ALAS, ALL IS NOT BOUNDLESS AFFIRMATION, sweetness and light, in the realm of documents. A scene in Terry Gilliam’s 1985 film Brazil plays on some of our worst nightmares about written forms. The movie depicts a highly bureaucratized, totalitarian state — part 1984, part Kafka, part Alice in Wonderland, and part Monty Python. The most visible symbols of the state’s intrusiveness and suffocating infrastructure are the ducts and pipes spilling out into every room. The film follows one man: Sam Lowry, played by Jonathan Pryce, a clerk in the Ministry of Education. It is the story of this Everyman’s awakening to, and eventual destruction by, the state.
The scene opens with Lowry coming home to discover that his air conditioning is on the blink. He puts in a call to Central Services, which is intercepted by Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro), a heating engineer wanted for his terrorist acts against the state. Lowry asks Tuttle why he doesn’t work for Central Services. “I couldn’t stand the paperwork,” he replies. “Listen, this whole system of yours could be on fire and I couldn’t even turn on a kitchen tap without filling out a 27b/6. Bloody paperwork.” “I suppose one has to expect a certain amount,” Lowry muses, half to himself. “Why?” Tuttle replies. “I came into this game for the action, the excitement. Go anywhere, travel light, get in, get out, wherever there’s trouble, a man alone. Now they’ve got the whole country sectioned off — can’t make a move without a form.”
A moment later, two looney engineers from Central Services show up at Lowry’s door. He tries to get rid of them, telling them his air conditioner has fixed itself. They don’t buy it, and push their way into his apartment. Just as they are about to discover Tuttle, Lowry calls out in desperation, “Have you got a 27b/6?” One of the men begins to shake uncontrollably. “Now look what you’ve done to him,” the other man says, and begins to pull his co-worker back into the hall. “Sorry,” says Lowry. “I’m a bit of a stickler for paperwork, you see. I mean, where would we be if we didn’t stick to the correct procedures?”
Admittedly this scene is a parody, but it points to a very recognizable and unfortunate dimension of our lives. Who among us hasn’t felt trapped in a tangle of paperwork and bureaucratic red tape, unable to make a move without a form? At such times we may well feel that we are caught in an airless, joyless world — a world in which every step must be documented and every action must conform to a logic that is not our own. It is fine to celebrate a single cash register receipt, but when you see it in the context of trillions of similar documents, the desire to celebrate may quickly disappear. A single snowflake may be beautiful, but aggregations of them make for avalanches. When you broaden the picture to include not just cash register receipts but the innumerable other forms of administrative, commercial, and bureaucratic documents, Brazil’s dark vision doesn’t seem so far off the mark.
Surely, though, the use of documents to administer human affairs, to regulate institutional and personal practices, is a good thing. They make it possible to keep the wheels of commerce, government, and industry rolling. How, then, can we make sense of this abusive side documents sometimes display? Is it simply a matter of scale, a mob mentality that arises when too many documents congregate in one place? Are some of them just bad eggs? Or is there something more to be understood about the way documents function in our lives?
Documents have been used for administrative purposes since the earliest days of writing. Indeed, writing, counting, and accounting have a close and ancient connection. While it is possible to do simple counting without external aids — just using one’s fingers, for example — more-complex forms of counting and calculation have generally required additional tools. Tallies — notches or tick marks cut in bone to keep count — have been unearthed dating back ten thousand years and more. The use of pebbles is also quite ancient, and, like tick marks, it is a technique still in use today Both tallies and pebbles can be thought of as primitive forms of writing, since they make use of simple surrogates — bones and pebbles — to tell stories about the world: how many sightings of the moon I’ve made or how many sheep are in my flock. And if Denise Schmandt-Besserat is right, full-blown written language may have arisen from such humble beginnings. She has developed an elaborate theory showing how simple clay “tokens” used to count agricultural and manufactured goods evolved into marks inscribed on clay tablets.1
Whether or not Schmandt-Besserat’s thesis is right, there can be no doubt that writing and counting are intimately related. So too counting and accounting. Certainly the English words counting and accounting share the same etymological root: the Latin word computare. But long before English, or even Latin, was spoken, counting was an important administrative tool. The Bible tells how Joseph, through his ability to interpret dreams, gained favor with the Pharaoh. He correctly interpreted two of the Pharaoh’s dreams as indicating that seven years of famine would follow seven years of abundant crops, and he set out to centralize the collection of foodstuffs and other provisions so they could be doled out in the approaching time of need. The Bible doesn’t tell us how he kept track of the provisions in his storehouses — how he recorded the deposits made by the farmers during the years of plenty, or the quantities handed out during the famine — but he must surely have done so. A task of this complexity would have required careful bookkeeping. In this sense, the Joseph story is paradigmatic of the movement from a nomadic society to an agrarian one, and the bureaucratic methods that would necessarily have accompanied it.
