Theoretical literature

Having categorised the findings in the initial stages of the write-up, the author began to collect literature relevant to these categories. The areas of literature that proved most fertile were those that discuss the jurisdiction of professions using Andrew Abbott’s model, and the literature on expertise. This review will survey the parts of these literatures that are most relevant to this study and which will then be discussed in the context of the Findings in the section following this one. However, firstly it is important to briefly cover the literature that focuses on the distinguishing features of computer technicians in the workplace.

4.1 Computer technicians in the workplace

Zabusky (1997) characterises computer technicians as being confronted by “ambiguities of membership and status” (Zabusky, 1997: 150). Zabusky states that unlike their colleague departments, computer technicians perform “horizontally organised work” (Zabusky, 1997: 130). Other occupations are organised vertically, with the status of people in these professions being decided by the position that they occupy in the clearly and strictly delineated hierarchy of the organisation. Zabusky believes that in the horizontal structures that computer technicians occupy, “collaboration rather than command” is the key to success (Zabusky, 1997: 130). Technicians work on the basis that their position within the organisation is derived from their personal skill and expertise, and the fact that this contrasts so deeply with the vertical, bureaucratic organisation common amongst other occupational groups, means that the technicians form very distinct groups. This “conflict of belonging” (Zabusky, 1997: 350) is reinforced by the fact that technicians can be seen as “brokers” (Zabusky, 1997: 131). Brokers are workers who must be “simultaneously oriented in two directions”: towards the needs and requirements of the organisation in which they work, but also towards the developments and expertise of the technical community that forms the occupational group from which they are drawn (Zabusky, 1997: 131-132). This fact causes computer technicians to regard their careers as not linked to their organisations, “but instead linked to an occupation” (Zabusky, 1997: 139). Thus, Zabusky argues that technicians are distinguished from their colleagues in many organisations, not only by the way in which they ascribe status, but also because as an occupational group, their sense of belonging is very differently calibrated.

Several commentators arrive at Zabusky’s conclusion about the identifying characteristics of computer technicians, but fail to give as penetrating an analysis as she does. McCombs (1998) comments on the feelings of isolation that are experienced by computer technicians, but explains this phenomena using far narrower insight than Zabusky. According to McCombs, computer technicians have lost influence as their skills have literally been distributed: the rise in micro-computing has created clients who are no longer dependent on mainframe-programmers to the same extent (McCombs, 1998: 687-688). Garten and Williams discuss “what fundamentally separates” library staff and computer service staff (Garten and Williams, 2000: 61). They state that computer technicians commonly identify with “off-campus people” working in business or industry, thus setting them apart from their on-campus colleagues (Garten and Williams, 2000: 66). Rossman and Rossman (2005) also mention that computer service technicians are more “socially reserved” than their colleagues (Rossman and Rossman, 2005: 2).

The reason why these commentaries are less compelling than Zabusky’s, can perhaps be drawn from Barley, 1996. Barley states that images of occupational groups are forged out of abstractions of the work that these groups perform (Barley, 1669: 407). Although these abstractions are useful for providing models of groups, they lack the adaptiveness to capture the changing roles that occupations actually perform. Unlike Zabusky, the other commentators mentioned above do not study computer technicians at work. Although McCombs uses ethnographic methods, she is more concerned to examine the technician’s thoughts about their loss of status rather than their work practices. The other papers mentioned above are essentially to do with the wider changes in the provision of academic information assistance and so use “ideal-typical” images of the actual nature of the groups to be analysed (Barley, 1996: 406). This is a problem that makes much of the literature on ‘convergence’ of little relevance to this dissertation. Prima facie this literature might appear to have a valuable bearing, but the majority of convergence literature covers macro-level shifts in the context of Higher Education or methods of managing converged services once they have been established (Sutton, 2000; Field, 2001), and very little examines what library and computer service staff actually do. Thus, although Zabusky and Barley’s insights are referred to in the Discussion of the Findings section, the rest of the literature mentioned above was found to be lacking in relevant insight, thus supporting the sentiment that more studies in this area using ethnographic methods are called for.

