What is the issue? The transformative capacity of documents

Abstract

Paperwork does not simply describe an external reality ‘out there’: Documents also take part in working upon, modifying, and transforming that reality. That is the overriding argument of this paper, which uses a practice-oriented approach to demonstrate how this is being done. The paper pursues the argument by analyzing what the author suggests we call ‘modifying work’. Very concretely, the paper demonstrates how a bureaucratic document, as the result of a series of modification work, may come to transform an issue radically. The paper is written, in part, as a contribution to the discussion related to what is often called the scholarly turn to ‘materiality’ or the ‘materialities of objects’, a turn that is often considered as a way of taking seriously the materiality of nature objects and pressing questions relating to how scholars within the social sciences and humanities may take ‘the environment’ into account in our studies. The argument of this paper is that if we are to analyze and take nature objects into account, a thorough attention to ‘materiality’ or ‘materialities’ is not sufficient. Rather than suggesting that there might be a conflict or an opposition between a turn to words and a turn to objects or materialities, it suggests that we think about this differently: Words and materialities, the material and the semiotic, must be handled together.