Let the ghosts speak: An empirical exploration of the "nature" of the record

Archivaria

Volumn 51, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 81-111

  Lemieux, Victoria L ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 33644509650     PISSN: 03186954     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (87)

1. Robert McIntosh, "The Great War, Archives, and Modern History," Archivaria 46 (Fall 1998), pp. 1-31
2. Lily Koltun, "The Promise and Threat of Digital Options in an Archival Age," Archivaria 47 (Spring 1999), pp. 114-135
3. Dawne Adam, "The Tuol Sleng Archives and Cambodian Genocide," Archivaria 45 (Spring 1998), pp. 5-26.
4. Preben Mortensen, "The Place of Theory in Archival Practice," Archivaria 47 (Spring 1999), pp. 1-26
5. Tom Nesmith, "Still Fuzzy, But More Accurate: Some Thoughts on the 'Ghosts' of Archival Theory," Archivaria 47 (Spring 1999), pp. 136-150
6. Brien Brothman, "Orders of Value: Probing the Theoretical Terms of Archival Practice," Archivaria 32 (Summer 1991), pp. 78-100.
7. Grounded Theory is "A general methodology of analysis linked with data collection that uses a systematically applied set of methods to generate an inductive theory about a substantive area."
8. See B. Glaser, Basics of Grounded Theory Analysis (Mill Valley, CA, 1992), p. 16. The software I used: QSR*NUDIST.
9. The precise year in which the Jamaican financial collapse can be said to have started is a matter of interpretation that depends on the factors one accepts as having caused the collapse; however, most analysts and commentators agree that the seeds of the collapse were sown long before the first banks failed.
10. For example, see Dennis Boothe, "Case Study of Selected Financial Institutions," Symposium on the Crisis of the Jamaican Financial Services Sector, University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica, 27 November 1999. Claremont Kirton and Moya Leiba-Barnes date the financial crisis in terms of forced closure, mergers, and government assistance. Using these factors, the crisis can be dated from 1995-1998. They note that economists also try to date the crisis by the following: non-performing assets to performing assets in the banking system exceeds 10 per cent, cost of rescue operations at least 2 per cent of GDP, extensive banking problems resulting in large-scale nationalizations, and large amount of bank runs
11. see Claremont Kirton and Moya Leiba-Barnes, Financial Sector Crisis in the 1990s: Macro-and Micro-Economic Roots, Symposium on the Crisis of the Jamaican Financial Sector, University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica, 27 November 1999). For the sake of simplicity, the study views the collapse of the sector as commencing with the first in a series of bank failures, that is, with the collapse of the Blaise financial institutions in 1995, although it accepts that the roots of the collapse go back much further.
12. Paul Chen Young, "With All Good Intentions: The Collapse of Jamaica's Domestic Financial Sector," Papers on the Americas, 30, Study 12 (Washington, 1998), p. 1.
13. "FINSAC bill nears $130b," The Financial Gleaner (Friday, 25 August 2001), p. 3.
14. See Norman Girvan, "Jamaica: In Internal Debt Trap?" Symposium on the Crisis of the Jamiacan Financial Services Sector, University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica, 27 November 1999
15. "Domestic Debt Jumps Again," The Financial Gleaner (27 October 2000), p. 3.
16. "Nation Unites in Protest," The Financial Gleaner (Tuesday, 20 April 1999), p. A1-A3
17. "More Mayhem," The Financial Gleaner (Wednesday, 21 April 1999), p. A-1.
18. See, for example, Ministry of Finance and Planning, "Public Sector Response to the Problems of the Financial Sector," Ministry Paper 13/98 (8 April 1998)
19. "BOJ Governor Keynote Speaker at Jamaican Institute of Bankers Awards Luncheon," JIOB News (May 1999), pp. 1+6
20. Jason Abrahams, "The Need for Restructuring of the Jamaican Financial Architecture and the Way Forward," Symposium on the Crisis of the Jamaican Financial Services Sector, University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica, 27 November 1999
21. Greta Bogues, "Origins and Causes of the Banking Crisis," Symposium on the Crisis of the Jamaican Financial Services Sector
22. Dennis Boothe, "Case Study of Selected Financial Institutions," Symposium on the Crisis of the Jamaican Financial Services Sector
23. Claremont Kirton and Moya Leiba-Barnes, "Financial Sector Crisis in the 1990s: Macro-and Micro-Economic Roots," Symposium on the Crisis of the Jamaican Financial Services Sector
24. Wilberne Persaud, "Financial Sector Growth, Innovation and Crisis: The Links," Symposium on the Crisis of the Jamaican Financial Services Sector
25. Ministry of Finance and Planning, Ministry Paper 13/98, "Public Sector Responses to the Problems of the Financial Sector" (Kingston, Jamaica, 8 April 1998).
