Desarrollo Metodológico de las Estrategias

Yakel points out that accountability comprises identity work, whereby an individual develops his or her sense of identity as accountability is given and requested. The delegation of responsibility and consequent accountability expectations in particular functional areas involve selecting both for personal characteristics and for occupational skills and knowledge.

The interaction between competence, work achievement, choice and social relations within the organization form occupational identity (Phelan and Kinsella 2009).

Historically, the occupational identity of ARM workers has been contested ground among North American archival and records management workers and researchers, who began questioning their occupational identity long before computerization established a firm foothold in the field. Within this pre-computerization time frame, one can find a tension between the roles and responsibilities associated with the fields of records management and archival administration. According to some, this tension is related to the historical

development of archives and records management within the American context. Richard Cox (2000b) states that modern records management principles developed between 1943 and 1985, a period that straddled both pre-computerized and post-computerized ARM

environments (although Cox does not remark on this fact). He argues that the development of archives as a field of occupational practice is linked to the development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of a newly systematic profession of history (1983). Luke Gilliland-Swetland (1991) agrees, suggesting that Progressive ideology led to an overarching belief during the early part of the twentieth century in the efficacy and superiority of

“scientific” modes of management and organization and that these rational modes of organization strongly impacted both the development of and the tools for organizational management, including the methods of recordkeeping and the development of the archival profession. His argument is consistent with that of Joanne Yates, who notes that the desire for internal control developed from 1850 through 1920, where ‘control’ is comprised of “the mechanisms through which the operations of an organization are coordinated to achieve desired results” (1989, xvi). During this timeframe, claims Yates, formal methods of internal

communication in organizations grew in quantity and complexity, eventually leading to “control through communication” (xvii). She paints a picture of increasing reliance on wider scale communication media and changing genres as a means for achieving corporate goals, in place of previous oral communication and less structured written communication.

Organizational communication became an objectified managerial tool, which allowed greater control over operations and increased scale. Systems supplanted individuals and many leaders and social scientists saw the ability to engage in system thinking as a primary requirement for organizational success.

Terry Cook suggests that it was this “rationalization and bureaucratization of office work” (1994, 408) that led to the structures of modern records management and archival duties. By using lower-paid, female secretaries with typewriters, the senior administrators who made the important business decisions no longer had to involve themselves with the creation of records. Thus, records and their creation were separated from the act of decision making that engendered them. Archivists, whose domain (as “secretaries”) had previously involved them in both decision making or advisement responsibilities and the recording of the resulting decisions, thereby fell from relatively high-powered positions to caring for huge volumes of records on behalf of the real decision makers. The need for managing these huge volumes, and the recognition that the records must be protected for those in power, led archivists to objectify the record, according it a status akin to a holy relic that must be preserved because of its connection with past decisions and actions of the real power wielders.

In fact, after the rationalization of communication was successfully achieved, from the 1940s well into the 1960s, archivists debated the nature of their profession, focusing

heavily on the concepts of professionalization and efficiency, and on managerial principles. In the late 1960s, Frank Evans (1967) argued that archivists working within the profession during the early days of the National Archives in the 1930s did not view their records management duties as a separate undertaking from their archival duties. He commented that for the previous two decades the professional literature was filled with pleas for a closer relationship between archivists and records managers. This suggests that the literature from the mid- to late-1940s recognized that archivists in general perceived there to be two separate professions – archiving and records management and also perceived that these two

professions did not work together as much as would be desirable. In fact, the articles Evans himself cited reflect a uniform discomfort with the question of how distinct archives as a profession is from records management as a profession.

Luke Gilliland-Swetland, Richard Cox, and others (Berner 1983; O'Toole 1990; O'Toole and Cox 2006) note that this discomfort reflects an ongoing debate about the nature of archivists in society. Luke Gilliland-Swetland argues that the dispute, framed in terms of a dichotomy between a “historical manuscripts tradition” and a “public archives tradition,” was the consequence of a group of strong-minded archivists who followed the ideas of Margaret Cross Norton during the 1930s. According to Gilliland-Swetland, the public archives tradition advocated the concept of provenance.17 This was in contrast to the historical manuscripts tradition that favored practices such as “item-level descriptive control, the imposition of predetermined classification schemes for cataloging purposes, and the reliance on several types of nonintegrated access tools” (161). In addition, the public archives

tradition focused upon the efficient management of public records whereas the historical 17 _{At this time, archivists generally defined provenance to be ““keeping records ‘as nearly as possible in the} same order or classification as obtained in the offices of origin’” (Gilliland-Swetland 1991, 161).

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manuscripts tradition focused upon maintaining the primarily private records of individuals for historical purposes.

Rebecca Hirsch (2010) suggests that the dichotomy between the historical

manuscripts tradition and the public archives tradition is ideological in origin, and founded on Norton’s belief in “archives as legal records” and her belief that “the historical profession should have no influence whatsoever on their treatment or retention” (67). She, like

Gilliland-Swetland, points out that the rules of “provenance, original order, public access, and government support” (66), primary principles of the public archives tradition, came directly from the scientific historians of the early twentieth century, who adopted the precepts of nineteenth century European archivists. Gilliland-Swetland and Hirsch both argue that the ideological disagreement between the public archives tradition and the historical manuscripts tradition still affects the archives and records management professions, separating them. The former claims that modern debates around professionalization and certification ultimately collapse into “two traditionally competing ideals of the archivist as professional: humanist historian-scholar or expert documentary manager” (171). Hirsch maintains that decisions such as Mark Greene’s choice “to make professional identity the topic of his presidential address [during] the 2008 SAA annual meeting shows that the question is not settled” (69). An examination of articles from the professionalization debates (Bolotenko 1985; Hull 1980; McCrank 1979; Spadoni 1983-84; Taylor 1977) supports that assertion for the period of time during which the debates occurred - the late 1970s and 1980s. Whether it is still the case, however, does not seem so clear.

Evans traced the development of records management as a professional activity of the government from 1941, when SAA renamed its Committee on Reduction of Archival

Material to “Committee on Records Administration” and when the National Archives instituted a “records administration program” (45). He provided a variety of cases showing disagreement between those who believe that archivists and records managers provide essentially the same function and those who argue that they either serve two different ends, or require two different skillsets in order to perform their jobs. He closed his article with the argument that records managers determine both the quality of archives and the nature of society’s involvement with archives, urging both archivists and records managers to accept the commonalities that bind them together.

Thus, one can see that disagreements about the appropriate distribution of roles and responsibilities between archivists and records managers occurred even before computer technology affected any aspects of the occupational identities of these two groups of workers. In addition, this literature supports Yusof and Chell’s previously mentioned contention that the archival literature provides one source of lineage for records management activities and the RIM and MIS literatures provide a different lineage.