Star and Griesemer explain how heterogeneous communities cooperate without requiring complete consensus. Their iconic concept is the boundary object: a repository, form, ideal type or shared boundary that remains adaptable to local viewpoints while retaining sufficient identity across them. The theoretical contribution lies in replacing a single-centred model of translation with an ecological account of multiple social worlds, divergent interests and distributed coordination. Methodologically, the authors reconstruct the early institutional history of Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, tracing relations among scientists, amateurs, patrons, administrators and collectors. The conceptual operation is robust flexibility: collaboration succeeds through objects that are simultaneously specific and general, weakly structured in common use and strongly structured locally. The wider bridge reaches STS, organisational sociology, participatory design and infrastructure studies. Boundary objects show that interoperability is a social achievement before it becomes a technical one.