4.2 Abbott

Zabusky and Barley’s interest in what professions actually do is echoed in the work of Andrew Abbott. Like Zabusky and Barley, Abbott seeks to move away from the ‘ideal-type’ image of professions as groups of people somehow permanently bound to a clearly defined set of tasks. According to Abbott, the relationship between occupational groups and the tasks they perform (or the ‘jurisdiction of professions’) is dynamic, and its stability is at the whim of various factors over which these groups sometimes have little control

It is Abbott’s central contention that an occupational group performs tasks only whilst those tasks are not being performed by another group with a better jurisdictional claim over them. According to Abbott, no occupational group is linked to a particular set of tasks permanently (Abbott, 1988: 33) and various external or internal forces can conspire to thrust disparate occupational groups into conflict for the same task areas (Abbott, 1988: 91). As one occupational group moves into the jurisdictional territory of another, its previous task area may become vacant, or at least less securely occupied (Abbott, 1988: 88). Thus, another occupational group could potentially seize the opportunity to adopt the vacated task area, and so the shifting will persist and could affect a wide range of different task areas and occupational groups. Although a successful jurisdictional encroachment could result in a settlement where the under-pressure group adopts a new task area, or where the under-pressure group continues to act within the same task area but with slightly reduced status, jurisdictional conflict can also result in the complete disappearance of an occupational group (Abbott, 1988: 69).

Abbott views disputes for occupational jurisdiction as occurring in “several different arenas” (Abbott, 1988, 59). The arenas that Abbott discusses are the legal arena, the arena of public opinion and the workplace arena. Abbott sees jurisdiction established in the legal arena (with the delineation of a task area occurring in court, or by legislative decree) as the most durable and desirable (Abbott, 1988: 63). Jurisdiction established in the public arena occurs when an occupational group is able to secure the “sympathy” of the public for that group’s methods of diagnosing, rationalising and solving workplace problems (Abbott, 1988: 60). This sympathy is normally attracted via well received portrayals of the occupational group in the mass media. When a united and homogenous group is demonstrated to use rarefied language, respect certain rituals and fulfil a certain aesthetic image, then it will be in a position to achieve jurisdictional legitimation in the public arena (Abbott, 1988: 60-61). However, Abbott argues that in the workplace, “professionals are not really a homogenous group” (Abbott, 1988: 66). Thus, genuine struggles for jurisdiction in workplace settings are “a fuzzy reality indeed” (Abbott, 1988: 66), with “comprehensive claims of jurisdiction” never fully realisable (Abbott, 1988: 66-67). Conflicts over jurisdictional claims generally occur in more than one of these arenas (Abbott, 1988: 69), and if an occupational group does succeed in encroaching on the jurisdictional domain of another, then some form of agreement or settlement must be established between these two groups, of which Abbott identifies several kinds.

The claim to “full and final jurisdiction” is the extreme form of settlement, in which one group secures the total control of a task area (Abbott, 1988: 69). The other ways in which groups apportion roles and status after a conflict include the subordination of one group by another (Abbott, 1988: 71), a settlement of interdependence (Abbott, 1988: 73) and a settlement which divides up a task area according to the types of clients dealt with (Abbott, 1988: 77). Abbott states that, for the most part, all resolutions of jurisdiction are “uneasy” (Abbott, 1988: 72), partly because they can be preceded by vicious conflicts which occasionally leave groups with damaged reputations or restricted status, but also because the colligation of occupational groups leads to fundamental clashes of method (Abbott, 1988: 41). An occupational group’s background (its history or academic roots) defines what it considers to be relevant problems, how it diagnosis problems and how it solves these problems (Abbott, 1988: 41). When more than one group must work together, disagreements over method are inevitable, leading Abbott to argue that every occupational group is aiming for a “heartland of work over which it has complete…established control” (Abbott, 1988: 71). Few occupational groups ever achieve this, and, as the commentators discussed below agree, the occupational groups represented in the academic information services task area are not exceptions.

4.3 Applications of Abbott

The model expounded in Abbott’s The System of Professions (1988) is applied to the “professions involved with information” by Abbott himself in Abbott, 1988 and Abbott, 1998. Abbott states that this task area has been dominated by librarians until recently (Abbott, 1988: 217), but that “system forces” (mainly technological advances), have left librarians facing an invasion of their jurisdiction by “the computer professions”, who claim to be able to perform roles traditionally controlled by librarians more effectively (Abbott, 1988: 224). To survive under this new pressure in their operational context, Abbott argues that librarians must “embrace various information technologies…and the groups that service them” rather than adopt a conservative strategy of relying on past strengths and competencies (Abbott, 1998: 442), a sentiment which is far from original or particularly insightful. In fact, neither of Abbott’s commentaries on this task area are particularly insightful, partly because, as he states, he is trying to demonstrate the explanatory power of his own model (Abbott, 1988: 226), and so is more concerned to discuss the ways in which the world of professions is “pushing and shoving” (Abbott, 1998: 433), than to discuss how this pushing and shoving is impacting upon the actual day to day work of the librarians. One controversial and interesting observation that he does make implies that librarianship as a whole should continue to be proficient at a wide number of tasks, and in that way, will become “a successful generalist” (Abbott, 1998: 442). This contradicts the arguments of Winter, 1996, who states that librarianship must not become a profession characterised as “a specialist in generality” (Winter, 1996: 354), but rather must become skilled in several niches.

