Freja Morris
Researcher
What Kind of Tool Is This? : Exploring the Role of the Incident Report in Counteracting Degrading Behaviour in Schools
Author
Summary, in English
My research centres on a topic that will be familiar to many of you – namely the proliferation of paperwork and documentation demands that characterises work in many contemporary organisations. More specifically, I take as my point of departure a crux from the Swedish education sector, namely that there is a broad will – from actors at all levels of the schooling system – politicians, the Swedish National Agency for Education, principals and (of course) teachers themselves – to reduce the amount of documentation work for teachers but despite this will, there is no evidence that the amount of documentation work is lessening. In fact, surveys conducted by teachers’ unions in 2019 and 2021 show that, in some regards, the burden of documentation (as it is commonly referred to in Swedish) is getting more demanding. Documents, then, seem impervious to efforts to eliminate them.
My approach to understanding the proliferation and imperviousness of documents has been to foreground the documents themselves. In doing this, I build on other anthropological and sociological research on documents that emphasise the need to bring documents out of their inertia – to see them as more than ‘dead’ things and certainly see them as more than just their content. In this, sometimes called ethnographic, approach to documents it is argued that documents do things – for instance, they enable and constrain action, produce effects. What and how they do things, however, is an empirical question and one that I try to take seriously in my research.
This text is the first analytical chapter of my thesis. I’m writing a monography and will have
my final seminar 31st May. It is a work-in-progress.
My approach to understanding the proliferation and imperviousness of documents has been to foreground the documents themselves. In doing this, I build on other anthropological and sociological research on documents that emphasise the need to bring documents out of their inertia – to see them as more than ‘dead’ things and certainly see them as more than just their content. In this, sometimes called ethnographic, approach to documents it is argued that documents do things – for instance, they enable and constrain action, produce effects. What and how they do things, however, is an empirical question and one that I try to take seriously in my research.
This text is the first analytical chapter of my thesis. I’m writing a monography and will have
my final seminar 31st May. It is a work-in-progress.
Department/s
- Sociology
Publishing year
2024-03-15
Language
English
Document type
Conference paper
Topic
- Social Work
Keywords
- Governance
- Documentation
- Document analysis
- Bureaucracy
- Quantification
- materiality
Status
Published