Conclusions

7.1 Survey of the present study

This dissertation was motivated by a lack of ethnographic studies of converged services, and by the author’s own experiences of differences between the library and computer service staff in the Information Commons. In addition to the fact that they have not been applied to this topic area very often, ethnographic methods were also selected because this study required the use a research method which allowed the author to be a member of the group to be examined, and crucially, because an unobtrusive method was required which would allow for the examination of the work that was actually done by IC staff – this study could not divorce the participants from the context within which they worked.

Ethnography is a method which assumes the existence of a world of constructed social facts that are different for different people. High emphasis is placed upon the author’s ability and tendency to reinterpret these interpretations, so the fieldwork stage of all ethnographies involves the author’s immersion in the world of the group to be studied. The author of this dissertation spent three days observing those at work in the IC, recoding notes whenever possible. The findings were transcribed into several categories that provoked research into relevant areas of theoretical literature, and as the most fertile areas of literature presented themselves, so the findings were re-transcribed with these areas of literature as a guide to their contents. Expertise and Abbott’s idea of ‘jurisdictional settlement’ were eventually settled upon as the basis of the discussion section – in which the theoretical literature and the findings from the IC were brought together for analysis.


The author’s final interpretation of the findings from the IC was that CiCS staff demonstrate higher levels of expertise from both the positivist ‘psychological perspective’ and from the interpretive ‘sociological perspective’. To explain this interpretation, it was argued that CiCS staff had attracted more sympathy for their methods of problem solving in the ‘public arena’ (Abbott, 1988), which meant that they were able to perform better as experts, and were able to redefine the qualities required to be an expert according to their own strengths. Alternative but complimentary explanations were that librarianship is a ‘client-centred’ profession (Danner, 1998) and so the Library staff were not willing to emphasise their own cache of knowledge and thus could not effectively present themselves experts. In addition, it was argued that computer service staff do not share the ‘bureaucratic’ (Weber, 1968) structure of libraries, and it is an individual’s skill and talent which defines their position within an organisation (Zabusky, 1997) rather than their rank or grade in the hierarchy – so Library staff do not perform as experts because authority is granted by rank alone, whereas the individual skills of a computer technician are important enough to make them want to perform well as experts.

The settlement in the Information Commons was interpreted by the author as being one in which the Library staff were suborned by the CiCS staff, because CiCS’ tasks appear to be coveted by Library staff, whilst library tasks appear have been successfully characterised as low status and undesirable by CiCS staff. However, the high level of interdependence between these groups is emphasised, and the largely harmonious relationship that exists between CiCS and Library staff is maintained and fuelled by this interdependence.

All the stages of an ethnography are thoroughly holistic and so separating them into the sections that are required for the writing of a dissertation distributes ideas and means a less ‘thick’ analysis is possible in any one section: the findings themselves, the review of theoretical literature and the analysis of the findings using the theoretical literature should all ideally be integrated and read as a coherent whole. It was also argued that the time constraints under which this dissertation had to be completed partially compromised the attempt at a full ethnography. However, this dissertation did succeed in conducting a proximate study of the work of library and computer service staff in a converged service, which maintained the required level of honesty as to the role played by the author’s interpretation of events, and thus, an honest and sound ethnography can be said to have been conducted. The overall findings were tangible and interesting, and added layers of detail and understanding to the theoretical constructs that they relied upon. So, despite the structural and temporal constraints of this study, ethnographic methods were employed with success.

7.2 Recommendations for future research

There is considerable scope for ‘thickening’ the current analysis using the theoretical frameworks already introduced. In addition to the models of ‘settlement’ that he describes, Abbott gives a far more detailed account of the various ways in which jurisdictional struggles progress at a workplace level (Abbott, 1988: 65-69) than there was space for in this dissertation. An interesting study could be developed to ethnographically depict the mechanisms used by competing occupational groups in a jurisdictional struggle, and much of the ethnographic material collected in the current dissertation would be relevant. With a longer term study, the relationships that develop between the IC staff, and between the IC staff and their tasks could be more fully explored, and some sense of the non-static nature of workplace settlements could be captured.

Other interesting studies could use ethnographic methods to explore the impact of belonging to a converged service on the images that library and computer service staff hold of themselves, and of their colleagues. Are library staff thought of more or less like the paradigm maintaining, bureaucratically rigid, ‘custodian of discourse’ that they are sometimes characterised as (Radford and Radford, 2001) once they are brought to work more closely with other, newer professions? Equally, do computer service technicians continue to think of themselves as ‘outsiders’ (Zabusky, 1997) in a task area where they appear (on the basis of this dissertation’s findings) to be the ascendant group? The perception of professional identity is an issue of particular relevance in converged services and an ethnographic approach could prove particularly fruitful in investigating it. Ethnography posses a unique power to explore issues of perception and self-perception, and studies of converged services from this perspective would be original and valuable.

7.3 Final Remarks

This dissertation concludes that library and computer service technicians display expertise to significantly different levels. In the Information Commons, the settlement of jurisdiction is interpreted to involve the subordination of Library staff by CiCS staff, although widely recognised interdependence exists between these groups. The ethnography detailed in this study did, therefore, succeed in delivering results that are original and of interest. It is fitting to finish with the deeply interpretive statement that ethnography embraces the inherent and defining complexity of social situations, and can offer researchers who use it a profound insight into the social world. The significant difficulty in producing successful ethnographies is comprehensively balanced by the value of this insight.