There follow nine posts that contain my dissertation which was handed in during August 2007 and fulfilled part of the requirements of the MA in Librarianship at Sheffield University
They are proceeded by various other posts that document some of the research that went into the dissertation. These earlier posts provide only the scantest record of this period because I ceased using the blog quite soon after starting it, partly because I became concerned about certain ethical issues to do with the privacy of the subjects of the research (which I have now got over), but mainly because of laziness.
Ethnography in a Library
Wednesday, 14 October 2009
Abstract
The University of Sheffield’s new undergraduate study facility, the Information Commons (IC), is staffed by both library and computer service (CiCS) staff. The author of this dissertation worked as a member of library staff in the IC, and uses ethnographic methods to analyse the differences between these two groups.
The theoretical background to ethnography is explained, and the method’s highly interpretive nature and the importance of the author’s place in this type of research is stressed. The holistic and interdependent relationship between the field work, the review of theoretical literature and any discussion of field work in the light of this literature is explained. The few existing ethnographic studies conducted in this area are presented, and ethical or epistemic issues raised by this study are highlighted.
The findings from three days of intensive observation are recorded from a first person perspective. Andrew Abbott’s theory of professional conflict is reviewed, and studies which have applied it to the information professions are explored. The part of the literature of expertise that concerns the dichotomy between the nature of expertise if viewed from a psychological or sociological perspective is then reviewed.
CiCS staff are shown to display considerably greater levels of expertise from both perspectives and various explanations for this are offered. Abbott’s idea of ‘jurisdictional settlement’ is then characterised in the IC as a settlement which involves the subordination of the Library staff by the CiCS staff, but in which there exists considerable recognised interdependence between these groups.
The use of ethnographic methods is then discussed. The various impacts of the time constraints under which this research was conducted, and the various impacts of the structural constraints under which this research was presented, are commented on. When taken as a whole, this study is found to have produced valuable and interesting results.
“…it is only interpretation that goes all the way down to
the most immediate observational level…”
(Clifford Geertz, 1973: 28)
The theoretical background to ethnography is explained, and the method’s highly interpretive nature and the importance of the author’s place in this type of research is stressed. The holistic and interdependent relationship between the field work, the review of theoretical literature and any discussion of field work in the light of this literature is explained. The few existing ethnographic studies conducted in this area are presented, and ethical or epistemic issues raised by this study are highlighted.
The findings from three days of intensive observation are recorded from a first person perspective. Andrew Abbott’s theory of professional conflict is reviewed, and studies which have applied it to the information professions are explored. The part of the literature of expertise that concerns the dichotomy between the nature of expertise if viewed from a psychological or sociological perspective is then reviewed.
CiCS staff are shown to display considerably greater levels of expertise from both perspectives and various explanations for this are offered. Abbott’s idea of ‘jurisdictional settlement’ is then characterised in the IC as a settlement which involves the subordination of the Library staff by the CiCS staff, but in which there exists considerable recognised interdependence between these groups.
The use of ethnographic methods is then discussed. The various impacts of the time constraints under which this research was conducted, and the various impacts of the structural constraints under which this research was presented, are commented on. When taken as a whole, this study is found to have produced valuable and interesting results.
“…it is only interpretation that goes all the way down to
the most immediate observational level…”
(Clifford Geertz, 1973: 28)
Introduction
The University of Sheffield opened a new undergraduate study facility called the Information Commons (IC) in 2007, which was to be jointly run by library and computer service staff (the latter are referred to as CiCS: the Corporate Information and Computer Service department). The author of this dissertation was appointed as a weekend customer service coordinator at the IC, having worked in the University Library for two years previously. This study will explicate the author’s interpretation of the interactions and behaviour of the staff of the IC using ethnographic methods.
