Who put the "management" in records management?

The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know.

From: Merle Miller, Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman (1974)

Surely, few would deny that it is important for practitioners of any profession to have some knowledge of the origins of their field. This holds because the field, as it currently exists, is very much a product of its growth and development over time, of the successive mutations of its basic philosophy, of the evolution of its characteristics and functions, of the development of its knowledge base, and of its continuing search for status. Such an understanding is also useful because knowing where the field came from will help identify allies and foes and bring into better focus the developmental or strategic directions it needs to take. Any occupational field which cannot clearly define its origins and lineage will, of course, have difficulty in credibly defining itself to society as an established and worthwhile profession.

It has been detrimental to the field of records management that its own origins as a discipline have, for several reasons, been obscured. By comparison, it has benefitted the field of computer science to be associated with the respected scientific field of mathematics. Medicine, a practice-oriented field like computer science, is naturally related to the mainstream life sciences (e.g., biology, anatomy, organic chemistry). By comparison with these two fields, however, records management appears to lack a well-documented affiliation with a well-established and respected theory-based field. There have been rather weak claims of kinship with other information fields or, just as bad, unwillingness by some of those fields to recognize their relationship with records management. Records management has been linked by some to other applied information-work areas such as archives management or librarianship,(1) but some records managers would deny a strong relationship with those fields, claiming records management's "uniqueness." Despite a common interest in organizational information, efforts to link records management to management information systems (MIS) have been greeted by deafening silence on the part of MIS practitioners. Finally, there has never been a serious attempt to chart the history of the field. There is simply more heat than light on this matter, and confusion continues about our professional origins and affiliations.

THE STANDARD ANSWER

One aspect of this identity problem is the federal government connection. Most records management texts suggest that records management is historically a product of the U.S. federal government and, specifically, of the recommendations of the Hoover Commissions on the Organization of the Federal Government in the late 1940s as those recommendations were implemented, first, by the National Archives and later by the General Services Administration.(2) It is true that the term "records management" was coined during that period (ca. 1947-48), replacing the earlier term "paperwork management." It is also accurate to say that records management as a nascent field began to emerge from federal-sector practices during this period. Government, however, is not an intellectual or theoretical discipline, nor did a concern about the management of recorded information suddenly spring up during this period. The conceptual origins of records management, then, are not so easily explained.

Others voices assert--just as wrongly, I believe-that records management is an outgrowth of archives management, or archival science. In her valuable two-part essay titled "The Odyssey of Records Managers,' Luciana Duranti represents that line of thought, insisting that "records managers and archivists share the specialized body of theory, if not of practices, on which their work is grounded. They are two branches of a single profession, they belong together...."(3) Indeed, records management and archives management have many common interests (e.g., preservation of archival-quality records, the evidential value of records series, information technologies and issues in electronic records, ethical issues in records work). There are those practitioners who are able to migrate from being effective archivists to being effective records managers; there are those records practitioners who can perform both records management and archival roles within the same position. There is also little question that records managers and archivists should-in fact must-- learn from each other and work more closely together as practitioners and, through their associations, as disciplines.(4) But does that which drives archives work also drive records management?

PARADIGM CONFLICT

What records management and archives management do not share, I believe, is a common core purpose, a fundamental paradigm. As I have suggested elsewhere, there are two central paradigms, or sets of fundamental assumptions guiding practitioners in the information disciplines:

those following

the Social Needs paradigm assume that information and knowledge exist primarily to meet the needs of individuals in the larger society in areas such as culture, education, research, pleasure reading, and aesthetics. Among the information professionals governed by this paradigm are librarians, archivists, and manuscript curators....

The

Decision Support paradigm introduces characteristics rather different from those of the Social Needs paradigm. This paradigm is less tied to social institutions or physical structures, both of which are properties of fields emphasizing the functions of libraries, archives, and museums. Information practitioners working under the Decision Support paradigm are, for the most part, designing systems to answer discrete and specific questions....This paradigm is typically related to the concept of instrumentality; that is, with accurate information provided by the system--and enough of it--one can make an effective decision and/or take a supportable course of action....

