working relationships between members of different social worlds. Or, inversely, one could also say that the particularities of these relationships would also limit what would be able to “function” as an effective boundary object. In Star’s words, “the forms this may take are not arbitrary. They are essentially organic infrastructures that have arisen due to what Jim Griesemer and I called ‘‘information needs’’ in 1989. I would now add ‘‘information and work requirements,’’ as perceived locally and by groups who wish to cooperate” (Star 2010, 602).
Star also admits that the idea of “interpretive flexibility” was fundamental to the constructivist approach to science studies well before it was integrated into the concept of boundary objects. Though, at this point, the two are inextricably intertwined.
In this article, Star reflects on how her research was impacted by her training and experiences in the field. Being trained in Sociology at the University of California San Francisco, she describes her approach as being heavily influenced by Symbolic Interactionism.More precisely, when in the field, she attempted to account for all the participants involved in the action, "from the janitor to the Nobel Prize winner" (Star 2010, 605).
Star also admits that the idea of “interpretive flexibility” was fundamental to the constructivist approach to science studies well before it was integrated into the concept of boundary objects. Though, at this point, the two are inextricably intertwined.
Star reflects on the history of her research program to help clarify her intent behind the development of the concept of “boundary objects.” She then uses this discussion to address a question that she often encountered about the concept: "What isn't a boundary object?" While Star explicitly resists the temptation to claim authority over the proper use of the concept, in this article, she spends some time discussing the scope and scale at which the concept of “boundary object” becomes useful. Primarily, she argues that the concept should be applied to situations where the certain objects with interpretive flexibility arise organically to suit the informational needs of diverse groups.
Star does not define collaboration directly. Instead she developed the concept of boundary objects to argue against the consensus model. Fieldwork inspired her to question the (then) standard model of conceiving collaboration as being dependent upon the preliminary establishment of concensus between participants. By contrast, she witnessed and experienced numerous instances where scientific research and knowledge production continued productively without establishing consensus. The concept of boundary object was innovated to help explain the material-semiotic process underwriting this particular type of cooperation.