1.1 Motivation
This dissertation is motivated partly by a significant gap in the literature, and partly by the author’s early experiences in the IC. There is a great deal written about converged library and computer services. Some of it concerns the motivations for convergence (Brewer, 2003), some of it concerns the optimum organisational or structural decisions concerning converged services (Collier, 1996), some it concerns the technical challenges presented by converged services (from a staffing point of view (Sutton, 2000a) or from an technical infrastructure point of view (Brindley, 1988)), and yet more of it concerns models of best practice for converged services (Field, 2001). However, none of it describes the working differences between these groups from the uniquely powerful, proximate and highly interpretive point of view that an ethnography can offer. There are comparisons of the ‘culture’ of library and computer service staff (for example, Garten and Williams, 2000), but these mostly use what Barley would call ‘ideal-type images’ of these professions (Barley, 1996), without showing how the characterisations of these groups were arrived at. Thus, a study is called for which records, analyses and compares what library and computer service staff actually do whilst at work.
The other motivation was the author’s observation of a divide between the library and computer service staff in the IC. From the opening of this new facility, key differences struck the author in the ways that CiCS and Library staff approached various tasks, behaved towards colleagues and dealt with queries. It is important to note that this motivation concerns the author’s own interpretation of events that he witnessed, and thus, from its genesis, this dissertation had the author’s construal of events that he was part of at its core, which is a hallmark of ethnographic research. So, the fact that the literature lacked an ethnographic study of a converged service, and the fact that the original idea for this study was of a distinctly ethnographic nature, conspired to define ethnography as the methodology and fundamental theme in this dissertation.
1.2 Structural Overview
Ethnography is a method that emphasises the holistic nature of the research process, and so as is discussed below, any linear representation of what this study involved will be to some extent artificial. However, for the sake of clarity, this dissertation will be divided into sections and structured so as to honestly reflect the way that this project progressed, and to constantly reinforce the important place of ethnographic principles in this research. Since ethnographic principles form the basis of the two key motivations behind this dissertation, it will begin with an explanation of what ethnography is, from both a theoretical perspective, and in terms of what it practically involves. Some pertinent examples of ethnographies are introduced and the reasons for the use of this method are then reiterated and expanded. Ethical and epistemic issues raised by the way this research was conducted are then discussed, and the research procedure is detailed.
This thorough introduction to the relevant methodology is followed by a narrative account of the observations taken during the field work stage of the research. A selection of relevant resources that were then gathered and used to analyse and provide a theoretical framework through which to discuss these findings is then introduced. The Discussion section brings together the relevant literature and the findings, and these three sections (the Findings, the Theoretical Literature and the Discussion of Findings) can be seen as the ‘write-up’ stage of this ethnography, and should not be viewed as genuinely independent from one another because each relies for its contents on others. The degree to which ethnographic methods were used successfully will then be discussed, and this section will lead into conclusions as to the success of the dissertation as a whole and some recommendations for further study.
1.3 Aims and Objectives
The central aim of this dissertation is to conduct an ethnography of the staff of the Information Commons. The brief nature of this aim is not an attempt to reduce expectations as to what can be achieved by this dissertation, but rather, a reflection of the degree to which a genuine ethnography should be conducted by a researcher who is entirely disponible, or available to whatever findings may present themselves during the process of research and the writing up of that research. However, although it may be inconsistent with a purist reading of the principles of ethnography to present other, more detailed research objectives early in the study, several key areas of interest did present themselves to the author before any formal observations began. ‘Expertise’ was identified as a key differentiating concept within the IC, and so the way the staff demonstrate their expertise is something that was examined in detail. In addition, the fact that two historically separate occupational groups were working within the same physical space on essentially the same tasks suggested the relevance of Andrew Abbott’s model of professional conflict, and so this dissertation can also be seen as an attempt to identify how task jurisdiction within the IC has been divided between CiCS and Library staff. The objectives of this study are summarised below.
