Discussion of findings

The previous and current sections serve the purpose of ‘thickening’ this dissertation’s description of the working lives of the IC staff by introducing theories and concepts employed by other commentators. This discussion sets out to “plunge more deeply in to the same things” that others have discussed (Geertz, 1973: 25) from the author’s privileged position within the staff of the IC. It will be argued that however ‘expertise’ is conceived, the CiCS people appear to demonstrate it more compellingly than Library staff – an interpretation which is explained using various theories. The jurisdictional settlement in the IC is then described using Abbott’s framework that is detailed above.

5.1 Expertise in the Information Commons

The author interprets the findings from the IC as indicating considerable disparity between the levels of expertise demonstrated by the CiCS staff and the Library staff regardless of whether the psychological or sociological perspective is assumed. This interpretation will be illustrated by assuming both perspectives in turn, beginning with the psychological perspective.

When I asked the senior Library person for information about room bookings and she printed off the instructional email and then took me through each stage of the process, I was struck by how much effort was being expended for so trivial an enquiry indicating a lack of the first quality required of an expert when viewed from the psychological perspective – an above average ‘efficiency’ in performing tasks. The CiCS senior’s response was far more succinct in terms of time expenditure, thus demonstrating a more efficient use of knowledge. In the light of the second quality demanded of experts by the psychological perspective, the CiCS person who stated that he was “a Mac person”, clearly demonstrated knowledge of a subject-specific nature in a way that Library people do not seem able or willing to do. Even in positions where they do posses arcane, subject-specific knowledge, such as of the RFID return machines, the Library people seem keen to reduce this knowledge to its component parts, and thus render it accessible to everyone: the extremely detailed crib sheets for restarting the return machines could enable anyone to perform this fairly obscure task, meaning that what subject-specific knowledge the Library staff did posses has ceased to be possessed by them uniquely. Library staff and CiCS staff are equally experienced, with neither group having worked for substantially longer or in substantially more varied circumstances than the other group, and so in terms of the third quality demanded of experts by the psychological perspective, they should be evenly matched. However, the CiCS people seem more able or more willing to utilise this experience on an individual level: the juxtaposition of the Library person’s detailed crib sheet for the return machine restart, and the CiCS person insistence that “you won’t really need” crib sheets for software problem resolution, indicates that the CiCS people are willing to accept that there are some things that personal experience enables their staff to become proficient in, or expert at, whilst the library people are not willing to accept this. Thus, CiCS staff demonstrate more clearly the three qualities that the psychological perspective of expertise stipulates must be fulfilled if an individual is to be conferred the status of expert.

Assuming the sociological view of expertise, the preservation of the distinction between the level of knowledge displayed by the expert and by the layperson is more effectively undertaken by the CiCS people than by the Library people. The jokes that CiCS people tell about one another fulfil the function of an expertise conferring ritual. The jokes not only bind the CiCS people into a clearly defined and exclusive group, but they also give the CiCS people a chance to use words and phrases that are not understood by everyone who might overhear them. That the Library people appear to lack any comparable ritual means that they cannot compete with the CiCS people in terms of the effectiveness of their expertise performance. When the Library person wrote the extensive crib sheet for the return machine, they were effectively reducing the extent to which there is a distinction between themselves and the layperson (in this case, their colleagues). Equally, when the Library person invites the student around the counter to see how he got the information on when the other library sites were open, he was reducing his unique knowledge, or building up the layperson’s knowledge so that they ended up knowing comparable amounts, or at least it ended up appearing as if the Library person knew no more than the student. On the other hand, the CiCS person who ran through the instructions for connecting to the wireless network not only managed to preserve the appearance of a very clear distinction between what he knew and what the student knew, but he also went out of his way to make it clear that he knew more than the student by offering to “quickly run through the process”.

The disparity in the levels of expertise between CiCS and Library people discussed above can be explained using Abbott’s idea of attracting sympathy for methods in the public arena. Abbott argues that one of the principal sources of authority for a claim of jurisdiction by a profession is the “public arena” (Abbott, 1988: 60). With public acceptance of an occupational group’s jurisdiction over a particular task area, comes the “legitimate control of a particular kind of work” (Abbott, 1988: 60). Abbott identifies various methods through which an occupational group can secure this ‘legitimate control’ from the public arena including: through the mass media, through vocational guidance manuals and through the presentation of ‘heroic’ individuals in the media. As well as these, there are other more ‘local’ strategies that can be employed by occupational groups seeking dominance of a task area which have greater relevance to this dissertation. One method which CiCS staff can be seen to demonstrate involves emphasising the superiority of their own professional group. For example, when one CiCS person commentated on the “little kingdoms” that he had identified in CiCS, this was interpreted by the author as an outwardly critical comment, but one which actually served to make the CiCS organisation seem significant, complex and worthy of admiration. The Library people showed that they were not adept at presenting their organisation well in the public arena when one commented to another, “I bet nobody’s thought of that”. This not only homogenised the Library staff into a group with no boundaries of rank or responsibility, but showed that the Library staff felt contempt for their colleague’s strategic and problem solving abilities.

