The role of documents in the U.S.

Abstract

Purpose -How documents pour l'action organize and bind US society. The paper aims to discuss this issue. Design/methodology/approach -Manuel Zacklad's concept of documents pour l'action are examined as highly embedded social objects using cultural anthropology and the robotics concept of stigmergy. Pragmatic literacy as opposed to scholarly or recreational literacy is used to inform the discussion. Findings -Documents pour l'action are more than memory devices that explain or describe. They function within highly structured social contexts to organize and bind US society. Research limitations/implications -Research on documents has been limited to their role as memory devices. Documents pour l'action are deeply embedded social objects. A new focus on pragmatic literacy could create many breakthroughs in the understanding of documents generally. Originality/value -This is the first study of the role of documents as a binding force in a society, particularly with an understanding of how they can be understood through stigmergy.The author of this paper has had the rare privilege over the past 25 years to observe how organizations handle what Manuel Zacklad calls documents pour l'action (Zacklad, 2006). This paper is not about a particular consulting project performed by the author, but about synthesizing 25 years' worth of consulting projects in nearly every industry and every aspect of document creation, handling, and mishandling, as well as historical research in pragmatic literacy. Analysis is informed by anthropological research based on understanding how societies organize themselves using documents pour l'action, rather than trying to find the locus of culture in documents. The focus is behavior, not storage, memory, or preservation, either of culture or documents. In focussing on behavior we are searching for the sine qua non, the "without which not" that makes a group of people, in the case of the USAa very disparate group of people, behave in a unified and organized way. Entomologists call this stigmergy, a way to coordinate agents or actions by individuals through simple mechanisms of signals and sensors:La coordination des tâches, la régulation des constructions ne dépendent pas directement des ouvriers, mais des constructions elles-memes. L'ouvrier ne dirige pas son travail, il est guidé par lui. C'est à cette stimulation d'un type particulier que nous donnons le nom du STIGMERGIE (stigma, piqûre; ergon, travail, oeuvre ¼ oeuvre stimulante) (Grassé, 1959, p. 65). This concept was adopted by robotics as a way of clarifying some of the goals of robotics:Stigmergy is essentially a mechanism that allows an environment to structure itself through the activities of agents within the environment: The state of the environment, and the current distribution of agents within it, determine how the environment and the distribution of agents will change in the future (Holland and Melhuish, 1999, p. 174). How behavior is coordinated by actors in a system using signals and sensors is also examined by anthropologis...

The pragmatics of weeding

“…There is growing recognition of the importance of understanding documents as part of policy regimes (Choksy, 2015), emphasizing policy analysis of the relationships of public libraries to national and state government policies (Jaeger et al , 2014) as well as the relationship of public library policies to their own local constituencies (Vårheim et al , 2019). As noted above, policies are often intended to address perceived or potential problems, but may have numerous effects and side-effects, both intentional and coincidental.…”