04: conceptual containers (why i'm telling everybody about container theory)
things that don't exist: "computing", "soup", "交流" and "democracy"
This week, I've been collaborating with Lara, my colleague + a third-year PhD, on her CHI paper exploring "broadening participation in computing" – specifically, how academic research can help more Americans access and sustain careers in the computing sector. Through this project, I've discovered how crucial role descriptions and professional identities are in enabling people to participate in the modern labor economy. I find it fascinating, but there’s a conversation that resurfaces constantly. It’s come up so many times I feel like Kow Cudi (that joke was for me):
What is “Computing Work”?
However - unlike a cow rechewing its food - there’s a very real reason we have to continue re-digesting and re-exploring this question what computing is. I decided to write this piece to document & process my realization that our debate about the meaning of “computing” was really much, much, deeper than simply defining computing. I’ve had fun returning to my sociolinguistics academic roots. Frankly, I’m not sure how easy this one will be to follow. But please reach out with any questions, reactions, critiques, recommendations.
Computing Work is a conceptual container
When we hear "computing work," certain images snap into focus: software engineers at Microsoft crafting code, IT professionals managing university networks, or developers puzzling over algorithms. But this narrow vision overlooks the vast landscape of everyday computing work: the office manager who builds complex Excel systems to track inventory, the restaurant worker who troubleshoots cash registers, or the small business owner who maintains their shopify site.
When we’re thinking about professional industries or academic disciplines, we need conceptual containers to hold the many ways that they show up in real life.
Other examples of these professional containers are healthcare work, creative work, or education work. You might use a smaller conceptual container (which I’ll henceforth reference as just ‘containers’), depending on the context you’re in. If you’re applying for a very specialized healthcare role, you might call yourself a nurse, rather than a healthcare worker. If you’ve just become certified to be a caregiver for older adults with dementia - and you’re looking for a client - you’ll use an even smaller container, like “dementia care provider”.
When do we use containers?
We need containers when we can offer something and want people who need it to find us - we need ways to signal our capabilities to potential employers, clients, or Hinge matches.
We need containers when we need something done - we need language to articulate what kind of help we're looking for, to find the right people with the right skills (or find ‘signals’ that a person might have a particular set of skills).
We need containers when we're organizing a system of containers - think job boards, HR departments, industry classifications, Hinge UX designers. The people who need to sort, categorize, and manage work at a structural level.
Why do we need containers?
First, here are a few interesting things about containers:
Containers hold things.
Containers don’t have to hold a thing perfectly.
A container’s value is typically determined by how well they hold the thing you want them to hold.
Containers still exist even once their contents are gone.
Containers also still exist when their contents outgrow them.
Ideally, if a container is no longer serving its intended purpose, you get a new one for the contents.
Once you get the new container, you can keep the previous container and fill it with new things, or you can throw it away, or you can just let it exist until there’s another thing you need to contain (yes… I am lovingly referencing my parent’s cupboard full of mismatch thai takeout containers and lids).
But not everything you need to contain has a container that holds it perfectly. Not every container will hold its contents perfectly. In fact, very very very few do.
How do we choose what container to use?
Now here's where I think it gets super interesting (and starts translating to situations we face in every day life). Recall, that there are three situations where conceptual containers are useful:
When we present our expertise to potential clients
When we search for specific expertise
When we create organizational systems & need to efficiently classify people
In these scenarios where we are choosing a container to use, we might ask:
What needs to be contained? And why?
Who gets to be inside/outside these boundaries?
How do we value or organize what goes inside vs. outside of these categorical boundaries?
Who and what is sustained by these containers? What individuals and systems depend on these containers to survive?
This helped point me to why the “What is Computing?” conversation continued to resurrect itself. “Computing Work” is a container. At one point in history, the contents of that container were SUPER limited to people who build and use computational machines. Today, the contents of the “Computing Work” container are overflowing and - as a result - highly contested. And this is what Lara and I are seeing in our research project.
Another container example: Academic Disciplines
Over the past 9-ish months, I've been working on a research project about interdisciplinary collaboration. I talked about this project recently in:
My collaborator/mentor - Sina Fazelpour - and I are crafting the following argument: If we are doing interdisciplinary work for responsible AI, we need a theoretical framework (rather than a term (a mere piece of semantic tupperware!)) to describe what interdisciplinarity is.
Decades of literature define and redefine interdisciplinarity. New terms, or containers, to describe it emerge, like “transdisciplinarity”. I’ve realized that there’s a very strong connection between the debates about “Computing Work” and debates about what a discipline, like “Sociology” is.
I’m pretty convinced now that labor categories, such as Computing, don’t exist, in the same way that disciplinary categories, like Psychology or Physics, don't exist. These terms are containers that serve a purpose. What's fascinating is how persistent these container-based debates are across academic fields - despite decades of scholars pointing out their arbitrary nature. In each case, we're really discussing:
What counts as legitimate knowledge
Who gets to claim expertise and authority
How different forms of knowing are organized and valued
How academic power is distributed
Containers, Language, & Systems Change
The beauty of having the freedom to name things is that they don’t have to mean anything to anyone but you. 1
You can unilaterally make a container. A fun example of this is when I visited my friends’ house last week. They have kids. You’ve heard of imaginary friends, but have you heard of imaginary economies? My friends’ four year old daughter is the guardian of an imaginary ecosystem of tulip birds. What is a tulip bird, you ask? None of your business. Her parents, however, are briefed at dinner time on what that concept contains. I imagine it is always subject to change.