Another ‘local strategy’ that Abbott identifies as useful in a group’s attempt to dominate the public arena is to reveal some “professional terminology and insight” without allowing people outside your group to become too familiar with it (Abbott, 1988: 60). The CiCS people appear adept at this sophisticated balancing act. When the CiCS person ran through the process for connecting to the wireless network he did it in a way that revealed his own mastery of this process, but that left the student still unable to do it for himself. When the CiCS person identified himself as “a Mac person”, he demonstrated significant knowledge of the task area he worked in, and revealed the extent to which he was well suited to working in this area. These kinds of examples serve to convince the public that the CiCS people, or computer technicians more generally, are compellingly adept in this contested task area: the CiCS people have attacked the public’s “sympathy” for the methods they employ (Abbott, 1988: 60). This means that the public are more willing to look upon their approach to solving a problem as the most effective approach. The Library staff are not as successful in this aim because they manage to convert fairly complicated tasks into ones that can be achieved by anyone: the overly detailed response of the Library person when asked about the opening times of the other libraries is a good example of this phenomenon. Although the Library people are being helpful to the IC users they are also proving that they are not well suited to their role by convincing the public that their role could be performed by anyone, so everyone is well suited to their role.

If it is the case that the CiCS people have succeeded in making their methods the most attractive in the public arena, then they will be the most proficient group at presenting the image of being adept at a task, and so this can explain why, from the sociological perspective of expertise, CiCS will seem like the more expert group. The fact that they are the most proficient experts from the psychological perspective can also be explained using Abbott’s idea of success in the public arena. When an occupational group is successful in the public arena, then the public come to recognise that that group’s methods of “classifying a problem…reasoning about it and … [taking] action on it” are more successful than those of their competitors (Abbott, 1988: 40). Thus, the methods that CiCS employ in dealing with the tasks in the IC would seem more efficient than other methods used to solve these problems, and equally the knowledge that the CiCS people employ in solving these problems would seem to reveal a more admirable background of experience and subject-specific knowledge. Thus, a member of an occupational group that is successful in the public arena will appear to satisfy all the conditions required to be a proficient expert from the psychological perspective because all the usual measures of how to complete a task successfully will be defined by that occupational group. This is not an attempt to reduce the psychological perspective on expertise to the sociological perspective on expertise: there are still some qualities that an individual can either posses or not posses entirely independent of anyone else. But, these qualities can and do change as different occupational groups achieve control over jurisdictional areas in the public arena.

An alternative, although not contradictory, explanation of the fact that higher levels of expertise can be identified amongst CiCS staff than amongst Library staff can be found in Danner, 1998. Danner contrasts “expertise-centred” professions such as law or medicine, with librarianship as a “client-centred” profession (Danner, 1998: 352). An expertise-centred profession is one in which the professional’s superior knowledge and experience is taped by clients and only very rarely questioned. Thus, doctors often recommend methods of treatment that might contradict the wishes of their patients, or a lawyer might pursue a defence strategy that their client opposes (Danner, 1998: 352, footnote). A client-centred profession, on the other hand, would be concerned principally with “meeting the client’s needs as the client sees them” (Danner, 1998: 352), and not displaying levels of personal expertise, or making judgements about which would be the best course of action for clients. So, the Library person who reduced all his expertise to a set of remarkably simplistic instructions for restarting the self-return machine was satisfying the needs of even the most inexperienced of clients whilst preserving none of his superior experience or expertise. Equally, when the library person bored the student by taking him through the process of finding out when other library sites were open, the Library person showed a desire to meet all of the clients needs, including anticipated needs such as finding the information in the future, but also made his own expertise redundant since the student will no longer need to utilise the Library staff in the future. Thus, Danner’s point that Library staff are client-centred appears to explain why they demonstrate far lower levels of expertise in the IC than the CiCS staff.