Accounting is essentially a means of keeping track of your resources in order to exercise some measure of control over them. By keeping track of who has borrowed which of your books, you stand a chance of getting them back from your absentminded friends. By making “to-do” lists, you empower yourself to take certain courses of action. These are examples of personal accounting, all of them relatively innocuous and well-meaning. But in situations where some people have power over others — whether it is Joseph in relation to the Pharaoh’s subjects or a boss over his or her employees — accounts can be highly charged, because they have to do with who has what, who owes what, and who ultimately gets to decide. Accounting, in other words, is about accountability: about who is accountable to whom for what. Accounting — and the acts of writing and recordkeeping that are integral to it — is all to do with power.
I ran afoul of the IRS some years back because of an accounting error. The initial error was theirs, but I stupidly compounded it through inexperience with bureaucratic ways. According to their records, the IRS informed me, I hadn’t filed a tax return for the year 1982. But I had. In my files I found a handwritten copy of the Form 1040 I had submitted for that year. I also located the canceled check, written to the IRS, in the exact amount of the taxes I owed.
This would be an easy enough problem to fix. I made a photocopy of both sides of the canceled check and sent it to the IRS. Sorry, they replied, we’re still unable to find your return; and they asked me to resubmit it. I made a photocopy of my hand-copied return. And here is where I made my mistake: I had never signed or dated the handwritten copy of my tax form, since I had intended it only as an informational copy But because I was now submitting an official tax return, I signed and dated the photocopy. The date I wrote was the date in 1984 when I was resubmitting the return, not the date in 1983 when I submitted the original return for the year 1982.
When next I heard from the IRS, they kindly informed me that since I had submitted my return a year late, I owed them interest. Never mind that the canceled check proved conclusively that I had paid my taxes on time. The bureaucratic machinery had seized on the newly submitted Form 1040 and seemed incapable of reasoning from the full set of records. I spoke to my father, a lawyer, and he offered to help me out. Over the next year he carried on a lengthy written correspondence, punctuated by occasional phone conversations, with IRS employees. (I still have the careful records he maintained: the typed letter, the handwritten memos, the postmarked envelopes, and photocopied forms.) Finally he reached a sympathetic ear. After listening patiently to the saga (and understanding its subtleties!), a well-meaning IRS employee counseled him: Listen, she said, we’re not talking about a whole lot of money Your son is better off just paying the interest and being done with it. Quite honestly, it will be nearly impossible to get the system to respond properly
So in the end, I paid the interest. There was no question about where the truth lay; but there was also no question about where the power lay For those of us who have lived with frustrating encounters of this kind, it is probably small comfort that others too have struggled with the bean counters, and for thousands of years. Roman emperors relied in large part on an efficient bureaucracy to maintain control over their far-flung empire. But as C. M. Kelly, a scholar at Cambridge University and the University of London, points out, this dependence on bureaucracy was a two-edged sword:
While undoubtedly it allowed a more penetrating and detailed control over empire, bureaucracy also posed a serious threat to imperial power. At its simplest, the problem was one of delegation and independence. The efficient functioning of any bureaucracy requires the delegation of power in order to allow officials to take decisions in their own right. But, from an imperial point of view, delegation was also a dangerous and uncomfortable necessity. Too much delegation might so far remove emperors from the actual exercise of power that they could become the prisoners of an administrative system which monopolized and controlled important policy-making information.2
Evidently even those officially in charge are vulnerable to the force of bureaucratic logic.
Although bureaucracy has a long history, if we are to understand its force in our lives today, I suggest we look to relatively recent developments, for it is only over the last two hundred years that recognizably modern document forms and administrative practices have arisen. Modern bureaucracy — as lampooned in Brazil and manifested in my IRS story — is a product of the industrial revolution. It came into being as a means of creating and managing large-scale, distributed organizations (railroads, corporations, government offices) capable of responding to the conditions presented by an emerging industrial economy
The Industrial Revolution began in England in the second half of the eighteenth century with the transformation of the textile industry. During this period, newly developed, mechanized methods of spinning and weaving were put into practice. Initially, running water powered the looms. But with James Watt’s development of the steam engine in 1765, a whole new source of energy became available, one not directly dependent on the natural powers or rhythms of wind and water. The nineteenth century saw the application of steam power to all aspects of economic life: the mining of raw materials; the manufacturing of finished goods; and the distribution of raw materials and finished products via the railroads. A society based largely on agriculture reoriented itself for industrial production.