1.3.1 Objectives:
• To conduct an honest and methodologically sound ethnography of the staff of the Information Commons
• To explore the extent to which expertise is demonstrated differently by library and computer service technicians
• To identify the nature of the jurisdictional settlement in the Information Commons
1.1 Motivation
This dissertation is motivated partly by a significant gap in the literature, and partly by the author’s early experiences in the IC. There is a great deal written about converged library and computer services. Some of it concerns the motivations for convergence (Brewer, 2003), some of it concerns the optimum organisational or structural decisions concerning converged services (Collier, 1996), some it concerns the technical challenges presented by converged services (from a staffing point of view (Sutton, 2000a) or from an technical infrastructure point of view (Brindley, 1988)), and yet more of it concerns models of best practice for converged services (Field, 2001). However, none of it describes the working differences between these groups from the uniquely powerful, proximate and highly interpretive point of view that an ethnography can offer. There are comparisons of the ‘culture’ of library and computer service staff (for example, Garten and Williams, 2000), but these mostly use what Barley would call ‘ideal-type images’ of these professions (Barley, 1996), without showing how the characterisations of these groups were arrived at. Thus, a study is called for which records, analyses and compares what library and computer service staff actually do whilst at work.
The other motivation was the author’s observation of a divide between the library and computer service staff in the IC. From the opening of this new facility, key differences struck the author in the ways that CiCS and Library staff approached various tasks, behaved towards colleagues and dealt with queries. It is important to note that this motivation concerns the author’s own interpretation of events that he witnessed, and thus, from its genesis, this dissertation had the author’s construal of events that he was part of at its core, which is a hallmark of ethnographic research. So, the fact that the literature lacked an ethnographic study of a converged service, and the fact that the original idea for this study was of a distinctly ethnographic nature, conspired to define ethnography as the methodology and fundamental theme in this dissertation.
1.2 Structural Overview
Ethnography is a method that emphasises the holistic nature of the research process, and so as is discussed below, any linear representation of what this study involved will be to some extent artificial. However, for the sake of clarity, this dissertation will be divided into sections and structured so as to honestly reflect the way that this project progressed, and to constantly reinforce the important place of ethnographic principles in this research. Since ethnographic principles form the basis of the two key motivations behind this dissertation, it will begin with an explanation of what ethnography is, from both a theoretical perspective, and in terms of what it practically involves. Some pertinent examples of ethnographies are introduced and the reasons for the use of this method are then reiterated and expanded. Ethical and epistemic issues raised by the way this research was conducted are then discussed, and the research procedure is detailed.
This thorough introduction to the relevant methodology is followed by a narrative account of the observations taken during the field work stage of the research. A selection of relevant resources that were then gathered and used to analyse and provide a theoretical framework through which to discuss these findings is then introduced. The Discussion section brings together the relevant literature and the findings, and these three sections (the Findings, the Theoretical Literature and the Discussion of Findings) can be seen as the ‘write-up’ stage of this ethnography, and should not be viewed as genuinely independent from one another because each relies for its contents on others. The degree to which ethnographic methods were used successfully will then be discussed, and this section will lead into conclusions as to the success of the dissertation as a whole and some recommendations for further study.
1.3 Aims and Objectives
The central aim of this dissertation is to conduct an ethnography of the staff of the Information Commons. The brief nature of this aim is not an attempt to reduce expectations as to what can be achieved by this dissertation, but rather, a reflection of the degree to which a genuine ethnography should be conducted by a researcher who is entirely disponible, or available to whatever findings may present themselves during the process of research and the writing up of that research. However, although it may be inconsistent with a purist reading of the principles of ethnography to present other, more detailed research objectives early in the study, several key areas of interest did present themselves to the author before any formal observations began. ‘Expertise’ was identified as a key differentiating concept within the IC, and so the way the staff demonstrate their expertise is something that was examined in detail. In addition, the fact that two historically separate occupational groups were working within the same physical space on essentially the same tasks suggested the relevance of Andrew Abbott’s model of professional conflict, and so this dissertation can also be seen as an attempt to identify how task jurisdiction within the IC has been divided between CiCS and Library staff. The objectives of this study are summarised below.