The

thrust of the Decision Support paradigm is toward information as a commodity for decision making (vs. mapping access to a broad range of knowledge as in the Social Needs paradigm). The fields most closely associated with the Decision Support paradigm are records management, MIS, and Decision Support Systems (and its auxiliaries, such as Executive Information Systems).(5)

What makes records management distinct, then, is its emphasis, not on documents as documents, culture, history, aesthetics, or scholarly research, but on the management of information as a corporate resource, information used in business processes in organizations of all types. Here, the key word is "management." Regardless of one's earlier education or experience in a related field (e.g., archives or librarianship), today's records managers would do well to focus pointedly on the management origins and paradigm of the field. While several disciplines have legitimate interests in work with recorded information, records management is clearly a product of the evolution of theory and practice in management itself. This, then, is the logical discipline in which to search for the origins of records management.

THE RISE OF MANAGEMENT AND EMERGENCE OF MANAGEMENT INFORMATION

In addition to claims that records management was "born" in the U.S. National Archives during World War II, it is often suggested that thereafter records management as a sound business practice began to spread from the federal government to other governmental, not-for-profit, and business entities. Wrong] In fact, the "management" in records management as a business practice is primarily a product of the rise of modern management from the Industrial Revolution in the U.S. and the explosion of interest (ca. 1870-1920) in what came to be called "scientific management" and "system," or "method." As we will see, it was this pre-existent body of management knowledge about records work which, necessitated by paperwork demands during World War II, found its way into government service and, in turn, taught those in government, mostly National Archives staff, the "management" in records management. Given the brevity of space here, a basic outline of these developments must sere to illustrate the direct relationship of management itself to records management.

In the Industrial Revolution of mid-eighteenth century England and later in the United States, a wave of technology arose, replete with inventions that enabled mass production in the textile industry, new approaches in steel processing, and the possibility of large-scale railroads and other industries. This movement also brought with it a variety of concepts--such as the division, or specialization, of labor--which permitted greater efficiency and productivity. On both sides of the Atlantic the Industrial Revolution heralded a transformation from an agricultural and cottage-industry economy to a more urbanized and industrial society.

Along with the shift from smaller owner-operated businesses to large and often far-flung enterprises arose a distinct professional management class whose members focused on those effective, efficient, accountable, and profit-producing processes and procedures needed to harness capital investment, exploit new technologies, and get optimum productivity from the greater numbers of laborers needed to run successful factories, railroads, and other enterprises.(6) Rational approaches to management were beginning to crowd out older personalized, idiosyncratic, ad hoc, and sometimes pig-headed approaches to planning, organizing, personnel, and everyday decision making. The growing professionalization of engineering was an important contributing factor in this movement.

A landmark in the evolution of the management class was the formation of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) in 1880. ASME's purpose "was to address those issues of factory operation and management neglected by the other engineering groups."(7) Among these neglected issues were aspects of shop management, process management, systems and procedures, organizational responsibility, reporting, bookkeeping, and other forms of records. Interest in these issues and those more focused on shop-floor efficiency and productivity gave rise to two related management emphases: "system" and "scientific management." Both have had an enduring influence on U.S. management thought.

A U.S. pioneer in the application of system thinking to management was Daniel C. McCallum (1815-1878). As superintendent of the New York and Erie Railroad, McCallum developed and applied management principles such as:

1. Proper division of responsibilities.

2. Authority to enable those responsibilities to be executed.

3. The means of knowing whether such responsibilities are faithfully carried out.

4. Promptness in the reporting of any dereliction of duty so that corrections be made.

5. Having information provided through daily reports.

6. Adoption of a system, as a whole, which would enable the detection or errors.(8)

Inherent in each of these principles is the need for management information--information to be systematically gathered, organized, accessed, and applied on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis through all the technologies and services then available (e.g., telegraph, express mail). One commentator suggests that by the 1860s McCallum had "developed information management to probably the highest state of the art for the times."(9) McCallum's efforts influenced generations of managers who, for the first time in U.S. commercial history, began to appreciate the need for creating and continuously monitoring flows of information in their organizations, in the form of correspondence, statistical reports, logs, ledgers, employee evaluations and the other genres of formal communication, with an emphasis on organizational flows of information. Proponents of system were chiefly interested in "control and coordination

based

on record keeping and flows of written information up, down, and across the hierarchy. The spread of systematic management theory and methods reshaped the communication system within manufacturing enterprises"(10) and other large organizations. Clearly, this focus had the greatest impact on primarily white-collar functions such as accounting, planning, budgeting, control, and various elements of what came to be known as administrative management. These areas of persistent importance are reflected in a continuing growth in the white-collar workforce from 1900 to the present. The roles of white-collar office workers have, since the turn of the century, focused primarily on management's need for the production, storage, retrieval, duplication, dissemination, application, and disposition of information.

