This would have made a great essay. Like Clanchy, who I read an excellent article of before reading his book, the authors seem to waste too much paper (pun intended) rehashing the same points, causing some fascinating research to be buried. I ended up skimming through many parts of the book, interestingly enough skimming is one of the advantages of paper the authors mention frequently. Cynicism aside, I do appreciate the value of the intensive research studies detailed in this book and some of the most fascinating parts come in the samples from the case studies. I like how the looked at the issue objectively, not taking sides neither too technological nor Luddite. The evaluate the advantages (affordances as they call them) of paper and its value and don’t seek to substitute electronic technologies, but change the practices that create so much paper. Interesting research, even if it is a rather dull book.

“There were two main problems that filing of cold materials need to address. First, the owners of these files would eventually move on … At that point the meaning of the files would be lost … what we have seen is that the relation between these documents and the activities they were part of is not self-evident: the documents do not speak for themselves. What this means is that putting a file in cold storage will take work to make its meaning, provenance, and importance clear to others who might wan to access it sometime in the future.” (p. 133-34) Records management and archives to the rescue!

“Iin the digital world, the stories disappear because the owners disappear. And there is another problem: in the paper world, if there is no one to tell the story, people try to reconstruct it by identifying the relation between documents on the basis of their own experience … On of the affordances of a DMS (Digital Management System) is something that can undermine attempts to reconstruct the story surrounding filed documents. A DMS allows users to view and reorganize documents in many different ways, and only a few of these … actually reflect the way in which those files were originally related to one another by the people who created or owned them.” (p. 180)

“Consider the lowly wastebasket. In the past, a wastebasket stuffed to the brim with paper could symbolize inefficiency and an organization looking to the past rather than the future. . . . According to the vision we have outlined, a full bin will reflect the fact people are working effectively because they are using paper at various stages in the document life cycle, particularly in the knowledge-intensive stages.” (p. 211) ( )

The evidence that the paperless office is a myth.

This book has been an inspiration to me. Sellen and Harper took a couple of organisational constructs, (paperless offices and the idea of hotdesking) and analysed them in the context of actual human practice. This book demonstrates exactly how to report an ethnographic study, but is also an interesting portrait of people working in the real world.

Well written, accessible, and full of wonderful stories (and ideas of how to make offices truly paperless), I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in organisational culture and sopcial impact on technology. ( )