In the United States (the case I know best), signs of what James Beniger has called a “control crisis” began to emerge in the mid-nineteenth century. By the 1850s — to choose one example that Joseph would appreciate — networks of grain elevators and warehouses were being set up to store and transport wheat, corn, and cotton around the country. But shippers were having trouble keeping track of what was stored where, and what needed to be shipped to whom.3 “Never before,” says Beniger in The Control Revolution,
had the processing of material flows threatened to exceed — in both volume and speed — the capacity of technology to contain them. Suddenly, owing to the harnessing of steam power, goods could be moved at the full speed of industrial production, night and day under virtually any conditions, not only from town to town but across entire continents and around the world.
To do this, however, required a system of manufacturers and distributors, central and branch offices, transportation lines and terminals, containers and cars, that grew staggering in its complexity. Even the logistics of nineteenth-century armies, then the most difficult problem in processing and control, came to be dwarfed in complexity by the material economy Just as the problem of control reached crisis proportions, however, a series of new technological and social solutions began to contain the problem.4
Through at least the first half of the nineteenth century, American institutions operated with limited administrative apparatus. If we were to go back to mid-nineteenth-century America, we might be surprised at how small and informally structured were even the most prominent of institutions. Government was much smaller, for example. In 1831, during Andrew Jackson’s administration, the entire federal government was run by fewer than one thousand people. During that same period, the Bank of the United States was run by just three people.5 Indeed, the American economy was dominated by small companies, owned and managed by one person or by a partnership.6
But these methods, which one writer in the 1890s called “the old slipshod way of our forefathers,”7 were not adaptable — or at least were not adapted — to the demands of the new economy. The control crisis precipitated by rapid industrialization therefore initiated a search for new forms of organization and oversight. By the 1870s, JoAnne Yates explains in Control Through Communication, a new theory was being espoused that promoted a supposedly rational and impersonal approach to management. In this scheme, called systematic management, a business was organized as a hierarchy of departments. Workers’ jobs were carefully defined, via job descriptions, and organizational knowledge was systematized as formal procedures. In essence, this new type of organization was modeled on the machine — many of the new management theorists were engineers — with workers seen as interchangeable parts performing scripted work within a formal organizational structure. One of the central concerns was efficiency, and “[o]nly by replacing individual idiosyncrasy with system, individual memory with organizational memory, and personal skills with firm-specified skills at all levels did the systematizers feel that they could achieve the current and future efficiency they sought.”8
A central question in this new system was how exactly workers and their work could be coordinated and controlled. In earlier times this was accomplished mostly through face-to-face interaction. The owner of a factory might not be present onsite, but his foreman would. The foreman could physically oversee — and talk directly with — the men on the shop floor. This worked well when business was conducted at a single, relatively small site. But as larger, geographically distributed organizations came into being, it was no longer satisfactory The problem was how to control workers’ practices in larger, distributed organizations.
One of the first instances of this new form of organization was the railroad. Railroad stations and stationmasters were, of course, geographically distributed along the track, the central offices located elsewhere again. The need for precise coordination was made evident by a series of early railroad accidents. Initially, railroads ran in both directions on a single track. This meant that a slipup in scheduling could easily result in accidents. Company investigations following a series of collisions in 1841 on the Western Railroad between Worcester and West Stockbridge, Massachusetts, pointed to the importance not only of accurate train timetables, but of controlled procedures for maintaining and revising them. “[T]he time and manner of running the trains shall be established and published by the Engineer,” railroad management concluded, and “no alteration in the times of running or mode of meeting and passing of trains shall take effect, until after positive knowledge shall have been received at the office of the superintendent, that [written] orders for such change have been received and are understood by all concerned.”9
The use of written records became a central plank in the realization of systematic management. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, new document technologies and new document genres were invented or adapted to satisfy the growing desire for speed, efficiency, and control. Three technologies were particularly important: the typewriter, carbon paper, and vertical files.
