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People want paper to record facts, to pass on knowledge, to entertain or think through new ideas individually or in teams. To be human is to be a thinking animal - and with paper we can remember and think a bit better.
Recording and summarising facts is the the basis of administration - known derogatively as paperwork - because for a long time that was the dominant way to do it.
Administration can be done several ways -
Pre-industrial societies can largely avoid it - people stay in a community where they are known and live hand to mouth. Landowners might use book keeping for rents and tithes. Merchants and gentlemen had clerks looking after accounts.
Human effort with paper records. Sorting, searching and arithmetic on ledger columns and index cards. Writing has always had several roles - entertainment, historical record and accountancy for instance. Writing in modern form - handrwitten or printed on paper - dates back hundreds of years.
Punch cards and tabulators - mechanical information processing were invented around 1890. Punch cards have lots of advantages - they can be sorted searched and copied by machine. The paper record retains a form humans can understand - they can often read what the record says because it can be printed on the card. However the cards and machinery to handle them are bulky and expensive so they had limited use.
Computers - hardware of processors, disks and networks - software of operating systems, protocols and applications became possible from 1945. Computers are general purpose machines so they can be used for art, amusement and education as well as scientific calculation and administration. Early computers used thousands of components restricting them to much the same role as punch cards. During the 1970s it became clear that, despite their complexity, computers could be made very cheaply if there was a demand. During the 1980s and '90s it turned out there was a demand so people built networks of computers - almost to the point where they are ubiquitous
Paperwork poses problems; it always has. Writing is slow - and if it is to be neat and easily read slower still. Searching for a specific bit of information requires scanning or an index - which is more work and slows things still further. Copying on a large scale uses a printing press but before the invention of carbon-paper the kind of small scale copying wanted for administration was scarcely possible. The cost of paperwork can be huge: most workers do some and a third of workers do nothing else.
A progression
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Paperwork tends to be treated as an unfortunate byproduct of other activities. Farmers, factory managers, doctors, policemen, salesmen and teachers groan about paperwork. Pen-pushers are often seen as enemies of creativity and productivity.
It isn't actually quite so clear that paperwork is just an unfortunate byproduct of affluence. Paperwork could be seen as it's cause - and not just in the commonly accepted sense that printing + literacy = industrialisation.
The exchange of letters between the "Lunar Men" (Boulton, Watt, Wedgewood, Darwin, Priestley etc ) is one of the foundations of Britains scientific and industrial revolution. Growth and exchange of knowledge, "technical progress" is a widely accepted mechanism for economic growth. 
In Newcastle the Literary & Philosophical Society served along the same lines - it is still the largest independent library outside London, with over 150,000 books. 
Paperwork & Growth
Paperwork is less commonly thought of as the engine of growth. But consider this tale of early salesmen:
"Years ago, peddlers scribbled customer information notes on 3 x 5 cards and filed them alphabetically by customer name in a shoebox. Every purchase was recorded, including the data, the product, the price, personal details to trigger future sales, gossip picked up from neighbours ... Before a sales call was made, the card was consulted and the intuitive knowledge brought top of mind for the crafty peddler. Children's names, color preferences, birthdays, returns, income and all manner of useful information ... "
"Now, it should be recognized that not every peddler used the shoebox method; only a few mastered this technology. The rest proceeded from place to place guided by the seat of their pants, relying on serendipity or luck. But the shoebox peddlers were succesful where others failed. They employed knowledge rather than charm, and knowledge always wins. ..."
Libey.com's website has this story to illustrate the simplicity and importance of databases in making sales. Peddler's did keep records and a shoebox might have made sense in an American covered wagon. 
Early Manufacturers
Paperwork is an essential underpinning of industry. The earliest factories were primarily dominated by their owners big personalities and personal contacts - but backed by paperwork. Historys of manufacturing tend to focus on the personalities and machines rather than the administration. Portraits and museum pieces tend to be on show today whilst the accounts and ecord cards are lost of buried in archives. This might blind us to how important the paperwork was.
Wedgewood's innovative "Etruria" works and Matthew Boulton's great Soho Manufactory both relied on administration. Wedgewood applied scientific principles - according to Jenny Uglow:
"Accounting, 'calculating' - the weighing and measuring to judge esults accurately that proved so central to the new science - were now applied to industry. Wedgewood became puzzled that although he was selling so much and his turnover was high, he was short of money. 'How do you think, My dear Friend,' he asked Bentley in 1771, 'it happens that I am so very poor, or at least, so very needy as I am at the present time, when it appears by my accounts that I clear enough money by the business to do almost anything with.' He discovered that part of the problem was the great amount of cash tied up in expenses and unsold stock, but also that the prices of his ornamental work were completely unrelated to the cost of manufacture. In response he made a pioneering analysis of his costs of production. He drew up his 'price book of workmanship', costing every stage carefully, from raw material to the shop counter. Then he set about increasing production runs and lowering manufacturing costs and therefore prices."