Winter discusses the nature and future of librarianship using Abbott’s model of professionalism and the idea of interdisciplinarity in academic disciplines. He argues that the “globalisation of cultural space” that has occurred in academic disciplines (with the ideas and academic influences of many different cultures being thrust together) has forced academic groups to adopt more and more specialised niches if they are to survive, and this is also happening in the professional sphere (Winter, 1996: 348). Occupations should be seen as “organised colonies seeking to define [and guard] territories” (Winter, 1996: 351), in an echo of the famous characterisation of academic disciplines as “tribes” (see, Becher, 1989). As the information task area becomes more crowded, Winter argues that there is a pressing need for librarianship to develop so that it has “coverage and control of newer areas” (Winter, 1996: 356). By making “new and emerging fields more accessible”, librarians will be able to attract collaboration and ‘sympathy’ for their methods (in Abbott’s terms) from users and researchers (Winter, 1996: 355). By building up specialism in vacant regions of the information task area, librarians will also succeed in becoming indispensable to certain other professions in the task area, thus creating the opportunity for a settlement of interdependence (Winter, 1996: 347) which will be amicable and will secure jurisdiction for librarians despite tough competition from these other professions. Freeman (1997) echoes Winter by stating that if librarianship is to regain its prestige and secure “occupational closure and exclusivity” (Freeman, 1997: 67), then it must go through a period in which it is composed of a series of “disparate, scattered and numerically small workers” who specialise in newer roles, before reforming as a profession by grouping into a coherent mass (Freeman, 1997: 68). However, Freeman’s analysis lacks the incisiveness of Winter’s because Freeman implies that this process of “fission and fusion” in the profession is somehow determined, and not entirely controllable by the members of any occupational group (Freeman, 1997: 68): he claims that it is in the nature of professions to split up and reform at various stages in their development.


Ray, 2001, presents an insightful application of Abbott’s model of jurisdictional shift to the case of librarianship. He argues that as technology changes, “the human need for assistance in making meaningful contact with and use of information” becomes more acute, and this need is seen as “a market by a variety of information brokering agencies” (Ray, 2001: 13). This means that the role that librarians have traditionally fulfilled is now competitively contested by a range of other occupational groups. To maintain any jurisdiction at all, librarians must fight for the tasks that have been their’s in the past and must adopt new tasks as well. Ray divides the jurisdiction of librarians into four “quadrants” (existing competencies of low status, existing competencies of high status, newly acquired competencies of low status and newly acquired competencies of high status (Ray, 2001: 12)). He then describes four “collective action strategies” that librarians can employ to secure and strengthen the jurisdiction of the profession overall, but which will be enacted independently within each of these quadrants (Ray, 2001: 15). For example, in the quadrant occupied by newly acquired but low status jobs, Ray argues that librarians must engage in a “strategy of demarcation” in which they must be seen as “active agents”, forging new roles as digital archivists or the maintainers of online learning facilities (Ray, 2001: 15-16). In the quadrant for newly acquired high status roles, Ray suggests that librarians must adopt a more attacking “strategy of usurpation” (Ray, 2001: 15). Librarians must begin to encroach on the domain of web designers and knowledge managers, and establish their position as an indispensable player in the new niches of the information assistance task area.

A striking similarity exists between the directions that Ray recommends librarians must progress in if they are to preserve their jurisdictional power, and the new roles that librarians themselves flag up as significant in a recent Research Information Network report (RIN, 2007; reported in Brown, 2007). In this report, the views of librarians as to what their most important future roles will be are recorded and compared to what academic researchers see as the significant future roles of librarians. Two roles that are identified by librarians as significant but that academic researchers do not consider to be so important are managing metadata and facilitating e-learning (Brown, 2007: 46). Both of these roles appear in Ray’s collective action strategies motioned above, suggesting that a divide exists between what librarians want or need to be doing to secure jurisdiction, and what others see the librarian’s role and future role to be. Hillenbrand (2005) comments on this “fundamental schism” between what librarians present as their core aims, and how they actually come across in terms of what they practice (Hillenbrand, 2005: 5). It appears that if librarians are to achieve the settlement that Ray recommends, then they will have to work harder at convincing library users and the other occupants of the task area that certain roles can belong to them and should be within their jurisdiction.