Until the invention of typewriters, office clerks used quills, as had writers for many centuries. A quill is simply a feather, from a goose or turkey, that has been baked to harden it, then cut with a knife to form a writing point. (The term “pen knife” derives from the use of knives to cut quills or pens.) The quill is an extremely fine writing instrument — I recently heard a calligrapher call it “the finest writing implement ever invented” — but it isn’t ideally suited for producing large quantities of writing quickly The point of the quill needs to be regularly trimmed with a quill knife to keep it sharp, and the quill itself will wear out before too long. The manufacturing of steel pen nibs addressed this problem; it made more durable writing implements, but could not significantly accelerate production of documents.
The first commercially viable typewriters were produced in the early 1870s. Initially considered a tool for court reporters, they didn’t assume a prominent place in the office until a decade later. In 1887 one writer observed: “Five years ago the type writer [sic] was simply a mechanical curiosity. Today its monotonous click can be heard in almost every well regulated business establishment in the country A great revolution is taking place, and the type writer is at the bottom of it.”10 The great advantage of the typewriter, of course, was that it permitted documents to be composed much more quickly than had been possible through handwriting. A competent typist could produce eighty words a minute, whereas a hand-copyist could produce thirty at best.
Equally important was the development of carbon paper as a means of reproducing documents. Before carbon paper, a document would be hand-copied; alternately, one or two copies of a handwritten letter could be made using a “letter press” while the ink was still wet. Hand-copying was of course slow, and in neither case was it practical to make more than a couple of copies. Carbon paper had actually been invented much earlier, in 1823, but didn’t work well with the quills or pens of the time. In a nice example of the synergy between technologies and work practice, it wasn’t until fifty years later that the increasing drive for speed brought a much improved carbon paper together with the new mechanical writing device. Even so, it took several decades before this new method of copying displaced the letter press in the office.
Thanks to the typewriter and carbon paper, office documents could be produced more quickly and in greater numbers. This served to highlight the inadequacy of the filing methods of the time. There were two main methods for storing incoming documents: pigeonholes and flat filing. In the first, the document to be saved was folded, a brief description of its contents (e.g., name of sender and date) was written on the outside, and it was stored in a pigeonhole in the recipient’s desk. In the second method, a document was stored flat (rather than folded) and horizontal between alphabetic tabs in a letter box or cabinet. (Such letter boxes are still in use today.) Neither method was particularly good at handling large quantities of documents. A typical desk could only hold so many pigeonholes, and finding any one document might require unfolding several, a time-consuming process. Flat filing could accommodate an open-ended number of documents (you could always start a new box), and while the indexing methods employed with them were an improvement over pigeonholes, still it was at best a clumsy and bulky system.
To help bring order, a filing method was borrowed from the library world. Melvil Dewey, the inventor of the Dewey Decimal System, adapted the idea of the library card catalog, a system of small cards filed vertically in drawers, to produce the vertical filing system we still use today in this system, consisting of hanging file folders stored in file cabinets, it was much easier to add documents to folders, to add new folders, and to move folders around. Vertical files also took up considerably less space than flat files. Along with these technologies came new techniques, new office practices. As one writer observed in a 1913 textbook: “It will already have become evident that it is impossible to sever the problem of finding a good practicable filing system from the whole problem of business organization. This is particularly true of all businesses large enough to be carried on departmentally”11
The new vertical filing system was much acclaimed; it won a gold prize in the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Today of course, we tend to think of paper files as the problem, not the solution. But at a time when the typewriter, carbon paper, and vertical files are all being challenged if not displaced, it may be useful to realize that they were the radical technologies of their time. Even today’s radical innovations will turn into tomorrow’s legacy systems.
These new document technologies were only part of the solution. What kinds — what genres — of documents would be created, copied, distributed, and filed with them? The philosophy of systematic management stressed the orderly flow of information up and down the organizational hierarchy Managers needed to be able to send rules and orders downward. They also needed to gather information from the lower levels to keep tabs on how the work was progressing. “Circular letters” — that is, letters that circulated — as well as procedure manuals were developed to accomplish the former, to communicate and document company policies and business procedures. Forms, graphs, tables, and reports were developed to accomplish the latter, to collect statistics on the operation of the company and communicate the results to higher levels of management.