Wedgewood had to explain to his workers that by making the greatest quantity possible in a given time the cost of articles could be educed. With lower prices he could sell to 'the middling people' so pay per piece may fall but overall wages would rise. As Uglow says "Pragmatic capitalism had arrived in the potteries".
Wedgewood's accountancy is not merely something that helps the industrial evolution - it is a causal factor, ushering in the age of mass production and consumption.
Matthew Boulton's accounting seems to have been less scrupulous but no less productive:
"Boulton was always impulsive, never costing products properly, balancing debts, swapping money around and sacrificing profits to prestige so chaotically that he faced disaster more than once. Yet he was canny; although terms were clearly agreed, non of his partnerships (there were thirteen by the time he died) had a formal contract, which meant that if his partner went bankrupt he stayed in the clear. He looked slapdash, but his spreading of interests reduced costs; he thrived on the adrenalin surge of risk." (Uglow)
Boulton's success seems to have come from:
| use of labour saving devices with interchangeable components where possible | |
| bringing trades under one roof - each tradesman had been a separate business | |
| organising things so there was some progression of orders through the system - although it fell far short of a production line |
Things were still at a small scale, Boulton "made a point of knowing all his workforce by name".
Soho's cash books survive and show people earning good wages. Work was fairly secure, Another innovation was the Soho insurance club, which took contributions of 1/60th of workers wages but paid out benefits up to 80% of wages to people who were sick or injured. Insurance was to become an important aspect of administration.
Uglow says:
"The combination of machines, cost accounting and paternalist discipline was something Boulton and Wedgewood shared with other leading manuifacturers, a model for the century ahead. Factories run on these lines improved living standards for many, but they also restricted their movements and deprived them of their independence. Workers were left open to exploitation by unscrupulous masters, while repetitive work, as Adam Smith foretold, ran the danger of reducing minds to 'hands'. In later years, James Watt would declare that compared to the inventors, most workers should be considered 'as mere acting mechanical powers ... it is scarcely necessary that they should use their reason.'"
In later years, Wedgewood introduced a checking in system, where workers left name cards at the gate, and even a primitive timeclock, based on a design by Whitehurst.
Both Wedgewood and Boulton created and printed catalogs and price lists.
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A step-change in the volume of administration occurs in the mid 19th century. Martin Campbell-Kelly in "Information Processing in the 19th Century" puts it down to mobility and affluence:
" ... instead of an affluent upper class and an impoverished working class, you had a relatively prosperous working class. There were suddenly millions of consumers. They hadn't got very much money, but they were mobile ... Previously people only ever had just enough to live on. Now suddenly they were saving for bank holidays and furniture. So now you needed clearing banks for the cheap consumer goods that they were buying, and credit enforcing agencies. People were also being encouraged to save, and there emerged the Thrift Movement, savings banks, life insurance, and the whole idea of registration to keep tabs on this newly mobile population. The common theme that connects all these activities is the processing of millions and millions of transactions in a way that never happened before." 
So the insurance office of the 1820s typically had less than a dozen clerks, all multi-skilled and multi-talented dealing with a gentleman's single annual premium payment of £5.
The insurance office of 1880 had more than 200 clerks organised into narrow specialities and dealing with thousands of ordinary people's premiums of one or two pence per week. Much more money in total - but a lot more administration.
Railways also generated administrative problems - schedualing, tracking olling stock and charging for freight for instance. NewYork Central Railroad processed over 4 million freight waybills per year and finally bought the first Hollertith machine to help cope.
Urbanisation and industrialisation also created new demands on government. Village life might be self regulating but urban life creates needs for utilities, education, regulations and policing. Even taking a census is a major undertaking. Martin Campbell-Kelly says:
"The Census Office was used to create an age profile of the population. You can imagine all kinds of planning activities that needed to know that."
"The GRO had one set of clerks, called abstracting clerks, who took the census forms and recorded all the data. They calculated totals as well. The clerks created a sheet of paper for each district, and as there were several thousand districts in the UK, you got several thousand sheets of paper that another group of clerks then had to deal with. It cascaded down through three levels of data concentration in order to generate the final tabulation. It was an entirely manual system."
Headcounts are an important start to public administration
Joseph Bazalgette