The Golden Flow of Boundary Objects

After watching the movie Crash (Lions Gate Films, 2004) in class this past week, I started thinking about how people affect one another and how we’re all linked through our various interactions and communities of practice. We affect other people every day. Individuals flow in and out of our lives, some having more of an impact than others. Our choices and actions affect others and sometimes we impact them by imparting part of our community of practice into theirs with a boundary object. These boundary objects will often cause a ripple effect, with boundary object after boundary object being shared with different community of practices.

How many ripple effects in transmitting boundary objects have you caused?

As Etienne Wenger explains in Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (as listed on Chapters.ca), boundary objects can be described as “objects that serve to coordinate the perspectives of various constituencies for some purpose” (p. 106). He further explains that these items are developed through the reification process in communities of practice so they provide a shared meaning, understanding, and use for those members. As you recall from Michael Tomasello’s The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (as listed on Chapters.ca) being human allows us to share meaning of items (like boundary objects) with others in our community of practice or to act as brokers to those in other communities of practice in order to pass along the meaning of that object.

How then, do we impact other humans in communities of practice outside of our own through the transmission of boundary objects? As members of certain communities of practice, we often relate to those in our immediate community more than those who belong to a different community. As Tomasello would tell us, this is primarily related to the fact that as primates we relate to and look out for those in our in group and opposed to those in out groups. As such, we tend to think of individuals who are different from us and in different communities of practice as objects as opposed to people. We don’t relate to them as one of our own since we haven’t established a sense of belonging or any negotiated meaning with them so we place less value on their contributions to our lives. Since we don’t value them as much, we don’t tend to dwell on the impact our mundane day-to-day interactions with those people may have on their lives.


To further illustrate the notion of how our actions affect others, remember the movie that Gwyneth Paltrow starred in called Sliding Doors (Paramount Pictures, 1998)? At the beginning of the movie, we see Paltrow’s character Helen rushing to catch a subway train. She’s rushing down the stairs into the station and has to momentarily pause to dodge a child walking up the stairs who tries to show Helen a doll she is holding in her hand. As a result Helen misses the train. The film then rewinds and we see Helen rushing down the steps again. This time, however, an adult (presumably the child’s parent) pulls the child out of Helen’s way before she can block her with the doll and Helen is able to just catch the train.  From there on, we see the two divergent paths that Helen’s life would take if she caught the train versus if she missed the train. Here’s the opening scene of the movie:

As you then witness in the movie, the little girl’s actions could have started a ripple effect of boundary objects being transmitted which would have had a huge impact on Helen’s life. When you start to think about life in terms of how your actions and transmission of boundary objects affect others, you can see just how much impact we all have on each other’s lives, in both a negative and positive ways. I realize that this is all part of “real life” and is “how the world works” but it is interesting to examine nonetheless.

On a larger scale, we briefly discussed how the ripple effect or “golden flow of boundary objects” is present in government and with those in positions of power in this past week’s class. To illustrate this idea, Dr. Plumb explained how the leader of a country’s order to go to war acts as a boundary object that is handed down through the various levels of government and military (ie. communities of practice within the overall city of practices in a government), which acts as a catalyst for other boundary objects to be transmitted to other communities of practice with that “city” and beyond. As a result, soldiers at the bottom of the pyramid of command go to war carrying out orders of the person at the top of the pyramid. This not only affects the people in their close communities of practice like their family and friends, but will also affect those they may injure in war and those people’s family and friends, their family and friends, and so on.

In many government structures, the golden flow of boundary objects starts with one person at the top of the pyramid of power. 

Although we easily get swept up in our own lives and within our own city of communities of practice, it’s also important for us to understand how our interactions through transmitting boundary objects to others affect them and those beyond them. When you realize you have power to influence others’ lives, perhaps you’ll think twice before jumping in front of someone when you’re in a rush or beeping at someone in traffic for example, and think about ways you can use that power to positively influence those within your city and beyond instead.