The birth of the form nicely illustrates how documents were streamlined and tailored in the service of ever greater efficiency Workers at lower levels of the hierarchy — e.g., railroad clerks and shop foremen — were increasingly being asked to document their activities in written reports, sometimes on a daily basis. This could be a time-consuming process. But, it was realized, the process could be standardized and speeded up by printing forms, sheets of paper whose printed material indicated exactly what information needed to be filled in, and where. This meant the worker had less to write; the familiarity of a standard layout also increased his speed. This standardization also facilitated reading and summarizing as the report traveled up the hierarchy. Except for changes in type styles, these earlier forms from nearly a hundred years ago are essentially indistinguishable from those we still use today
The memo, too, was a product of the search for speed, efficiency, and standardization. It arose most directly from the letter. Letters as a form of personal correspondence had of course existed for many centuries. They were already used in commerce, mainly for external communication. The conventions of letter writing were well established. These included the date of writing, a formal salutation (“Dear . . .”) as well as a formal closing (“Your most . . .”). The opening and closing addresses could be quite flowery, at least to our ears. But as the letter was increasingly used for internal communication, within and across departments, the new business experts, masters of efficiency argued for a much simplified format. Typing time could be saved if the company printed up letterheads with fields such as To, From, and Subject, and if openings and closings were stripped down to a bare minimum. Jo Anne Yates quotes one expert arguing for just such a simplification:
In the first place, all unnecessary courtesy, such as “Fred Brown & Co.,” “Gentlemen,” “yours very truly” and other phrases are omitted entirely. In a business where hundreds and sometimes thousands of interhouse letters are written daily the saving of time is considerable. Next, an expensive letterhead is done away with, and this also is a factor in reducing expense. The blank is made with simply the words, “From Chicago,” “From Atlanta,” or whatever may be the name of the town where the letter is written, printed in the upper left-hand corner, and underneath the word, “Subject.” In the upper right-hand corner is the serial number of the letter and the words, “In reply refer to No.” and “Replying to No.” It will thus be seen that the only typewriting necessary in addressing a letter consists of the location of the house to which the letter is to be sent, a short summary of the matter contained in the letter for indexing purposes, the number of the letter, and date, with the initials of the writer, and the number and date of the letter which is under reply (in case there has been previous correspondence), with the initials of the former correspondent.12
The “Subject” field had a double purpose. It of course gave the recipient a quick way to determine what the memo was about. But it was equally important as a resource for a new class of workers, the file clerk. It helped the clerk determine where in the vertical files to store the memo. One authority went so far as to suggest that memos should be limited to a single subject to simplify the task of filing.
Initially, companies thought of their files as a centralized resource, but as memos proliferated (thanks to the typewriter and carbon paper), departments realized they had reason to maintain their own local files as well. Although the memo emerged as a tool of the new management techniques, it also shaped them. (I have perhaps made it sound like the new management methods were invented to solve the control crisis, then new document technologies and genres were adapted or invented to satisfy the needs of the new methods. A better way to think of it is that the new management methods and the new document technologies and genres co-evolved, with changes in one area affecting the others.)
While these technologies and methods achieved their intended purpose — they made it possible to create and manage large-scale, distributed organizations — they also came at a substantial cost. “Systematic management principles,” says Yates, “required depersonalizing the workplace in the interests of control and efficiency.”13 This led to resistance at times on the part of both workers and managers. Decades before these changes swept through the American economy, however, the German sociologist Max Weber had already begun to speculate about the causes of mass bureaucratization and to express concern about its effects. He believed that Western culture was becoming increasingly disenchanted: it was prone to value that which was amenable to calculation, to mechanization, and to rational analysis, and to devalue and dismiss “mysterious incalculable forces”14 — anything that was not amenable to rational control. The West was becoming increasingly depersonalized, he thought. “Bureaucracy develops the more perfectly,” he said, “the more it is ‘dehumanized,’ the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from official business love, hatred, and all purely personal. . . and emotional elements which escape calculation.”15 (Recall Carlyle’s complaint that people were becoming “mechanical in head and heart, as well as in hand.”)
We can now see, I think, where the horrors of the 27b/6 and the tyranny of correct procedures have come from. They have arisen, in conjunction with industrialization, from a philosophy of impersonal management and rational control. And although neither forms nor standardized work practices can be held responsible for the disenchantment of the world, they are certainly major participants in it. You might think of a form as the attempt to create a highly stylized, scripted, and impersonal piece of conversation. Each labeled field is essentially a question: name? address? marital status? Your job, then, as the form-filler, is to understand what is being asked of you and to respond appropriately. Not only are the questions typically of a highly institutional nature, but the person asking the questions isn’t a person at all. He — or it — is the institution itself, which may by law be considered a “person,” but shares few of the warm, soft, human features of real people. When you fill out a form, you are essentially engaging in a scripted conversation with a faceless bureaucracy. Is it any wonder that we feel uncomfortable with such documents?
