records belongs in a larger whole: the fonds of that organizational body. This is a group of records that, like any other aggregate wholes, possesses an internal structure. The "network of relationships that each record has with the records belonging in the same aggregation" constitutes the so-called "archival bond" (Duranti, 1987, p. 215-216). We will return to this special link among records later in this contribution. For the time being, it will suffice to say that a record cannot exist without archival bond. In the absence of this connection to other records participating in the same activity, a record becomes merely a document, information affixed to a medium. This characterization of context exemplifies the robustness and rigor of the analytical method that is typical of the diplomatic approach. Diplomatics operates by "eliminating] the particularities and anomalies of records in the interest of identifying their common, shared elements" (MacNeil 2004, p. 224). The central idea of diplomatics is "that all records can be analyzed, understood and evaluated in terms of a system of formal elements that are universal in their application and decontextualized in nature" (Duranti, 1997, p. 215; emphasis added). According to diplomatics, the form (or internal structure) of a document reveals its context of creation (that is, its external structure); what matters in the context is formally codified, and can be discerned in the document's form by anyone who knows the code. All contextual elements that do not belong to the specific system of laws, administrative rules, and business procedures, which dictates how actions should be carried out in any given legally-binding situation, are not considered relevant to the understanding of the record from a diplomatic perspective. Furthermore, diplomatics as a system does not capture the open-endedness and lack of linearity of all the contextual elements. These contexts are neatly separated only through an analytical stance that, by abstracting some of the elements of reality, fails to capture the fact that reality is anything but neat. This approach has profoundly influenced the theory and the practice of recordkeeping. Decontextualization and prescriptiveness are especially the hallmark of most records management literature, which is based on the premise that "[t]he analytical tasks performed by the record professional require that the complexity and messiness of the real world be eliminated, like in a laboratory setting" (Foscarini, 2012, p. 397). As written elsewhere, "[i]n the record disciplines, the world and the word, the context and the text, are conceived as discrete, finite, and dissectible entities. It is part of a record professional's responsibilities to abstract the instantiation of events, which the record impartially encapsulates, from the flux of life, to analyze and describe all elements that participate in the action and the documentation of the action concerned, and to identify and fix those properties that point to the true meaning of the record" (Foscarini, 2015, p. 120). In recent decades, archival scholars have started to question some of the precepts of traditional archival science by, for instance, investigating its received view of the provenancial context, or context of creation. The traditional, static view of the context of provenance as a single organizational creating body has been reconceptualized by taking into account the dynamic character of the juridical- administrative and procedural contexts. Organizations have begun to be seen as flexible and adjusting rather than monolithic entities. First, the view of the organization as a rigid administrative structure, best represented in a hierarchical organizational chart, has become untenable since the focus of research has shifted towards the operational processes carrying out the functions of the organization. By prioritizing functional over structural considerations, the very identity of the records creator has come into question (Douglas, 2010; Yeo, 2010b). These changes in our understanding of the context of provenance have come hand in hand with a reconsideration of the traditional interest of archival science in large organizations, often government bureaucracies. Out of this reassessment, archival scholars have become more open to non-bureaucratic environments of business and/or knowledge production (Flinn, 2007; Flinn, 2008; Flinn, Stevens, Shepherd, The new "contemporary archival diplomatics" advanced by the "InterPARES school" has started to be challenged and expanded by bringing in lessons and perspectives from outside the discipline. This process of "situating [diplomatics] within the framework of other disciplinary and philosophical perspectives" (MacNeil, 2004, p. 228) has led to rethink our conceptions of the other contexts of records as well. Archival scholars have long known that the juridical-administrative context and the procedural context can hardly be seen as separate, in that the former continually impinges upon the latter, as changes in the legislation lead to changes in the accepted administrative procedures. Recent explorations of scholarship concerning organizations and organizational culture have provided archivists with new conceptual and methodological tools to reimagine context. The idea of a "network organization," for instance, with its ad hoc working groups and teams that cross administrative units and professional boundaries for the purpose of working collaboratively on particular projects, is characterized by a flexibility that contrasts with the rigid bureaucracies that reigned supreme during the period of development of modern archival science. Impermanency and fast changing structures and functions have come to characterize the administrative context of records. The procedural context cannot be seen as consisting exclusively of official, written down or agreed upon rules and formalisms. Even in traditional, mono-hierarchical, relatively static bureaucracies, it is often the case that the attitudes and values of individuals or business units in an organization affect the way procedures are executed. Scholars have started to study organizational information cultures, the multilayered complex of attitudes, values, and tacit behavioral norms regarding information that are at work in any given organization and that influence the way records are created, kept, accessed, and used (Oliver, 2008; Oliver Foscarini, 2013). The technological context has also been subject to profound reappraisal, in the light of philosophical trends recognizing agency to technology and questioning traditional subject-object positions (Orlikowski, 1992). Some archival scholars have for instance adopted a structurational perspective, which has allowed them to reframe the interrelationship between technology and the structural properties of organizations. In line with this new way of conceiving agent-function-structure relationships, the different layers of context identified within the traditional archives in liquid times 180 fiorella foscarini and juan ilerbaig intertextuality in the archives 2009). 181

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