Archival Brinkmanship: Downsizing, Outsourcing, and the Records of Corporate America

Mergers, restructurings, and consolidations have always been part of American business. There has never been a time since the rise of the modern corporation when companies have not bought other companies, restructured their operations, entered new businesses, and consolidated, sold, or spun off operations. In addition to these realities, the terms downsizing and outsourcing—and all that they portend for employees—have become bywords as business—and not only business—seeks to wring more productivity from the workforce. These trends have inevitably affected corporate records. Archives and records management units have been closed and records destroyed or transferred to warehouses, while the rate of establishment and growth of in-house corporate archives has diminished greatly. If one believes that the records of business are an integral part of American history, and that the place of corporations in that history needs to be documented and accessible, then the fate of those business records and the archives themselves is a matter of some importance. This essay explores the progression of events in the past twenty years, and reviews both the expected and the unexpected results that downsizing and outsourcing have actually produced for archives.