1.3.1 Objectives:
• To conduct an honest and methodologically sound ethnography of the staff of the Information Commons
• To explore the extent to which expertise is demonstrated differently by library and computer service technicians
• To identify the nature of the jurisdictional settlement in the Information Commons
Methodology
2.1 The theoretical background to ethnography
Ethnography investigates social groups and makes the ethnographer’s interpretation of findings accessible to members of other social groups. In common with all methods of investigating aspects of the world, at its foundation ethnography has various assumptions about the nature of reality, and about the relationship between the researcher and that reality. Ethnographers assume that their subjects (social groups) have unique understandings and impressions of the world that inform their behaviour, their interactions with others and their attitudes towards the world. This is not to say that ethnographers deny the existence of a world of shared “objects, events and processes” (Guba and Lincoln, 1988: 81), but that this world of ‘things’ does not compare in significance to the world of constructed ‘facts’ when studying groups of people. Believing that the world of facts is more interesting than the world of things, ethnographers place themselves firmly in the research paradigm known variously as the naturalistic (Guba and Lincoln, 1988), the interpretive (Geertz, 1973) or the constructivist (Williamson, 2006) paradigm (see Lincoln and Guba, 2000, for a discussion of these and various other names for this paradigm). Although they do describe differing approaches to research, ethnography can be seen as exhibiting aspects of all of these approaches (Williamson, 2006: 83-84) and they shall be referred to as ‘interpretive paradigms’ in this dissertations, after Geertz, 1973.
As well as their assumption as to the existence and importance of differing interpretations of the world, methodologies informed by the interpretive paradigms are also united by an assumption about the role of the researcher. Traditional scientific research is located within the ‘positivist’ paradigm and holds that the researcher is an instrument which designs experiments to test hypotheses, records the results from these experiments, and reasons from these results to larger generalisations. Researchers in the interpretive paradigms have a more “messy” view of their relationship with the data (Guba and Lincoln, 1988: 82). Interpretivists embrace the fact that all representations of data are constructed from someone’s (the researcher’s) experiences. Ethnography in particular emphasises the crucial role that the humanity (the non-mechanical nature) of the researcher plays in the collection and presentation of data. The ethnographer accepts that the human mind is fallible, easily moved, error prone and extensively forgetful, but argues that the insight and synthetic abilities that the prism of another human mind can apply to the facts of someone else’s world are entirely invaluable and irreplaceable. What an ethnographer presents is his or her “own construction of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to” (Geertz, 1973: 9).
The central role given to the researcher’s interpretations in ethnographic studies clearly raises questions about the objectivity, the validity and the authenticity of ethnographic findings. Some authors have argued for the replacement of these typically positivist terms with other concepts that better convey the nature and the strengths of interpretive research, such as “dependability”, “openness” and “fairness” (Guba and Lincoln, 1988: 84-85). When applied, ‘dependability’ means that ethnographers must explicitly record and keep referring to his or her method; ‘openness’ means that the ethnographer must be honest to the point of ‘nakedness’, with clearly no embellishment or fabrication of details, and a frank exposure of his or her own feelings and impressions; and ‘fairness’ means that the ethnographer must ignore any personal prejudice in reporting the data. By occupying a privileged position inside the group to the studied, the ethnographer has access to events and occurrences of interest. Through a thorough application of principles of the method, a successful ethnography can be produced if the ethnographer succeeds in “fixing” his or her impressions of these occurrences and turning them into an account which others can experience (Geertz, 1973: 19). The fully embraced importance of the researcher’s own interpretation, the privileged position of the researcher and the constant reference to method make ethnography “less vulnerable than empirical [sociology] to demands for positivist legitimacy in methods” according to Okely, 1994: 19.
The rest of this section will explain what ethnography involves at a practical level, outline some relevant applications of this method, explain why this method was used and any ethical or epistemic concerns raised by its use, and the precise research procedure will be described.
2.2 What ethnography involves
Ethnographies provide “rich and contextualised understandings” of social situations (Smith, 2001: 220). The process by which these understandings are reached is an involved and complex one. Any separations that this account projects onto the ethnographic research process are only present for pragmatic reasons, and in reality, ethnography is a thoroughly integrated and holistic process.