Another alternative explanation for the Library staff’s apparent lack of desire to display their own expertise, can be drawn from the different organisational structures that have traditionally characterised libraries and computer service departments. It can be argued that libraries are organised according to what Weber would call a “bureaucratic” structure (Weber, 1968). Weber states that the way a “modern officialdom” functions is due to its bureaucratic structure (Weber, 1968: 956). In a bureaucratic organisation, all notions of seniority and rank are established by the strict hierarchy which stipulates “a clearly established system of super- and sub-ordination” (Weber, 1968: 957). If this idea is applied to the Library staff in the IC, then it becomes apparent that they would see their authority (amongst their colleagues, and over IC users) as derived from the structure of the organisation in which they work. Thus, they would not need to display great levels of expertise or exhibit their superior experience in order to be respected as authorities within the information service providing task area. This is in contrast to the CiCS people who come from a computer technician background, where, as Zabusky points out, staff belong to “horizontally structured occupational communities” (Zabusky, 1997: 129). These communities revolve around expertise rather than rank, and rather than those in superior positions being assumed to have greater ability, respect is exclusively derived from skill and expertise demonstrated in work. Thus, the CiCS staff are more concerned to show themselves to be expert to both their colleagues and IC users because their authority is not accepted to be derived from the simple fact of their rank within an organisation. Expertise is more important to CiCS people due to the horizontal structure of their organisational heritage, whereas the bureaucratic nature of library organisations appears to depreciate the importance of individual displays of expertise, meaning that less of these can be identified in the behaviour of Library staff in the IC.

To briefly summarise, it appears that CiCS staff more effectively exhibit expertise from both the psychological and the sociological perspectives. There are a number of complimentary explanations for this observation: that by attracting sympathy for its methods in the public arena, an occupation group automatically appears to exhibit more expertise from both perspectives; that librarianship is a client-centred profession that shies away from emphasising personal expertise; and that the traditional organisational structures of library staff and computer service staff appear to determine that the former believe that authority is derived from the position an individual holds within a hierarchy, whereas the latter believe that successful working practice revolves around group and individual displays of expertise and skill.

5.2 Settlement in the Information Commons

This section will explicate how the author interprets Abbott’s idea of ‘settlement’ as existing in the Information Commons. Abbott states that it is the aim of all occupational groups to have a “heartland of work over which it has complete…established control” (Abbott, 1988: 71). Since the IC is staffed by a mixture of both CiCS staff and Library staff, complete control of all the tasks conducted within the IC by one group is impossible. So, there must be some form of “limited settlement” (Abbott, 1988: 71) in place to delineate the jurisdictional areas of the two groups.

According to Abbott, one of the most common forms of settlement in a disputed task area is by “client differentiation” (Abbott, 1988: 77). This would involve the two occupational groups dividing a task area along the lines of the types of clients who might seek assistance within the task area. In successful examples of this type of settlement, both groups will secure jurisdictional control independent of the other and the conflict between the groups will be resolved fairly amicable. Abbott gives the example of lawyers in America: corporate lawyers deal with large corporations and very wealthy individuals, whilst other lawyers deal with “the mass of individuals” (Abbott, 1988: 77). In the IC, a settlement of this kind could be seen to have developed between CiCS and Library staff. When the CiCS person commented that he passes all book questions “straight over to a library person”, a clear division of labour along the lines of the nature of the client is taking place (with all clients needing book-related assistance being dealt with by library staff). However, the fact that the Library people rarely pass computer based queries immediately over to the CiCS people, and the fact that the CiCS people are also fairly disparaging about library tasks (as the “I’m not a librarian so why should I have to shelve books” comment indicates), means that ‘client differentiation’ is not the most fitting interpretation of the settlement present in the IC.

Another type of settlement that Abbott identifies involves the division of labour in a task area so that two occupational groups adopt interdependent roles (Abbott, 1988: 73-74). Abbott states that this sort of settlement commonly arises when one occupational group “finds its self increasingly relying on another’s advice” (Abbott, 1988: 73-74). It could be argued that such a situation arose with the wider convergence of library staff and computer technicians: the information that library people deal with became increasingly dependent upon computers (with the World Wide Web being arguably the most important source of information for many library users, and with library circulation systems being commonly supported on computers, to cite but two examples), and so library staff came to increasingly rely upon people who have expertise in dealing with computers for troubleshooting and development. Winter identifies a similar sort of settlement, and calls it “integration through interdependence” (Winter, 1996: 347). In the IC, the integrated CiCS and Library staff maintain quite independent identities (with the CiCS people eating their lunch at their desks, for example – a feature of many computer technicians’ routines that Zabusky identifies as a means of preserving their “separateness” (Zabusky, 1997: 140)), but are reliant on one another’s skills if the smooth running of the IC is to be maintained. Although the CiCS people are disparaging about the Library people’s book based tasks, these are essential to the IC, as the recruitment of six new shelvers after the opening of the IC indicates. Equally, that the Library people commonly attempt CiCS tasks but have to call in CiCS people to help them out, demonstrates that the Library staff rely on the CiCS people to a substantial degree. Winter sees this type of settlement as promoting “durable social bonds”, even between highly differentiated groups (Winter, 1996: 347), which could explain why I observed no real animosity between the two groups evident in the IC.

