Abstract
Documents play a central role for many organizational processes. Current conceptualizations of documents predominantly engage with documents in two different ways. One sees documents as things with specific properties, and a second sees documents as medium enabling communication across different groups of actors. What is currently not well understood is how documents are perceived either as thing or as medium. This chapter engages with this issue by drawing from Fritz Heider’s epistemology of thing and medium, a concept stemming from social and media theory. According to Heider things are uniform and medium are multiform. Applying this concept to documents we argue that documents as things are perceived as uniform, whereas documents as medium are perceived as multiform. We exemplify the application of this conception of documents in the context of Gantt charts and the concept of boundary objects.
Highlights
Documents are an essential and integrative aspect of virtually all aspects of modern life
Using Gantt Charts as an example of documents used for managing work activities, we demonstrate how Heider’s epistemology can be applied to better understand the dual function of documents in organizations where they are used both as containers for content and as vehicles for communication among different stakeholders
Our review is aligned with a review of document theory by Lund (2009), confirming that different conceptions of documents highlight either the thing-like or medium-like character of documents
Summary
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