Destruction of Documents: Erasure and Accountability in the Administrative State

How deleted or destroyed paperwork impacts organizational capacity and memory—and allows power to evade accountability.

Administrative documents mediate bureaucracies and trust in them, making organizational life possible. In Destruction of Documents, Andrew Whelan argues that the politics of paperwork are most explicit when the paper trail is deleted, burned, shredded or otherwise done away with.

Exploring how irreconcilable administrative ideals have been understood across historical and cu...