Organizations, e-information and the law…

On NPR’s Morning Edition, reporter Ari Shapiro’s “New Rules on Retaining Digital Business Documents” described rules “that help companies decide how many e-mails and other digital items they have to keep in case someone sues them and demands the documents be brought to court. Even small companies can generate millions of digital documents in a very short time, and systems for managing them can be expensive.” (NPR 2006)

Consider Weber’s observation that maintaining written records is a hallmark of bureaucratization. He was primarily observing the internal rationalization of organization. Information retention rules would seem to push things at the other end of the spectrum and a sort of external rationalization oriented not toward organizational performance but rather the organization’s existence in a social context. Hmmm.

See Also

uscourts.gov 2006. E-Discovery Amendments and Committee Notes

Author: Dan Ryan

I've been an Academic Program Director at MinervaProject.com, a professor at University of Toronto, University of Southern California, and Mills College teaching things like human centered design, computational thinking, modeling for policy sciences, and social theory. My current mission is to figure out how to reorganize higher education and exploit technology so that we can teach twice as many twice as well twice as easily. View all posts by Dan Ryan