“Communist Miscellany” is a history of file-keeping and bureaucratic paperwork in Maoist China, examined through the institution of individual dossiers on Chinese subjects known as dang’an. Drawing upon an original sourcebase of deaccessioned archival dossiers, the project explores how the party-state bureaucracy fashioned an archive of Maoist society through scrupulous routines of investigative, clerical, and material labor. In Maoist China, one of the primary responsibilities of local bureaucratic units was to compile detailed individualized dossiers on party members, cadres, workers and students under their jurisdiction. The dossier constituted a master record of a subject's social identity, probing issues of class status, personal background, family relationships, political activities and attitudes. Broadly instituted in the 1950s on the basis of the Soviet model, the stated purpose of the dossier system was to inform staffing decisions for personnel management in the planned economy. However, in the Mao era, the dossier was widely deployed as a surveillance instrument, producing a living archive of “political and historical problems” among the people. For ordinary citizens, materials gathered through the dossier were the basis of crucial class labels and the grounds for political advancement. The paper-bound practices of the dossier informed the generic presentation of identity and evidence while supplying material for everyday political acts. This study of the dossier system engages current debates on bureaucratic culture, social surveillance, and archive in the PRC. A project of immense ambition, the dossier system straddled the imperatives of permanent revolution and socialist state-building to transcribe a record of Chinese society in the Maoist image. The continuous expansion of the dossier system over the Mao era gave rise to elaborate routines of file-keeping and paperwork as well as unexpected consequences of the bureaucratic will to knowledge. The bureaucratic tendency toward overaccumulation and excess in the production of dossier materials exposes the political and epistemic insecurities that drove social surveillance. The practical demands of the dossier system strained the ability of local bureaucrats to keep pace with requests for intelligence, shaping an approach to file-keeping that conceived its own distinctive forms of knowledge and incapacity.

This thesis sets out to explain how spheres of responsibility or competences are assigned in the administration of government functions in order to assess the ways in which archivists can come to terms with increasingly rapid rates of administrative change in the performance of their work. It examines statutes and government publications to present a picture of the evolution of the competence of agencies of the government of Canada given responsibility for carrying out activities in administration of the function of agriculture. It is found that knowledge of the assignment of functional responsibility is essential to a number of archival tasks. It is vital to know all the bodies participating in carrying out the function when appraising records. A vital part of identifying the external structure of a fonds lies in determining the competence of the agencies creating records in it, and this knowledge must be effectively communicated in archival description. Finally, the concepts of function, competence, and activity, if clearly understood, can guide the development of vocabularies to assist users of archives to find loci of administrative action relevant to searches they are undertaking. Accumulating information about the functions, competences, and activities of organizations and keeping it current can serve many purposes in the administration of records during the entire life cycle. Organizations need this information to control and provide access to records for administrative purposes and to facilitate secondary access under freedom of information and privacy legislation or for historical research purposes. The method of analyzing how functional activity employed in this study can be used for all government organizations in Canada.

This thesis sets out to explain how spheres of responsibility or competences are assigned in the administration of government functions in order to assess the ways in which archivists can come to terms with increasingly rapid rates of administrative change in the performance of their work. It examines statutes and government publications to present a picture of the evolution of the competence of agencies of the government of Canada given responsibility for carrying out activities in administration of the function of agriculture. It is found that knowledge of the assignment of functional responsibility is essential to a number of archival tasks. It is vital to know all the bodies participating in carrying out the function when appraising records. A vital part of identifying the external structure of a fonds lies in determining the competence of the agencies creating records in it, and this knowledge must be effectively communicated in archival description. Finally, the concepts of function, competence, and activity, if clearly understood, can guide the development of vocabularies to assist users of archives to find loci of administrative action relevant to searches they are undertaking. Accumulating information about the functions, competences, and activities of organizations and keeping it current can serve many purposes in the administration of records during the entire life cycle. Organizations need this information to control and provide access to records for administrative purposes and to facilitate secondary access under freedom of information and privacy legislation or for historical research purposes. The method of analyzing how functional activity employed in this study can be used for all government organizations in Canada. / Arts, Faculty of / Library, Archival and Information Studies (SLAIS), School of / Graduate

