There’s some people who clearly left the Earth too soon and Susan Leigh Star is one of them. She brought some essential ideas from ethnography and the history of science into the discussions around technology, notably monsters (and not in a bad way, more like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) and the idea of boundary objects and boundary infrastructures.

A boundary object is “any object that is part of multiple social worlds and facilitates communication between them; it has a different identity in each social world that it inhabits. As a result a boundary object must be simultaneously concrete and abstract, simultaneously fluid and well-defined…”

And then there’s boundary infrastructures which “exists at the crossroads of a large and complex network of individuals, institutions, and practices…”

Either of these can be explicit technological artifacts and objects but they can also be something we don’t necessarily categorize as such. For example a scholarly journal, an academic senate or a P&B committee.