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The theoretical conceptualization of boundaries is proposed as a useful approach to study diversity in organizations.

Two types of diversity in health-care organizations – functional diversity and social category diversity – are compared, drawing on two extensive studies of Israeli hospitals. One study addresses the boundary between the medical professions and complementary medicine and the other examines the boundary between Israel's Jewish ethnic majority and the Arab minority.

With regard to functional diversity, boundary-work is used to draw, redraw, and maintain the boundary between biomedicine professionals and complementary medicine practitioners. With respect to social category diversity, boundary-work is employed to blur the boundary between Jewish and Arab professionals working within the organization and the ideal of professionalism is used as a boundary object to blur this ethno-national boundary.

This typology is offered in the hope of providing greater theoretical insight into the study of organizational diversity in the context of power relations.

Classification is an important process in making sense of the world, and has a pronounced social dimension. This paper aims to compare folksonomy, a new social classification system currently being developed on the web, with conventional taxonomy in the light of theoretical sociological and anthropological approaches. The co‐existence of these two types of classification system raises the questions: Will and should taxonomies be hybridized with folksonomies? What can each of these systems contribute to information‐searching processes, and how can the sociology of knowledge provide an answer to these questions? This paper aims also to address these issues.

This paper is situated at the meeting point of the sociology of knowledge, epistemology and information science and aims at examining systems of classification in the light of both classical theory and current late‐modern sociological and anthropological approaches.

Using theoretical approaches current in the sociology of science and knowledge, the paper envisages two divergent possible outcomes.

While concentrating on classifications systems, this paper addresses the more general social issue of what we know and how it is known. The concept of hybrid knowledge is suggested in order to illuminate the epistemological basis of late‐modern knowledge being constructed by hybridizing contradictory modern knowledge categories, such as the subjective with the objective and the social with the natural. Integrating tree‐like taxonomies with folksonomies or, in other words, generating a naturalized structural order of objective relations with social, subjective classification systems, can create a vast range of hybrid knowledge.