The Myth of the Paperless Office

This accessible and well researched work explores what happened to the much heralded concept of the “paperless office”. In the 1970s it was widely accepted that the advent of the information age and widespread use of computers would mean the end of paperwork. The authors date the notion of a paperless office as far back as 1800 with Samuel Morse and the telegraph. In reality, the use of e‐mail in offices actually increases paper use by as much as 40 per cent and the worldwide production of paper is greater than ever. This book attempts to ascertain the organisational and psychological reasons for the survival of paper‐based work.

The Introduction explores changes in office technology and paper use. The new technologies have so far failed to have their predicted effect on paper consumption. This is due to two particular trends. First, the access to massive amounts of information has led to a tendency to print this out to make sense of it all. A second trend has been advances in print technology, with cheaper printing costs, while we also tend to distribute documents and then print them off. The book aims to explore the use of paper to gain insights into our understanding of work, documentation and new technologies.

The second chapter argues that there are three distinct problems with paper: symbolic problems, cost problems and interactional problems. But these difficulties are often intertwined with other problems, such as work practices and organisational value systems, i.e. the problem of paper can get mistaken for the problem of inefficient work practices. Paper can seem like a symbol of old fashioned ideas. Case studies are examined to illustrate many of the arguments.

A further chapter explores the use of paper in knowledge work. The authors’ research includes the case study of the International Monetary Fund. The authors conclude that paper is still used alongside electronic documentation because of its functionality for the individual worker and not because of any employee or organisational reticence. The authors actually found that that those involved in deep knowledge work were the employers with the most paperwork on their desks. And yet new technologies are generally ubiquitous.

Part of the problem has been reading from a screen as opposed to paper. There are psychological reasons for liking paper more than electronic information – we can flexibly navigate through documents, we can annotate documents easily on paper, paper facilitates the cross referencing of documents and it also allows us to interweave reading and writing (all of which, of course, can be done on computer screens). This chapter explores the taxonomy of work‐related reading. Paper is quite simply the medium of choice for reading.

The role of documentation in how people work together is discussed, especially the sharing of information and individual needs. Using case studies, the researchers show that neither paper nor digital means could provide the perfect solution for all the interconnecting tasks of many workplaces and jobs. All the case studies show that the role of paper is much more interwoven with work than first might appear. There is a need for organisations to realise that attempts to move away from paper are very complex.

The first five chapters focus on the positive aspects of maintaining paper in the office. The chapter on designing new technologies tries to look more harshly at paper, but concludes that even technologically‐advanced companies need to understand the role of paper before attempting to do away with it, and that ultimately an efficient workplace may need to retain some paper‐based documentation.

The book concludes that we need to dispel the myth that there are always benefits to going paperless and focus on managing expectations. There is a need to understand the broader picture of how offices and individual people work. Paper manufacturers do not need to fear as paper consumption will not diminish in the near future. The future office will probably be one where we keep less paper, rather than use less. The idea of a paperless office was a myth 30 years ago, and probably still is.

The Myth of the Paperless Office has a good further reading section and is adequately indexed.

Although the book is well written and of general interest, it does throw up a few problems. There is, of course, the delicious irony of the book being in print format. More serious is who this book is aimed at, as the authors do not clearly state this. It is certainly an interesting subject and will perhaps be of use to students doing projects in business and information management. Chief executives or senior management of some major organisations might find it useful, but it is unlikely to tell them much that is new. The book would seem to be of most interest to the general reader with an interest in work culture.

When reading this work I could not shake off the feeling that the authors were using their research to back up their belief that printing electronic documents on paper was a good thing. This may or may not be a fair view, but it should be noted that Abigail Sellen works at Hewlett Packard and there is a clear acknowledgement that the institution that played the largest part in this work was Xerox – both companies obviously heavily depend on printing paper documents.

There is very little mention of the environmental considerations of the amount of paper used in the workplace. The words environment, conservation and even recycling do not appear in the index. Nor does the word photocopying, which seems extraordinary in a book about paper use in the office (Copiers: reduced demand for, has one page reference).

While the case studies and research have obviously been carefully analysed, I put this book down after reading it with the feeling that I had learned little new and that the conclusions about paper use in the organisation were glaringly obvious and self evident in many cases.