The other focus--one related to system--in the evolution of management thought is "scientific management." Here, the emphasis was on greater efficiencies from blue-collar workers on the shop floor through efforts such as time and motion studies, development of production standards, and worker incentives such as piecework payments. In these areas, generations of professional managers have been influenced by Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915), whose approaches to scientific management, or efficiency engineering, still influence management thinking today and gave rise to what we call "industrial engineering."(11)

While a full-time worker at Midvale Steel in Philadelphia (he rose from common laborer to chief engineer in six years), Taylor attained a degree in mechanical engineering in 1883 and began development of his efficiency improvement methods. Best known for his efforts in time-motion studies and the careful matching of both tools to the work being done and to the laborers using the tools, Taylor is properly known as the 'father of scientific management.' Taylor undertook "scientific" studies to learn how much workers could produce at peak capacity given the right tools, working conditions, and management encouragement; he advocated piece-work systems to encourage individual effort and initiative. Taylor's The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Row, 1911) proved one of the most influential books in American history as it showed that greater profits--and wages for workers--could be realized through greater efficiency and effectiveness in the workplace.(12)

Taylor had many allies and followers. Among them were the Gilbreths, Frank (1868-1924) and Lillian (1878-1972), who brought even greater sophistication to time-motion studies (e.g., Applied Motion Study

1917). Henry L. Gantt (1861-1919) developed a workable task and bonus system and pioneered a variety of graphic information systems for managers, including the well-known Gantt Chart. Another pioneer of scientific management and organizational efficiency, one who considered effective records systems as one of the twelve most important management efficiency principles, was Harrington Emerson (1853-1931).

Almost as well known as Taylor, Gantt, and the Gilbreths, Emerson was an engineering consultant for U.S. railroads who found that a sense of effective organization was often lacking in business enterprise and that there was a need to eliminate wastes in time, material, and labor. His Twelve Principles of Efficiency (New York: The Engineering Magazine, 1912), a book which ran through six editions, was the first management publication to spell out a conceptual foundation for the importance of records in the business environment. Emerson's principles included clearly defined goals, organizational effectiveness, and standardized control functions. His Sixth Principle specifically enunciated the importance of "Reliable, Immediate, and Adequate Records." While he did not spell out the specifics of managing records as a resource, Emerson spoke to the nature and problems of adequate records. Some of his remarks have a strangely modern resonance:

* Records are anything that give information.

* In the great industrial plants one knows not whether to marvel most at the absence of reliable, immediate, and accurate records or at the superabundance of permanent records

which are

collected with painstaking and at great expense but

are

neither reliable, immediate, nor adequate.

* It has not been unusual in a great corporation's records to find...

that old reports

continue to be made, and painstakingly clerks work their monotonous lives away in neat compilation

s

that no one has looked at, much less used, for a decade.(13)

Widespread interest in Emerson's and Taylor's ideas among all sectors of the growing management class was understandable given an increased ability to improve productivity and reduce costs-and thus increase profits-in all areas of work. Given the spate of books on office management claiming to have followed Taylor's principles, the basic tenets of Taylor's scientific management clearly applied to records and information systems. Taylor's contributions to the evolution of records management might seem indirect to some, but Maynard Brichford acknowledges Taylor's spiritual role in this area:

The intellectual basis of records management as well as the administrative problems it seeks to solve owes much to the application of F. W. Taylor's principles of scientific management to the office.(14)

Some managers in large organizations became pioneers specializing in those white-collar processes known collectively as "system." The emergence of system arose with management's need for statistics and other records-based information. Like scientific management, system meant a departure from the caprice of individual decision makers who relied more on personal rules of thumb than on adequate documentation and sound standards and procedures. Norris Brisco, a contemporary management author, provided a basic definition:

System, as applied to business, consists of rules and regulations, which are worked out and adopted as governing the actions of the members of an organization. The general principles underlying system are simply the reduction of methods employed by successful entrepreneurs to rule. No man can accomplish much without system.(15)

According to Brisco, "poor system" included ineffective records practices in which "no attempt is made to unite the information obtained into a systematic whole so that it will be of service."(16) Brisco's comments might well have been directed at such un-systematic practices as the cluttered and ineffectively decentralized pigeonhole filing method.

