Recordkeeping Practices of Grassroots Community Organizations: Exploring the Potential Application of Push-Pull-Mooring Theory

Across the world, grassroots community organizations contribute to local socioeconomic development and community empowerment. Most of these grassroots community organizations initially start as informal groups autonomously formed by like-minded members of the community or shaped due to the influence of external agencies like large non-government organizations in the development sector. Different factors, notably the vision of leaders, desire for sustaining long-term operations, and financial gains, often influence these entities to embrace the formal shape of an organization. Owing to this transition from informality to formality, grassroots community organizations also have to change their approach to recordkeeping practices from reactive to proactive ones. Although the recordkeeping literature has a strong focus on organizational practices, the literature hardly looked at the specific case of grassroots community organizations. The literature did not investigate the influencing factors that reshape the recordkeeping practices of grassroots community organizations. In this regard, the push-pull-mooring theory adopted initially by scholars in migration studies has the potential to be applied to grassroots community organizations’ recordkeeping practices to explain the influencing factors. Considering this, we aim to explore the potential application of the push-pull-mooring theory in the context of the transitional recordkeeping practices of grassroots community organizations.