Informal Communication and Information‐Management*

Abstract

Cet essai concerne un des aspects de la gestion de l'information, c'est‐a‐dire la transmission des messages informels. Une analyse descriptive du village ou nous avons effectue notre terrain dans les annees 50 indique comment le besoin de meme que les problemes de la communication informelle sont accentues par le developpement et l'innovation institutionnels. Nous aimerions toutefois souligner le caractere preliminaire du schema theorique et des conclusions de cette analyse: il serait necessaire de les mettre a nouveau a l'epreuve dans des situations comparables afin de les am61iorer. Comme c'est souvent le cas en anthropologic, les donnees recoltees sur le terrain ont servi de fondement aux idees que nous avancerons ici. Mais les conceptions ont ete elaborees d'une maniere systematique quelques annees apres l'etude sur le terrain. II se peut alors qu'a certains endroits les interpretations depassent les faits bruts. This essay is about one of the rudiments of information‐management, that of the transmission of informal messages. A descriptive analysis from the village where I did field work in the 50s shows how both the need and problems of informal communication are exacerbated by institutional development and innovation. I would stress the exploratory and tentative character of the general scheme and the few conclusions of this analysis ‐ they certainly stand in need of further testing and refinement, particularly of a comparative kind. As tends to be the way of the anthropologist's progress, data collected in the field seeded the ideas expressed here, but it was not until some time after the field work that these ideas were formulated at all systematically, and so in places they may outdistance the data.

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