All administrative and bureaucratic documents have something of this impersonal character. The writer or author is essentially an organization, not a person or even an identifiable group. Can you show me, please, Steve’s Deli — not the physical place, but the author of my cash register receipt? Even when the document has been written by a real person and signed by him — a letter from your health insurer, for example, in response to a query about denial of service — the writer is still speaking in the name of the corporate entity. The subject matter of administrative documents, too, is typically impersonal and objective: it is about the cost of a tuna sandwich or the time at which a train arrives, not the taste of the tuna or the sound of the whistle as the train roars across the prairie.
Dorothy Smith, a sociologist, has analyzed an example of bureaucratic writing in detail.16 Her observations are particularly compelling because she juxtaposes a personal account with a bureaucratic account of the same event, a clash between the police and a crowd of people in Berkeley in 1968. She examines two documents written in response to this event. The first is a letter written by a college professor, a witness to the event, protesting what he considered “a fracas . . . staged and organized by the police in an obvious attempt to provoke the people there into a confrontation with the heavily armed cops.” He describes how a passing boy, sixteen or seventeen years old, was grabbed by the police and manhandled; how the police tried to pry a baby away from a young mother; how another young woman was beaten with a club while lying on the ground; and how a policeman attacked a man whom the officer thought had thrown a beer can. “Immediately, the young, cigar-smoking cop sprinted across the street charging like a vicious bull, the most vicious and horrifying look of hatred and contempt on his contorted face, his club raised, shouting. If hate could kill, that savages look would have killed everyone in sight. How can a man be entrusted with safeguarding the law and protecting the citizens, all citizens, if he becomes so easily the victim of such neurotic behavior that blinds him to all reason?” The professor’s letter was addressed to the Berkeley chief of police, but was also published in a local paper, the Berkeley Barb.
The second document is a response from the mayor of Berkeley. It was produced as a flyer, and was distributed in banks and stores throughout the community. It begins with an excerpt from the professor’s letter to the chief of police, and is followed by an open letter from the mayor to the professor. The mayor asserts that he has checked into the professor’s allegations. Subsequent paragraphs present an entirely different picture of what happened: The young man whom the professor claims was an innocent passerby was in fact “a juvenile who was arrested and charged with being a minor in possession of alcoholic beverages.” As for the woman with the child, “[i]nvestigation revealed that this young woman was screaming vile profanity at the police and was agitating the crowd.” The other young woman “was attempting to interfere with the arrest of a man who had attacked a police officer.” She may have ended up on the ground, but she was, “to the best of my investigation, never struck with a baton or hit with a fist.” Finally, it is true that the man the professor identifies did not throw the beer can, but “body-blocked” the officer as he began to pursue the man who had.
Here are two completely different stories about what happened, one accusing the police, the other defending them. But they differ not only in their ascription of innocence and guilt. The professor’s is a personal, eyewitness account, a set of observations made from a particular place on the street: “I was walking toward my car parked off Telegraph Avenue.” “I was standing just below the corner of Haste and Telegraph opposite Cody’s.” The mayor’s account, by contrast, is institutional. Instead of statements based on direct observation from a particular vantage point on the scene, it offers the results of an “investigation.” It is a composite account that has pretensions to objectivity — supposedly offering a Gods-eye view of what really happened. It gives the impression of simply stating the facts. While the professor offers up vivid details of his experience, including his emotional reactions (“I shall never forget the face of that policeman, his eyes bulging out. . .”), the mayor’s report is dispassionate, and seemingly neutral.
But the mayor’s account is bureaucratic in another important respect as well. The police actions are justified, he claims, because the police were simply following “proper police procedures.” Rather than being the result of “neurotic behavior,” as the professor claims, they were the result of reasoned and reasonable institutional action. Each of the people the professor mentions — the boy, the young woman with the child, the second young woman, and the man — can be shown to have acted in ways that warranted the corresponding police action. “Thank you for relating to me your civic concern,” the mayor concludes. “I am sure we both share a common desire to cultivate respect for law and law enforcement officers.” In the background of the police chief’s remarks we can almost hear Lowry’s comment to the men from Central Services: “Where would we be if we didn’t stick to correct procedures?”