In the same decade that Harrington Emerson's Principles appeared, some managers were going even further in applying the gospel of system and scientific management to records. For example, in his book The American Office (1913), J. William Schulze proposed that "records systems" were one of the three fundamental functions of all offices. The others he called "management" (i.e., human resources administration and budgeting) and "organization" (i.e., facilities, equipment, and telecommunications).(17) In addition to a lengthy section on files, filing systems, good recordkeeping practices, what records to keep and their formats, Schulze addressed issues such as disposition of 'useless" records, avoiding unneeded new records series, and the folly of making unnecessary copies of records for dubious legal needs.

William H. Leffingwell (1876-1934) was both an early and a prolific writer on administrative management, or system. Leffingwell's first work addressing records systems, Scientific Office Management: A Report on the Results of Application of the Taylor System to Scientific Management to Offices... (Chicago: A. W. Shaw Company, 1917), was followed by other books from his pen on topics such as form letters, business graphics, office lighting, dictation systems, and records systems. Administrative, or office, management and its records-related issues, then, emerged some twenty-five years before its second flowering in the U.S. federal government.

An eventual--and predictable--outgrowth of applying scientific management to office work was specialization, and one example is in the area of forms management. Wallace Clark, an engineering consultant active in the American Management Association and the

Frederick Winslow

Taylor Society, published his Shop ad Office Forms: Their Design. and Use (McGraw-Hill Book Co.) in 1925. Much like Emerson's general comments on the importance of good records, Clark's rationales for the management of forms in organizations might be found in any current records management text:

* Understanding the systems and procedures supported by the forms is essential.

* Effective forms will facilitate work simplification.

* Effectively designed forms will reduce costly clerical labor.

* Unnecessary forms must be eliminated.

* Duplicative forms should be combined.

* Those who actually use the forms should be involved in their design.(18)

As offices increasingly brought system to their records practices, created more records, and hired more records personnel, "filing manuals" were needed to respond to the growing diversity in records systems, including the use of vertical filing, an innovation courtesy of the librarians.(19) Typical of the genre is Modern Filing and How to File (1916).(20) Covered in this and books like it are topics such as filing types (e.g., loose-sheet systems, Shannon files, vertical filing) and filing patterns (e.g., numerical, geographic, alphabetical, subject). Sound familiar? Approaches to various types of documents were addressed as well (e.g., checks, card files, inventory records). During the 1920s and 1930s, vendors of recordkeeping and filing equipment (e.g., the A. W. Shaw Co., Shaw-Walker, The Rand Co., Yawman and Erbe) frequently published books and magazines on filing and related topics and increasingly used the term "system" for what today is known as "records management."

CONCLUSION

It may well be that the earnest innovators in records and information management within the federal government during the 1940s and 1950s were only dimly aware of their predecessors in the first two decades of the twentieth century. It would be wrong, however, to continue giving the later prophets of records management (e.g., Emmet J. Leahy, Robert A. Shiff, Everett O. Alldrege, Arthur Barclan, J.F.X. Britt, Philip C. Brooks, Herbert E. Angel) so much credit for 'inventing the field" without sharing the honors with those earlier, but now lesser known, proponents of scientific management and system. Clearly, it was they, rather than the archivists or librarians,(21) who were the first to put the "management" in records management.

REFERENCES

1. While not making a case for librarianship as the origin of records management, I have suggested some functional affinities and the hospitality of educational programs in library and information for records management; see: J. Michael Pemberton, "Library and Information Sciences: the Educational Base for Professional Records Management," Records Management Quarterly, 15, (1981), 48-53 and "Records Management Courses in Accredited Library Schools: A Rationale and a Survey," Records Management Quarterly, 16, iii (1982), 10-16.

