Document Acts as Organizational Architecture
The Core Idea
The documents an organization produces and uses don’t just describe the organization, they constitute it. The corpus of contracts, policies, charters, and records is the organizational architecture in a way that the physical building never could be.
Why This Matters
In small communities, promises can be maintained through speech and memory. A handshake agreement works when everyone knows everyone.
Organizations at scale face a different problem. Commitments must persist beyond any individual’s tenure or memory. The solution: documents that create temporal extension for organizational commitments.
When a director signs a memorandum authorizing a hire, three things happen simultaneously:
- A document act occurs (the signing)
- A social entity is created (the authorization)
- The authorization becomes persistent and referenceable: it can be cited, appealed, revoked
This is why the pattern “nothing social exists outside the text” has explanatory power. Organizations that don’t document decisions don’t really make decisions in any durable sense.
How It Works
Document acts extend Reinach’s social acts and Austin/Searle’s speech acts:
Social acts require perception by another, a promise must be heard to be made.
Speech acts perform actions through language (“I promise to pay you tomorrow” is the act of promising, not a description of an intention.
Document acts provide what speech acts lack: persistence. The signed contract survives the conversation that produced it. It can be:
- Archived and retrieved
- Modified and versioned
- Transferred between parties
- Revoked by subsequent acts
The D-Acts Ontology formalizes this with three operations:
- Create: a document act brings a new social entity into being (claiming land)
- Transfer: a document act moves a social entity between bearers (selling property)
- Revoke: a document act ends a social entity (divorce papers)
Implications for Knowledge Systems
You can identify organizations by their document types. A hospital produces medical records. A law firm produces contracts and filings. A university produces transcripts and degrees. The distinctive documents reveal the distinctive social entities each organization creates.
Information architecture for organizations is fundamentally about document architecture. The structure of documents, what they contain, who can create them, how they flow, determines the structure of organizational reality.
Organizational knowledge management is document management, reconceived. It’s not about storing files. It’s about managing the acts that create, transfer, and revoke organizational commitments.
Related Patterns
This connects to why workflow systems and policy engines matter more than they might seem. They’re not just automation, they’re the machinery by which document acts occur at scale.
It also explains why organizational memory is so fragile when it depends on informal knowledge. Speech acts don’t persist. Without documentation, the organizational reality they created disappears when people leave.
Related: 02-molecule—two-dimensional-organizational-analysis, 06-molecule—tacit-vs-explicit-knowledge