However, evidence can be found to suggest that, in fact, a third kind of settlement is actually present in the IC: the subordination of the Library people by the CiCS people. Abbott argues that when one occupational group suborns another, the former delegates “dangerously routine work” to the latter so as to preserve the dominant group’s status by making it the only group to deal with the more high profile and complex tasks (Abbott, 1988: 72). Thus, when the CiCS person said, “I’m not a librarian so why should I have to shelve books” he was implying that shelving is all librarians do in order to confer upon the Library people a subordinate status and make it clear that shelving is not a task that he has been trained for or would normally be involved with. When the CiCS person who did not work in the IC commented to his colleague who did, “how’s the shelving going?”, he was not only criticising his colleague’s new role but was also implying that the nature of library work was restricted to merely shelving. That a CiCS person who did not work in the IC was able and willing to make this joke suggests that the subordination of library staff is encouraged by CiCS people all across the University system, and only most clearly expresses its self in the IC.

The fact that the Library staff were not keen to pass over the CiCS queries to CiCS people suggests that the CiCS roles have gained a higher level of desirability, and so the Library people want to bolster their own undesirable roles by performing some of the CiCS roles. The CiCS people on the other hand are willing to admit that they cannot perform some of the Library tasks and that they “pass all book questions straight over to a Library person” because they have succeeded in casting the library tasks as undesirable and low status. When one occupational group seems to want to perform the tasks that its rival group is in control of, it is easy to draw the conclusion that the latter group is the group determining the perceptions of what tasks are desirable. In the light of this conclusion, the over-elaborate assistance that the Library person offered to the student who wanted to find out which other Library sites were open, can be interpreted as signalling the degree to which the Library person wanted to demonstrate the importance of the non-book based task area that is traditionally the domain of librarians: sourcing information for library users. That Library staff seem so keen to make much of this task area indicates the extent to which other library tasks have become less desirable due to the what can be interpreted as the CiCS staffs’ successful subordination of library staff by abstracting their task area and making library roles seem low status and undesirable.

And yet, Abbott admits that the work of the subordinate group is “absolutely necessary to successful practice by superordinates” (Abbott, 1988: 72). Thus, perhaps the most sensible way to characterise the settlement in the IC is as a hybrid of the ‘subordination’ style settlement which explains why the Library staff are so keen to perform CiCS roles, and the ‘interdependent’ settlement that Winter suggests leads to social harmony and mutual reliance in task areas. Although it would be wrong-headed to suggest that the tasks performed in the IC are all afforded equal status and respect (the findings of this dissertation almost precisely contradict this), it would also be unfair to suggest that the Library people are genuinely viewed or used as menial and undeserving of esteem. The library tasks play an important role in the IC, but it happens that these tasks are typically less sought after, by everyone who deals with them, than the more computer oriented roles. This is a situation that is far less confrontational than the one that Danner suggests librarians and information technologists exist under (Danner, 1998: 324), and need not cause problems for the staff of the IC. In time, this settlement might even result in the differences between the groups becoming an irrelevance.

This discussion of ethnographic observation from the Information Commons has examined several important findings. It appears that the CiCS staff display greater levels of expertise than the Library staff, and it was suggested that this could be because the CiCS staff seem to have succeeded in attracting more sympathy for their methods in solving problems in the IC than the Library people. An additional explanation used the idea that librarianship is a ‘client-centred’ profession to explain why the Library staff were unwilling to display high levels of expertise. These two explanations were complimented by a third which suggested that the CiCS people seemed to display greater levels of expertise because they came from a ‘horizontally’ structured organisation, meaning that they worked on the principle that individual displays of expertise were important for the success of the whole group, whereas the Library staff came from a ‘bureaucratic’ organisation in which rank determines authority, so there was no real need to display individual experience or expertise. The discussion then characterised the jurisdictional settlement in the IC as partly the subordination of the Library staff by the CiCS staff due to their successful attempts to characterise the library tasks as low status, but also, importantly, as a settlement of interdependence in which the CiCS and Library staff had to make use of one another’s skills and task areas in the successful running of a busy customer service.