Of course, not all administrative and bureaucratic documents are brutish, demonic creatures. Three chapters back, I was singing a love song to a cash register receipt. And earlier in this chapter I offered train schedules as an example of an innovation that saved lives. There is no doubt that administrative documents make the trains run on time, literally and figuratively, and surely that is a good thing. What I have been after here is the source of our bad feelings about these kinds of documents. We can partly locate these feelings in the sheer quantity of bureaucratic documents, the fact that we are bombarded and overwhelmed by them at every turn. But this explanation doesn’t go far enough. There are more books, news stories, and movies than we can possibly attend to, but we don’t direct our hostility at them. Something else is going on with administrative documents, something qualitative. They are at once the products, the co-creators, and one of the more visible symbols of our age, an age that bears the mark of the rational, the mechanical, the impersonal, the efficient, and the disenchanted. We may have derived many benefits from a system of efficient administration and production, but we also feel victimized by it.
It is curious to notice how robust our modern bureaucratic systems have so far been. Despite remarkable and rapid change in many arenas, bureaucracy seems to have become only more entrenched; it continues to grow and thrive. A hundred years ago, bureaucratic practices and bureaucratic documents were primarily used to regulate the internal working of institutions. JoAnne Yates’s story of “control through communication” is about the development of document-centered practices for managing the movements of employees within a company But over the course of the last century, these same techniques have been extended to regulate the interactions between customers and corporate entities. If we resent red tape, it isn’t just because we feel enslaved to it in the workplace; it’s because we encounter it in almost all our daily practices. If you want your mail stopped while you’re on vacation, you don’t generally tell your mail carrier — you fill out a form. Your dealings with the gas company, the health insurance company, the phone company, the bank, are mediated by forms, boilerplate letters, and bills. In most of these cases we have also been able to speak to someone by phone. But even here, one of the last bastions of direct human contact, the customer service representative, is being replace by automated, menu-driven voice-mail systems.
Rather than freeing us from bureaucracy, computers may actually be locking us only more firmly into what Max Weber called the “iron cage.” (It is a term he first used for capitalism, but it applies equally well to bureaucracy.) In a book written twenty-five years ago, Computer Power and Human Reason,17 Joseph Weizenbaum argued that the computer came along just in time to save our massive bureaucratic system. (This is very close to Beniger’s thesis, although Beniger puts a more positive spin on it.) The Internet is clearly a powerful vehicle for extending commerce and administration across the globe. Many of the document genres generated in an earlier era to effect control and coordination are already present in digital form. Indeed, the genre that Web developers first produced to facilitate two-way communication was the dialog box — a digital incarnation of the form. The technologies of document construction and distribution may be changing, but at least in the bureaucratic realm, the system looks remarkably like the one created a hundred years ago.
Won’t digital technologies at least liberate us from paperwork? In some ways they already have. In the years ahead, more and more of us will prepare our tax returns on the computer and submit them electronically to the IRS. Companies will increasingly offer us the option of receiving bills electronically rather than on paper, and we will have the option of handling our payment electronically too. Companies will offer to handle our bills for us. Business memos and reports, sales catalogs, and advertisements will increasingly appear in digital form, and fewer readers will feel the need to print them out before reading them. In certain areas of our lives, there will certainly be less paper.
But less paperwork — literally less paper to work with — doesn’t necessarily mean less bureaucratic tangle. If we think paper is the problem, it is because we are confusing the medium with the mode of operation. Paper in itself isn’t the problem; it is the most visible and tangible manifestation of it. It is true, of course, that stacks of paper are daunting and they require effort to organize and keep organized, but so do digital materials, as we are discovering is the case with e-mail and Web documents. Digital technologies, in their favor, do offer the possibility of increasingly powerful, automated search tools and classification schemes. These, however, are solutions in the spirit of bureaucracy itself: they try to counter the bureaucratic onslaught by giving us more efficient, more mechanized, more impersonal tools. From childhood I remember an episode of the “Little Rascals” TV show. The truant officer has just caught one of the kids playing hookey. He tells the boy that if he’s sent to reform school, he’ll spend his days breaking rocks with a sledgehammer. Ah, but on Christmas, on Christmas, the truant officer says, all the boys get a special present. What’s that? the boy asks. A new sledgehammer, the officer replies.