26. Subject A-1, personal interview, Kingston, Jamaica, 19 May 1999.
27. For example, Subject A-16, personal interview, Kingston, Jamaica, 30 July 1999. "Subject: That's what we need, one management information system. One loan system, one platform and we can't wait until [system name] gets on board so we can do all this."
28. For example, subject A-3, personal interview, Kingston, Jamaica, 20 May 1999, who asked, "As a manager sitting there looking at your management information systems and all the numbers and things for your IT systems, how do you get behind these numbers then as a manager and really get to the pulse of what is happening in your organization behind some of those soft issues?" Or, subject A-6, personal interview, Kingston, Jamaica, 6 June 1999, who said, "The whole idea of, my idea and philosophy of MIS is to [flatten] the organization chart so that there are... the reporting is simple to understand and that you shorten the lines of communication between the people who are dealing with the customers and the ultimate decision maker."
29. Subject A-1, personal interview, Kingston, Jamaica, 19 May 1999: "In terms of computerization of the accounts. I think, I am trying to break this down, in terms of different institutions. Each of them was computerized differently and someone like [name of bank] really had no computerization, a lot of it was manual. So if you had to get any information out, what would have to happen is that the information request had to go out to each of the branches. They would have collated the information manually; a time-consuming operation, then it would be collated and given to you. So that was the worst example in terms of [name of bank]. The other major problem affecting the institutions, even ones which were computerized, like [name of bank], was the actual quality of data... They had not got significant report-writing functionality within their management reporting tools. They could not get management data readily out. Management suffered with or just put up with what they actually had rather than actually demanding, 'this is the kind of data we wanted'." He later went on to discuss various templates that had been created to provide managers with information about profits and losses and other information required for monitoring and decision making.
30. For example, Australian archivists Frank Upward and Sue McKemmish Define the "Archival Document" (a term they use to refer to both records and archives) as follows: the archival document can be conceptualized as recorded information arising from transactions. It is created as a by-product of social and organizational activity in the course of transacting business of any kind, whether by governments, businesses, community organizations or private individuals. It is therefore defined by its contextuality and its transactionality. The documentation of transactions may be any storage media and is increasingly an electronic process.
31. See Sue McKemmish and Frank Upward, eds., Archival Documents: Providing Accountability Through Recordkeeping (Melbourne, 1993), p. 1.
32. Hilary Jenkinson, A Manual of Archive Administration, 2d ed. (London, 1965), pp. 2-6.
33. Frank Wood and Alan Sangster, Business Accounting I, 8th ed. (London, 1999), pp. 3-4.
34. See Use of the term in Wood, p. 148.
35. Preben Mortensen, "The Place of Theory in Archival Practice," Archivaria 47 (Spring 1999), p. 6.
36. Written documents came to be accepted as evidence before the courts with the first business records exception to the hearsay rule covering shop books of tradesmen. The hearsay rule came into being around 1500 as juries began to rely on the evidence presented by witnesses before them in court, rather than by going out and obtaining it themselves from an informed person, as had been the earlier practice. See John Henry Wigmore, A Treatise on the Anglo-American System of Evidence in Trials, 3d ed., vol. 5 (Boston, 1940), pp. 9-19+347-351+369-370.
37. This definition, taken from the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, University of British Columbia "Select List of Archival Terminology," neatly summarizes the Jenkinsonian perspective. It is cited in
38. Heather MacNeil, "The Context is All: Describing a Fonds and its Parts in Accordance with the Rules for Archival Description," in Terry Eastwood, ed., The Archival Fonds: From Theory to Practice (Ottawa, 1992), p. 202.
39. Jenkinson's ideas are elaborated in his book A Manual of Archive Administration, 2d ed. (London, 1965), pp. 2-6.
40. MacNeil, "The Context is All," pp. 200-201. (Emphasis added.)
41. John Roberts, "The Possibilities of Accountability," Accounting, Organizations and Society 16, no. 4 (1991), pp. 355-359.
42. A paper by Verne Harris that discusses the use of records as evidence in South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission is an interesting case in point. In this paper, Harris describes how South African courts overlooked the traditional rule against hearsay to allow for oral testimony in support of land claims as it was felt that the official records too greatly prejudiced the ruling elite. See Verne Harris, passim. fn. 33.
43. Roberts, p. 355.
44. Ibid., p. 359.
45. Joni J. Young, "Getting the Accounting 'Right': Accounting and the Savings and Loan Crisis," Accounting, Organizations and Society 20, no. 1 (1995), pp. 55-80.
