The Politics of Knowledge Organization: Introduction to the Special Issue

Politics is about the distribution of goods and risks. We can describe the distribution of goods, and we can also characterize those distributions as a kind of inequality. As a baseline definition of "politics of information" we mean the distribution of information goods across different populations. Despite a strong tradition of disciplinary focus in information science, much of the literature is still given over to fairly simple notions of social form and structure. A nascent knowledge organization practice dedicated to social difference is explicitly motivated by justice and nomenclature. Not only is knowledge organization a tool of cultural hegemony, but also it can be read as a product of cultural ordering and bias. Identifying unjust and politically oppressive practice must be part of the path to justice. Understanding the political construction of knowledge organization is essential for the theory of information service in order to build a more just professional practice.