Authoring social reality with documents: From authorship of documents and documentary boundary objects to practical authorship

Submitted by Isto Huvila on Tue, 12/18/2018 - 18:48

Publication Type:

Journal Article

Authors:

Huvila, Isto

Source:

Journal of Documentation, Volume 75, Number 1, p.44-61 (2019)

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 N=16 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.

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Taxonomy terms:

Archaeology and Archaeological Information in the Digital Society shows how the digitization of archaeological information, tools and workflows, and their interplay with both old and new non-digital practices throughout the archaeological information process, affect the outcomes of archaeological work, and in the end, our general understanding of the human past.

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Taking Health Information Behaviour into Account: implications of a neglected element for success- ful implementation of consumer health technologies on older adults (HIBA) is an Academy of Finland funded research project at Åbo Akademi University.

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Sheds new light on the potential of extra-academic knowledge-making as a contribution in formations of knowledge throughout society, explores extra-academic knowledge as a useful resource in academy, policy development, evidence based practices, and innovation, and focuses on the informational dimensions, stemming from and grounded in an informationscience perspective, which provides the means to address practical information-related issues throughout knowledge-making processes.

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