What role did documents play in the governance of the British Empire during an age of unprecedented geopolitical transformation? Paperwork, Governance, and Archive in the British Empire During the Age of Revolutions answers this question by examining the role of paperwork in British imperial governance in the Atlantic World during the eras of the American and French Revolutions. The dissertation argues that paperwork served as the facilitative technology through which administrative interactions between metropolitan officials and their imperial servants were conducted. Through the creation and circulation of particular material forms, late eighteenth century bureaucrats across the different offices involved in imperial administration–including the Board of Trade, the Admiralty, the Secretary of State, and the Customs–articulated and enforced an ‘imperial constitution’ that elevated the power of royal sovereignty in the governance of the British empire. This role of paperwork remained consistent throughout the late eighteenth century despite the pressures of revolution and war that transformed the imperial state in other respects. But at the end of the eighteenth century, imperial administrators developed a new approach to documents that had previously been pronounced only in domestic governance: the transformation of the archive from its role as a container of documents, into an active site of policy-making. Paperwork–meaning any document produced either in response to official demand, or written by bureaucrats in the execution of the processes of administration; and the constellations of practices in which bureaucrats engaged when using them–made Britain’s otherwise ungovernable empire cohere across vast oceanic and territorial expanses. Through the dispatch and circulation of particular forms, the different institutions responsible for exercising authority over imperial possessions in the Atlantic Basin enacted the specific administrative tasks that preserved the political viability of the imperial constitution. Every act of governance involved the seemingly limitless production of paperwork: from collecting taxes (reliant upon keeping account books and receipts) and navigating ships (dependent upon logbooks and geographical atlases), to negotiating treaties (through diplomatic letter writing and drafting) and maintaining order (requiring the composition and circulation of legal codes). The first chapter of the dissertation provides an overview of the structure and growth of imperial bureaucracy and communications in the British empire during the long eighteenth century. The second, third, fourth, and fifth chapters examine how the central institutions involved in governing the British empire in the Atlantic world, including the Board of Trade; the Secretary of State; the Admiralty; and the Customs and Treasury, used documents. While each of these different institutions relied upon different kinds of documents in executing their administrative tasks, in each case the administrative use of paperwork articulated, enforced, and facilitated the relationships of hierarchy and deference between metropolitan and colonial administrators that characterized sovereignty in the British empire. The administrative use of paperwork, these chapters show, centered upon bureaucrats’ use of documents to demonstrate to their superiors that they understood expectations for proper official conduct, and were acting accordingly. This constitutional and facilitative role of documents, the dissertation argues, continued to inhere in administrative culture during the late eighteenth century despite a set of significant political challenges–notably the American and French Revolutions–to British imperial power. Yet, in one key respect, the material practices of imperial bureaucracy changed in this period. Beginning in the 1790s, administrators began to systematically use the vast archives of paperwork accumulating in the offices and repositories of the British state as sources of knowledge and evidence to inform the development of imperial strategy against the French in Asia, Europe, North America, and the Caribbean. These practices of archival use revived modes of bureaucratic governance that had been developed centuries earlier, and were characteristics of a distinctively ‘early modern’ style of administration. The dissertation concludes by suggesting the complications that this history of the bureaucratic archive introduces for extant accounts of British ‘modernity.’ For over a century, scholarship has fruitfully attended to the ideological origins, political development, and administrative history of the British empire in the long eighteenth century. But virtually all of this research has looked through paperwork for evidence of other phenomena, rather than attempting to understand the significance that contemporaries ascribed to the material forms they used. By accounting for the role of documents in the history of British imperial governance, the dissertation also models an approach to writing the histories of states and empires that departs from both structuralist and poststructuralist perspectives on governance by attending instead to the specificities of bureaucratic practice.

Thesis (MPA)--University of Stellenbosch, 2011. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The research study assessed records management practices in the Limpopo Department of Agriculture (LDA), with the focus being on human resources records. Human resources records management practices were assessed in four key performance areas, namely: policy and regulatory framework, storage requirements, integrity of paper-based and electronic records, and efficiency and effectiveness of the registry system. The assessment tool, as prescribed in the Best Practice Model for Keeping and Managing Paper-Based Employee Records, was used. Research findings showed that LDA's performance in terms of records management practices do not comply with the set policies and regulatory framework and that the storage conditions are insecure. Research findings were evaluated and possible strategies for improving the management of human resources records are recommended. The adoption of awareness campaigns for staff, a coordinated training programme as well as the provision of support of top management, are some of the strategies recommended. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: In hierdie navorsingstudie is rekords van bestuurpraktyke in die Limpopo Departement van Landbou (LDL) geassesseer, met die fokus op menslikehulpbronrekords. Die menslikehulpbronrekords is geassesseer op grond van vier kernprestasie-areas, naamlik die beleids- en regulatoriese raamwerk, bergingsvereistes, integriteit van papiergebaseerde en elektroniese rekords, en doeltreffendheid en effektiwiteit van die registerstelsel. Die assesseringstelsel soos voorgeskryf deur die Best Practice Model for Keeping and Managing Paper-Based Employee Records is gebruik. Navorsingsbevindings het getoon dat die LDL se prestasie ten opsigte van rekordbestuurpraktyke nie voldoen aan beleide nie en dat ‟n regulatoriese raamwerk en veilige bergingstoestande nie bestaan nie. Navorsingsbevindings is geëvalueer en moontlike strategieë om die bestuur van menslikehulpbronrekords te verbeter, is aanbeveel. Die ingebruikneming van bewusmakingsveldtogte vir personeel, 'n gekoördineerde opleidingsprogrm en ook die verskaffing van steun deur topbestuur is van die strategieë wat aanbeveel word.