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Using Heider’S Epistemology Of Thing And Medium For Unpacking The Conception Of Documents: Gantt Charts And Boundary Objects, Sebastian K. Boell, Florian Hoof

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Documents play a central role for many organizational processes. Current conceptualizations of documents predominantly engage with documents in two different ways. One sees documents as things with specific properties, and a second sees documents as medium enabling communication across different groups of actors. What is currently not well understood is how documents are perceived either as thing or as medium. This chapter engages with this issue by drawing from Fritz Heider’s epistemology of thing and medium, a concept stemming from social and media theory. According to Heider things are uniform and medium are multiform. Applying this concept to documents we …