2. See, for example, Mary F. Robek, Gerald F. Brown, and David O. Stephens, Information and Records Management: Document Based Information Systems, 4th ed. (New York: Glencoe

McGraw-Hill

, 1995), pp. 20-21.

3. "The Odyssey of Records Managers--Part II: From the Middle Ages to Modern Times," Records Management Quarterly, 23, iv (October 1989), 10. Prof. Duranti sees the fields of records management and archives management as two of the fields making up the "records sciences." Others might include paleography, epigraphy, diplomatics, notarial science, codicilography, sphragistics--all weighted toward historical rather than business concerns.

4. In fact, the survival of records management and archives management may to some extent depend on how willing and able they are to eschew "uniqueness" and cooperate in joint educational ventures under a common banner of "information studies" or "information sciences." See J. Michael Pemberton and Christine R. Nugent, "Information Studies: Emergent Field, Convergent Curriculum," Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, 36, (Spring 1995), 126-138; Tyler O. Walters, "Rediscovering the Theoretical Base of Records Management and Its Implications for Graduate Education: Searching for the 'New School of Information Studies'," Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, 36, ii (Spring 1995) 139-154; and J. Michael Pemberton and Ray McBeth, "Opportunity Out of Chaos: Survival Strategies in the Information Age," Records Management Quarterly, 29, iii (July, 1995), 8.

5. J. Michael Pemberton, "Clash of the Information Professions: A Case of Paradigm Conflict?," Records Management Quarterly, 29, ii (April 1995), 47.

6. The story of the rise of a management class in the U.S. is superbly told in Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972).

7. Daniel A. Wren, The Evolution of Management Thought, 4th ed. (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1994), p. 89.

8. "Superintendent's Report," March 25, 1856, in the Annual Report of the New York and Erie Railroad for 1855.

9. Wren, p. 78.

10. JoAnne Yates, Control Through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 10.

11. Taylor's writings also remarkably resemble the spirit of our current preoccupation with business process re-engineering.

12. See discussion of Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management in Robert B. Downs, Books That Changed America (New York: Macmillan, 1970).

13. Twelve Principles, pp. 207-208.

14. "The Relationship of Records Management Activities to the Field of Business History," Business History Review, 46, ii (Summer 1972), 220. Despite his acknowledgment of Taylor, Brichford assumes the birth of records management in the federal government.

15. Norris S. Brisco, Economics of Business (New York: Macmillan, 1920), p. 80.

16. Brisco, p. 82.

17. The American Office: Its Organization, Management, and Records (New York: Key Publishing, 1913). There were other such books; e.g., H.J. Barrett, Modern Methods in the Office: How to Cut Corners and Save Money (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1918) and Floyd W. Parsons, American Business Methods: For Increasing Production and Reducing Costs in Factory, Store, and Office (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1921).

18. Clark, pp. 1-4, 134.

19. An interesting survey of the development of filing systems in U.S. corporations is found in JoAnne Yates, "From Press Book and Pigeonhole to Vertical Filing: Revolution in Storage and Access Systems for Correspondence," Journal of Business Communication, 19, iii (1982), 5-26.

20. W.D. Wigent, Burton D. Housel, and E. Harry Gilman, Modern Filing and How to File: A Textbook on Office Systems (Rochester, NY: Yawman and Erbe Manufacturing), 1916. See also: Edward A. Cope, Filing Systems: Their Principles and Their Applications to Modern Office Requirements (London: Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons, 1913.)

21. This, however, is a good point at which to note the contribution of a librarian cum records specialist, Irene Warren (b. 1875), who was a leader in the teaching of filing and "system." She created the Warren Filing School in Chicago and for many years taught filing systems and filing rules to librarians as well to as the precursors of records management. See Irene Warren, Office Records: Their Filing and Indexing (San Francisco, CA: Journal of Electricity and Western Industry, 1921); Irene Warren, Marion C. Lyons, and Frank C. McClelland, Filing and Indexing Procedures (Chicago: Rand-McNally, 1924). Interestingly enough, Warren had a cross-town competitor in Estelle B. Hunter, Director of the Yawman and Erbe School of Filing in Chicago, and author of Modern Filing Manual (Rochester, NY: Yawman and Erbe, 1923).

Copyright Association of Records Managers and Administrators Inc. Oct 1995
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