In other cases, we may choose to agree with others on what the container should be. A container may be created to describe something of value by a friend group (like a joke) or niche online community (like a TikTok (RIP) sound). In other cases, a container is created that’s only of value to people who speak a certain language.
One of my favorite language example is the word 交流 (jiāoliú) in Mandarin. 交流 means “talk”, but 说 (shuōhuà) also means “talk”. Mandarin speakers use the “container” 交流 (jiāoliú) specifically to refer to cases when people are talking to understand each other.
At some point in the history of the Chinese language, it was important to differentiate this type of talking from other less-intentional cases of 说 (shuōhuà). There’s also 聊天 (liáotiān), which is even less intentional; but we’ve added a complementary containers in the English language “chat” and - my personal favorite that recently arrived + I am convinced will never go away - “yap”.
Alright, I digress.
But before I do… shoutout to my friend Auriel for pointing this distinction out to me. We were having a conversation in my living room about miscommunication in romantic relationships and found our way to talking about Chinese etymology. I love my friends.
In all cases, containers are not self-evident. Yes, some are more anchored (交流) and others are more elastic (yap). But there is no guarantee that your container will seamlessly translate to a new place, new person, or new predicament.
Conceptual Containers are “Ontological Categories”
Concepts, which scholars who study power and language - including me - call ontological categories, are central to the transfiguration of power in social systems.
In order for an oppressed group to be able to organize… they have to have some shared term to use to find each other. They must have some container that says who’s on their side and who isn’t. This makes group members easier to find.
But what happens once you’re easier to find? You’re easier to find to those you may not want to be found by.
The containers we use are simultaneously tools of liberation and tools of oppression. In the same way that a container can and will be used to used to exclude people, to justify inequities, to maintain existing power structures… a container can be and will also be used to include people, invalidate inequities, and transfigure existing power structures.
I’ll end this by discussing a very clear-cut example of how conceptual containers shape and are shaped by power structures. That case is race.
Racial Categories as Conceptual Containers
What’s probably the most thoroughly researched example of what I like to call container politics (and what my peers call social constructionism) is race. A racial category is, undoubtedly, a container. If we know they are containers, why do we take them so seriously? We have to take them seriously because, whether or not we like it or intend to, we take them seriously.
The debates about which racial category containers we should use persist because, in each case, racial categories are very useful containers. They help us:
understand our heritage and family histories
create and enforce social hierarchies
form supportive communities
distribute resources
navigate cultural differences
maintain systems of power
talk about systems of power
celebrate distinct traditions
track population-level inequities
preserve cultural knowledge
organize demographic data
target ads
establish shared identities
direct social impact investments
exclude certain groups from opportunities
This blew my mind when I was 21, studying in Brazil, learning about their history of race and slavery. Brazil chose different ‘containers’ for race than other countries like America. Why? Their cultures and institutions had:
social divisions to maintain (and hierarchies to justify)
populations to categorize (and ways to enforce these categories)
resources to distribute (and methods of restricting access)
power relations to establish (and systems to perpetuate them)
To Recap:
Containers are how we make meaning sharable and communicable. They don't have to exist, but we need them to get things done: to find what we need, offer what we have, and organize our social world. Whether you think someone using a container well/poorly, fairly/unfairly, or correctly/incorrectly doesn’t change the fact that containers are crucial!
No container is perfect (I’m not even sure what ‘perfect’ would look like). They leak, they overflow, they can be too big or too small.
Every container makes us wrestle with the same questions: what goes in, who belongs, how do we value the contents, and who benefits from these boundaries.
Those of us who are social scientists are tasked with asking “where did this container come from”, “how are people using it?”, and “what would happen if we used it differently?”
Containers vary in stability. Some (like 交流) are anchored by institutions and centuries of cultural understanding. Others (like "yap") are elastic, arrived a year ago, and could disappear tomorrow.
When it comes to power and social change: containers are tools that can both liberate and constrain. They help oppressed groups organize but also make them easier to target.
The creation or revision of a container is evidence that power is shifting somewhere - containers don't change unless something in society is changing too.
In case you hadn’t picked this up already (though I’m sure you did if you found this interesting enough to read this far): “Container Theory” doesn’t exist. It’s a concept. A container, if you will. Containers are not my preferred form of communication, but I needed to give this post a title. Thanks for reading :) - Kayla
Fun observation: God gave humans the responsibility of creating containers (shoutout to Adam who named the animals. and to Noah who definitely needed that list for paperwork purposes). But God did not (or possibly took away) our ability to easily align with one another on what those containers should be (boooo Tower of Babel architects).