46. Jenkinson, p. 4.
47. Luciana Duranti, "Diplomatics: New Uses for an Old Science (Part II)," Archivaria 29 (Winter 1989), pp. 6-9.
48. Mark Poster, "The Mode of Information and Postmodernity," in David Crowley and David Mitchell, eds., Communication Theory Today (Stanford, 1994), p. 174.
49. Tom Nesmith, "Still Fuzzy, But More Accurate: Some Thoughts on the 'Ghosts' of Archival Theory," Archivaria 47 (Spring 1999), p. 145.
50. Another leading proponent of this viewpoint is Verne Harris. See, for example, his book Exploring Archives: An Introduction to Archival Ideas and Practice in South Africa, 2d ed. (Pretoria, 2000), in which he writes that the meaning of the words archives and records is a site of contestation. His own understanding of the terms is heavily influenced by the writings of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, who see the archive as a construction expressing relations of power (see pp. 18-23).
51. See for example, "BOJ Governor Keynote Speaker at JIOB Awards Luncheon," JIOB News 2, no. 1 (May 1999), pp. 1+6 and subject B-1, personal interview, Kingston, Jamaica, 20 May 1999.
52. Subject A-1, personal interview, Kingston, Jamaica, 19 May 1999.
53. Subject B-1, personal interview, Kingston, Jamaica, 20 May 1999.
54. Omar Davies, "Introductory Statements," Symposium on the Crisis of the Jamaican Financial Services Sector, University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica, 27 November 1999.
55. Subject A-18, personal interview, Kingston, Jamaica, 3 August 1999.
56. Subject A-14, personal interview, Kingston, Jamaica, 22 July 1999.
57. Subject A-1, personal interview, Kingston, Jamaica, 19 May 1999.
58. Subject B-1, personal interview, Kingston, Jamaica, 20 May 1999.
59. Roy Radner, "Hierarchy: The Economics of Managing," Journal of Economic Literature 30 (September 1992), p. 1404.
60. M. Haralambos and M. Holborn, fn. 65.
61. Subject B-3, personal interview, Kingston, Jamaica, 25 June 1999
62. Subject B-6, personal interview, Kingston, Jamaica, 13 July 1999.
63. Subject C-5, personal interview, Kingston, Jamaica, 5 October 1999.
64. Subject A-13, personal interview, Kingston, Jamaica, 9 July 1999.
65. Laws of Jamaica, An Act to Amend the Evidence Act. L.N. 12-1995. I am only aware of one case, Zachary Sheriffe v. NCB, that focussed on the question of the admissibility of computergenerated evidence.
66. Brien Brothman, "Orders of Value: Probing the Theoretical Terms of Archival Practice," Archivaria 32 (Spring 1991), pp. 85+91.
67. Brien Brothman, "Declining Derrida: Integrity, Tensegrity, and the Preservation of Archives from Deconstruction," Archivaria 48 (Spring 1999), p. 70.
68. Ibid., p. 72.
69. Ibid., p. 70.
70. Subject A-7, personal interview, Kingston, Jamaica, 10 June 1999.
71. Subject A-16, personal interview, Kingston, Jamaica, 30 July 1999.
72. Site visit to Bank A, Conducted 6 July 1999
73. Subject A-12, personal interview, Kingston, Jamaica, 6 July 1999.
74. Subject C-4, personal interview, Kingston, Jamaica, 30 September 1999.
75. Subject A-7, personal interview, Kingston, Jamaica, 10 June 1999.
76. Subject C-5, personal interview, Kingston, Jamaica, 5 October 1999.
77. Subject A-12, personal interview, Kingston, Jamaica, 6 July 1999.
78. Subject A-2, personal interview, Kingston, Jamaica, 19 May 1999.
79. Subject A-1, personal interview, Kingston, Jamaica, 19 May 1999.
80. Subject A-10, personal interview, Kingston, Jamaica, 17 June 1999.
81. Subject A-2, personal interview, Kingston, Jamaica, 19 May 1999.
82. See Collins Dictionary of Sociology entry under "Social" and "culture" Collins Dictionary of Sociology, 2d ed. (Glasgow, 1995).
83. Quoted in M. Haralambos and M. Holborn, Sociology: Themes and Perspectives (London, 1996), pp. 887-888.
84. Harris, p. 22.
85. Eric Ketelaar, "Archivistics Research Saving the Profession," American Archivist 63, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2000), pp. 326-327.
86. Ketelaar calls for a study of what he terms "archivalization," that is, the processes leading to the choices involved in archiving. He writes: "People create, process, and use archives, influenced consciously or unconsciously by cultural and social factors. People working in different organizations create and use their records in different ways " (p. 329). He argues that archivists must come to understand these processes better.
87. Ien Ang, "In the Realm of Uncertainty: The Global Village and the Capitalist Postmodernity," in David Crowley and David Mitchell, eds., Communications Theory Today (Stanford, 1994).