Authoring social reality with documents. From authorship of documents and documentary boundary objects to practical authorship
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-04-2018-0063 |
| Pages | 44-61 |
| Date | 14 January 2019 |
| Published date | 14 January 2019 |
| Author | Isto Huvila |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management,Classification & cataloguing,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Scholarly communications/publishing,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
Authoring social reality with
documents
From authorship of documents and
documentary boundary objects to
practical authorship
Isto Huvila
Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
Abstract
Purpose –In the context of organisation studies, Shotter and colleagues have used the notion of practical
authorship of social situations and identities to explain the work of managers and leaders. This notion and
contemporary theories of authorship in literary scholarship can be linked to the authoring of documents in the
context of document studies to explain the impact and use of documents as instruments of management and
communication. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach –The conceptual discussion is supported by an empirical interview study
of the information work of N¼16 archaeologists.
Findings –First, the making of documents and other artefacts, their use as instruments (e.g. boundary
objects (BOs)) of management, and the practical authorship of social situations, collective and individual
identities form a continuum of authorship. Second, that because practical authorship seems to bear a closer
affinity to the liabilities/responsibilities and privileges of attached to documents rather than to a mere
attribution of their makership or ownership, practical authorship literature might benefit of an increased
focus on them.
Research limitations/implications –This paper shows how practical authorship can be used as a
framework to link making and use of documents to how they change social reality. Further, it shows how the
notion of practical authorship can benefit of being complemented with insights from the literature on
documentary and literary authorship, specifically that authorship is not only a question of making but also,
even more so, of social attribution of responsibilities and privileges.
Originality/value –This paper shows how the concepts of documentary and practical authorship can be
used to complement each other in elaborating our understanding of the making of artefacts (documentary)
BOs and the social landscape.
Keywords Documents, Archaeology, Documentation, Authorship, Reports, Boundary objects, Materiality,
Sociomateriality, Organisation studies, Practical authorship
Paper type Conceptual paper
1. Introduction
Documents erect and lower boundaries, communicate, translate and mediate. More precisely,
as Murphy suggests by using the term“summon”, they are made to do so in a liminal space
between different communities of interest. Earlier studies have shown (e.g. Østerlund, 2008;
Murphy, 2001) that this betweenness makes documents potentially powerful boundary
objects (BOs) that can be helpful in bridging gaps between communities and to function as
shared “portable places”for virtual, non-physically based, communities (Østerlund, 2008).
From the perspective of Shotter’s (1993) theory of practical authors in the context of
organisationstudies, a BO can be seen as anexus of multiple community-specific shared ideas
of self and of the organisational landscapes constructed and produced in the process of
practical authorship in the context of bordering communities. As authored intangible or
physical “things”(Murphy, 2001; Huvila, 2012), the BOs can be seen as kernels of a shared
landscape of a much largerconstellation that encompasses allcommunities adjacent to them.
In spite of the interest in how documents and documentary BOs (DBO) come to being in
specific contexts such as healthcare or museums (e.g. Østerlund, 2008; Star and Griesemer, 1989),
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 75 No. 1, 2019
pp. 44-61
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-04-2018-0063
Received 27 April 2018
Revised 25 June 2018
Accepted 29 June 2018
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0022-0418.htm
44
JD
75,1
there is relatively little research on the broader relation of the making of documents and that of
DBOs, and especially on what implications their authorship has on their use and usefulness
across communities. Authorship and authoring (e.g. Gorli et al., 2015) have been studied to
certain extent in organisation and document studies literature (e.g. Huvila, 2012; Feinberg, 2011;
Lund, 2009) but from the perspective of authorship studies (e.g. Wirtén, 2004; Biagioli, 2006), the
conceptualisation of the notions has tended to be rather rudimentary and limited to making and
makership. Further, in spite of the large corpus of literature on BOs (Huvilaet al., 2017), it seems
that there is no prior work discussing the relation of the authorship of BOs and practical
authorship in their adjacent communities.
The aim of this paper is to propose how to explicate the interplay of authorship of
documents and DBOs, and the practical authorship of social situations and identities and to
show how a closer look at the authorship (as understood in the contemporary authorship
literature) of documents and DBOs can be helpful in elaborating the understanding of the
making (i.e. practical authorship) of the social landscape. Somewhat roughly, the question is
how the authoring of documents changes the world through the use of the same documents
to transform the reality. Further, the authoring of a document, that is, it authored to become
a DBO, and the different instances of the use of the document or DBO in the authorship of
social landscape mean that the document becomes a different thing in each of these different
settings and situations. This perspective places the present text in the middle ground
between documentation and organisation studies bringing insights from the latter to
explain what documents are capable of doing beyond functioning as information carriers.
The conceptual discussion in this text draws from observations made during an empirical
study of the information work of professionals working with the management and archiving
of archaeological information, contemporary theorising of authorship and the notion of
practical authorship of Shotter (1993), and the model of the authorship of DBOs of Huvila
(2012). The theoretical underpinnings of the discussion on documents are based on new
document theory (Lund, 2009) (or neo-documentation). Documents are seen as socially
constructed and constructing entities that serve a documentary function rather than a
certain class of specific objects (third sense of understanding documents (Pédauque, 2003);
see also Lund, 2009; Buckland, 2015) and BOs (in an essentially analytical sense) as entities
with a BO function (Star, 2010a). The discussion on practical authorship builds on Shotter’s
(1993) concept and later scholarship on the topic (including Cunliffe, 2001; Shotter and
Cunliffe, 2003; Gorli et al., 2015).
The propositions made in this paper expand the earlier observations of the individual
and collaborative practices of making documents and making documents to become BOs to
how they are used to author translation, mediation and communication between
communities and what implications the (act of) authoring and authorship of documents to
make them DBOs has on the practical authorship in the bordering communities.
Simultaneously, this paper continues the longstanding pursuit in the information and
documentation field to shed light into information practices and work by following texts
and documents (e.g. Davenport and Cronin, 1998; Frohmann, 2004). The central thesis of this
text is that a better understanding of the relation of the modes of authorship of documents,
of documents to BOs and their relation to practical authorship is potentially helpful in
understanding why and how particular BOs are useful for different adjoining communities
and how their authorship and uses are related in the processes of building and rebuilding
positioning and sense of identity in various types of social constellations.
2. Boundary objects
BOs are abstract or physical things that reside in the interfaces between organisations and
groups of people. They have a capability to bridge perceptual and practical differences
between communities and facilitate cooperation by emanating mutual understanding
45
Authoring
social reality
with
documents
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