geert-jan van bussel the theoretical framework for the 'archive-as-is'
an organization oriented view on archives - part ii
Derridean sense (see Part I of this article)), about externalizing archivalization's
choice in inscribing a trace in an external location. The last, conscious phase is
Archiving, capturing and filing a record into the (organizational) archive. Between
these three phases are psychological filters, and interplays between unconsciousness
and consciousness. The first two phases of registrations determine whether (and
how) actions are externalized and inscribed in archives. They determine the way
people behave. They define behaviour that influences the way people construct,
process, and use archives and the way archivists acquire, contextualize, and appraise
archives and records. Ketelaar assumes that people working within the same
organization will use and create records in different ways (Ketelaar, 2000a, p. 328).1
Different organizations are implementing the information value chain differently.
Professional standards lead to different ways of creating and using records and
archives. For understanding records and archives, employees and archivists of
organizations are to be known in their social, religious, cultural, political, and
economic contexts (Ketelaar, 2000a, 2001). These contexts define the 'software
of the mind', and the effects of human behaviour that are its consequences. The
'software of the mind' impresses the fact that archives are not neutral, not
complete, and a result of human behaviour within organizations. That behaviour
reflects morals, preconceptions, and the limitations of the social and cultural
environment of employees, and offers only a distorted view of reality. Or, maybe
better, they allow for the construction of realities, excluding, other realities as a
result of archivalization and, later, appraisal and selection (Ihanus, 2007).
The information value chain is embedded and largely configured by this behavioural
component of the theoretical framework. Behaviour can have detrimental effects on
organizational and personal archives. Managing records and constructing archives
is strongly dependent on the working of organizational systems of controls, the
methods and instruments used to strengthen such controls, and the behaviour of
employees when confronted with these systems, methods, and instruments. When
entering an organization, an individual employee brings personal characteristics,
a personal social, ideological, ethical, religious, and cultural background, and
experiences from other organizations. Employees have their expectations, goals, and
ambitions. Those can change when they are interconnecting with other employees
when working and collaborating. This affects the organization itself, and the
organizational morals and ethics agreed upon may change those of the individual
employee, or the other way around. It may explain why some people choose to leave
an organization and others elect to stay (Griffin and Moorhead, 2014: 4-5).
Hofstede (1997) found that specific attitudes and behaviours of employees differed
significantly because of the values and beliefs that characterized their environment.
The ways employees are handling information, the choices they are making, and the
way they are behaving when confronted with systems of (information) control are
heaviliy affected by these values and beliefs.
Study of behaviour and culture has never been part of archival science. The first to
connect behaviour and culture explicitly with records and archives management are
Gillian Oliver and Fiorella Foscarini (2013). They use the viewpoint of information
culture to 'tackle the people problem'. Based on an inadequate introduction of
information culture, they try to use the Information Culture Framework2 for
analysing and assessing recordkeeping behaviour and practices. Although it is a very
courageous and interesting exploration, they, in my opinion, do not really succeed in
the endeavor to 'tackle the people problem'. It is not really a practical guide and only
offers superficial ideas for assessment techniques and training that cannot be used
to develop behavioural change programs. More problematic is that their work is
extensively based on work of archival scientists and cultural theorists, which
probably accounts for irrelevant chapters on records continuum, information
continuum, and record keeping informatics. But their work neglects very relevant
work done on organizational behaviour and culture within organization studies,
such as Weick (1979), Shein (1992), Kotter and Heskett (1992), Simon (1997),
O'Donovan (2006), Robbins and Langton (2007), and many more.
The effects of behaviour in organizations on information and information
management are already known for a very long time. Campbell (1958), Wilensky
(1967), Downs (1967), Janis (1972), Kaufman (1973), Athanassiades (1973),
O'Reilly (1978), and others, have provided considerable evidence of organizational
dysfunctions attributed to failures in the information value chain. The hypothesis of
Benjamin Singer (1980) was that organizations suffer from psychotic and
pathological behaviours, just like people do, but are rarely diagnosed with it or
treated as such. According to Singer (1980, p. 48), dysfunctional organizational
behaviours often take the form of 'crazy systems' that generate 'confusion, error,
and ambiguity' and even 'inscrutability and unaccountability, involving harm to the
victim and often to the system itself, [breeding] a new kind of organizational trap'
called Kafka circuits. These involve 'blind alleys, crazy situations', and processes that
'end where they began'. More recently, Ronald Rice and Stephen Cooper (2010)
confirmed that information is often blocked or distorted in organizational
communications. They state convincingly that organizations allow employees to
(consciously or unconsciously) misuse, distort, or suppress information and records
(Rice and Cooper, 2010, chapters 7 and 8). Zmud (1990) argued that the use of ICTs
make organizational functions vulnerable to strategic information behaviours such
as distortion of records. It is quite clear that employee behaviour can have
detrimental effects of the way records are created, processed, managed, and com
municated (Singer, 1980; Clegg et al, 2016).
Especially in bureaucratic organizations, information access might be (or will be)
influenced by the intentional or unintentional choices employees make when
handling records and when deciding which information to keep (or not). These
61
archives in liquid times
60
1 Although the concept of archivalization is mentioned many times in archival literature, there is almost no
research done on the concept since its introduction almost seventeen years ago. The concept is completely
misrepresented in literature and is identified as (a step in) the appraisal of records and archives. But it is a
psychological phenomenon that influences human behaviour. As such, it defines appraisal and selection,
but it cannot be considered part of them. For an interesting study in which the concept is applied on archival
institutions and social communities and in which some of its psychological nature is expressed: Mark A.
Matienzo, 'Canonization, Archivalization, and the 'Archival Imaginary", Paper presented at Archive Fervour/
Archive Further: Literature, Archives, and Literary Archives, Aberystwyth, Wales, July 9-11, 2008. Online
source. Archived at: http://hdl.handle.net/10150/216929 (retrieved on December 22, 2016).
2 The name of their framework is not unique. The name has been used for completely different Information
Culture Frameworks by M.N. Khan and F.T. Azmi (2005). 'Reinventing business organisations: the
information culture framework'. Singapore Management Review, Vol, 27, No. 2, pp. 37-62, and Y. Zheng
(2005). 'Information culture and development: Chinese experience of e-health', Thirty-Eighth Annual
Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, (Hicss 38). 2005. Big Island, Hawaii, Los Alamitos,
California IEEE Computer Society, pp. 153a, 1-11.