ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights how documents represent an attractive ability to transform diffuse activities and responsibilities within people-processing organizations into tangible “things.” Engagement in expanding documentation is fueled by the vital properties—even magical ones—that people today attach to textualizations and paperwork. We use several instances in our data to show how people get a sense of ordering the social world by documenting it carefully, and we draw on Marcel Mauss’ classic conception of magic. Documentary magic can be vital to the prosperity of a human services organization when rankings direct clients, patients, or customers to “the best” places and the methods “that works.” One example concerns fieldworkers in social work who were instructed to log every conversation they had with young people in the streets during their shifts and to classify the type of conversation. Another example concerns the so-called SIP in Sweden—a Coordinated Individual Plan for clients that is supposed to promote collaboration between authorities and professionals—and how it is producing an astonishing amount of documentary activities and magical thinking. This chapter discusses how reification processes grant considerable power to documents, and thereby stimulate the Eigendynamik of today’s administration society.
