Japan Socilogical Society 2010 Fujiyoshi

The archive is a body of records and documents created and accumulated in business processes of any, public or private, organization and a preservation warehouse for it. Keeping records ~~are~~ is indispensable to internal and external control of organizations.　Many countries have seen more and more scandals regarding public and private record keeping and management such as the large-scale illegality of public pension registry in Japan.　These events are sometimes discussed in terms of ‘accountability’ and in the private sector also, organizations and companies are urged to keep their records for their ‘stakeholders’ to check their activities.　These events and trends lead to the approval of ‘Public Record Act’ at the National Diet of Japan, in June 2009.

　　　It is common to see the negative aspect of record keeping, manipulation or destruction, but record keeping and archives have many significant aspects to be studied from the sociological point of view.　They are classified in four level as follows:

1) Governance by record management: Keeping records as the evidence of business processes may have some effects on the job style of staff. They may feel themselves under surveillance by ‘stakeholders’ and posterity.　This kind of consciousness can have an influence on them.

2) Knowledge Management: Keeping records as archives may have some effect on the knowledge management of organizations.　The style to make use of records as an material for planning and decision making may have some variety by organizations.

3) Civil society and archives: Accountability of the government may be maintained by keeping records.　It can be said that the right to know is ensured by archives that keep government’s records accessible to people.　Archives are, from this standpoint, indispensable to democratic civil societies.

4) Social integration or collective identity and archives: Archives may have some contribution to building the communal or national identity.　Archives, however, may be perverted by the Government’s for some kinds of propaganda.　How to keep archives under the people’s control is important but difficult, especially in the nation that experiences internal conflicts.

　　　Archives will provide some materials for sociological study and the internet must be added.　Digital network makes it easy to access more and more records of　organizations all over the world, public or private.　We are looking forward to fruitful discussion under the theme ‘record keeping, archives and civil society.’

　　　All papers and abstracts shall be provided in English.　We welcome any paper dealing with the theme.　We also welcome graduate students who are interested in or working on this subject and are planning to present their papers at international conferences of any kind in the near future.