Danner (1998) also refers to the lack of clearly defined roles for librarians in the eyes of these who interact with them when he comments that, “it has always been difficult for library users to understand…what librarians do” (Danner, 1998: 315). Danner argues that what weakens the position of librarians is the lack of an academic heritage: librarianship has no comparable underpinning to the “dead Germans” that sociologists are versed in (Danner, 1998: 328). Danner points out that this precludes librarians from engaging in the jurisdictional encroachment or defence strategy of “abstraction” that Abbott identifies (Danner, 1998: 327-328). This leads Danner to argue that the settlement between librarians and information technologists is best characterised by what Abbott identifies as “advisory jurisdiction”, in which neither occupational group has the theoretical background required to entirely control a task area, but each seeks to reinterpret the actions of the other according to their own practices (Danner, 1998: 324). Thus, Danner sees librarians and information technologists as openly competing in the workplace by both attempting to not only dominate the theoretical task area, but also to assume practical control of one another’s tasks by applying their own methods to the execution of all problems.

Thus, Abbott’s model has been used by a number of different authors to describe how librarians actually interact with other professions. This dissertation will present an account of how the Library staff and the CiCS staff in the IC interact, and so can be seen as a ‘thickening’ of the literature that applies Abbott’s ideas to the information professions.


4.4 Expertise

The subtitle of Abbott’s The System of Professions is “an essay on the division of expert labor”, indicating the degree to which Abbott believes the concepts of ‘profession’ and ‘expertise’ are related. Thus, any study which uses Abbott’s views as a theoretical lens to examine occupational groups must also examine the concept of expertise. The following section will introduce an area of debate in the literature of expertise which has particular relevance to this study, and will then present what can be interpreted as Abbott’s position within this debate.

The literature on expertise is interpreted for the purposes of this dissertation to be situated around a central dichotomy over the nature of ‘expertise’. This dichotomy can be seen to have developed from the debate in the philosophy of science as to the extent to which scientific theory choice genuinely is ‘value-free’ (Kuhn, 1962: esp. Chapter 12). These ideas implied a flaw in the commonly accepted ‘realist’ account of science and suggested that “observation and analysis are bounded to the theories and perspectives of scientists” (Faulkner et al, 1998: 12). Applied to expertise, this new way of thinking about science encouraged some commentators to “acknowledge a distinction between truth…and social purposes and interests” (McNeil, 1998: 57). Commentators who adopt this view, which will be referred to here as the ‘sociological perspective’ on expertise, argue that experts can only exist “in relation to a layperson” (Huber, 1999: 13). Expertise is a “ritual and potentially a mystification” (Faulkner, et al, 1998: 14) that involves “displaying, acting or performing” in such a way as to demonstrate the expert’s superiority over those who appeal to their expertise (Huber, 1999: 8). The sociological perspective on expertise assumes that there is no objective set of criteria that can be possessed or not possessed, but rather that the status ‘expert’ is value-laden and is conferred by a series performances that impress upon other people an individual’s relative superiority to them.




On the other side of the dichotomy is what will be referred to in this dissertation as the ‘psychological perspective’ on expertise. Commentators who adopt this perspective can be broadly grouped with the ‘realists’ who would oppose Kuhn’s ideas on theory choice (Faulkner et al, 1998: 12). They would argue that an expert is someone who posses certain objective cognitive qualities that demonstrate something superior about their ability in a given field. These qualities would include, efficiency – excellent results must be achieved for the minimum effort, error rate and cost; extensive subject-specific knowledge of the techniques and salient facts in the field; and wide and varied experience of problems in the field (Krems, 1994, quoted in Huber, 1999: 7). Hoffman organises the qualities that an expert must posses in to three comparable categories: the expert’s reasoning processes; the expert’s knowledge structures; and the expert’s development to their current status (Hoffman, 1998: 83). The defining statement of the psychological perspective on expertise is that an expert can posses the required qualities regardless of the opinions of those around him or her. The positivist ideas that drive this perspective imply that even if an expert’s knowledge is never utilised by anyone else, that person will still be an expert if they posses certain qualities. This is in direct conflict with sociological perspective that implies that only those people who are used and considered as experts by other people can count as experts.

Abbott’s model can be read as adopting the sociological perspective on expertise. Abbott believes that what occupational groups do is determined by the ‘ecological’ “pushing and shoving” (Abbott, 1998: 433) of the other professions. Thus, it is not the cognitive qualities that the members of a group posses which makes them the group that is appealed to for assistance and expertise in a given set of circumstances. Rather, they are merely “finding work to do and doing it when they can” (Abbott, 1988: 433). They are appealed to as experts only with the acquiescence of their fellow professions, who could at any moment challenge them for that position. However, although one of the principal theoretic lens used in this dissertation can be interpreted as adopting the sociological perspective on expertise, the following section will use both perspectives to analyse the findings, because it is the author’s belief that each is valid and can be used to derive similar conclusions in the context of the Information Commons.