‘Ethnographic field work’ describes what the ethnographer does when he or she is directly exposed to the raw data of the study. The first step is to decide upon a subject for study, and then to secure entry into this social group – a feat that is treated briefly here purely because the author’s entry into the staff of the Information Commons was not difficult, but many authors go to extraordinary lengths to gain access to groups which are initially unwilling to admit researchers into their midst: see Smith, 2001: 220-221. The ethnographer must then “penetrate” the group (Goffman, 1989: 129) and immerse him or herself in the activities and day to day lives of those being studied. Geertz asserts that only by close and prolonged exposure to a group will the unexpected and chance events occur which reveal the defining characteristics of the group’s view of the world (Geertz, 1973a: 412-413). This exposure and involvement in the group should occur over a very long period of time: Goffman states, “I think you should spend at least a year in the field” (Goffman, 1989: 130), and Okely describes a study in which researchers lived for the duration of an entire generation with their subjects in order to learn about attitudes towards inheritance (Okely, 1994: 23). This degree of interaction with a social group is intended to give the ethnographer a “deep familiarity” (Goffman, 1989: 130) with the conventions, norms and “piled-up structures of implication” that define the world as the subject sees it (Geertz, 1973: 7).
What the ethnographer does during the field work stage is not spelled out in any great detail in the literature and differs greatly depending upon the group to be studied. It can involve the collection of a great range of types of data, but the essential features of the research are that it must not be intrusive or entirely dependent upon the creation of artificial situations like interviews (although it can involve interviews); it must collect data about the ‘actual’ lives or work patterns of the subjects, so it must not rely solely on second hand accounts of what occurs in the group; and it must ignore no details, however trivial they may seem at the time (Okely, 1994; Emerson et al, 2001; Baker, 2006).
There is a “freshness cycle” involved in ethnographic research which means that the researcher will notice more on his first day in the field than on his second day and so on because what is strange early on in the research process will become expected and un-noteworthy as time progresses (Goffman, 1989: 130). Thus, it is essential that some record of these events is made to fix them in the mind of the ethnographer, and this record takes the form of ‘field notes’. Considerable debate exists as to the way field notes should be taken and as to what their content should be (see Emerson et al, 2001). What is widely agreed is that they should be as “thick” as possible (Geertz, 1973), with as much detail of “everything [the researcher happens to] hear, smell and see; even the colour of the carpets” (Okely, 1994: 23). Field notes are written whilst the researcher is in the midst of the ‘field’, and little attention is paid to style or even legibility, with notes often being “incomprehensible to onlookers” (Emerson et al, 2001: 356). But a record will then exist of what the researcher experienced as he or she experienced it – the notes will be a unique record of the ethnographer’s interpretation of other people’s interpretations of events as close to them happening as possible.
Once the ethnographer has completed their time in the field they will commonly transcribe their field notes. This is not a process that simply provides a bridge to other stages of the research, but rather a centrally important task that widely influences the rest of the project (Okely, 1994: 24). The process of writing up what was experienced allows themes to emerge, interpretations to be extended and entirely new understandings of what occurred to be incorporated. What allows ethnography to become the powerful tool it can be is the way in which the gathering of data, the analysis of the data and the writing up of this data becomes one interdependent process. Only by being disponible (Okely, 1994: 19) to new ideas and interpretations of the data can the ethnographer ensure that they are actually reporting “the structures of significance” as they see them (Geertz, 1973: 8). The layers of interpretation that the ethnographer adds to the interpretations of others are crucial to record, and emerge gradually as the data is examined. Okely recommends dividing up the data into overlapping categories, with some observations placed in many different categories if necessary (Okely, 1994: 23). As the ethnographer examines the data in the categories, themes that unite it or describe its differences will begin to emerge and these will form the criteria for selecting the theoretical literature to be reviewed – only once the data has been collected can a satisfactory analysis of relevant literature be attempted, if the ethnographer’s disponibility and complete openness to new ideas is to be preserved. This is a counter-intuitive element of ethnography, but as Okely sates, although the ethnographer may conduct extensive reviews of the literature before the field research begins, he or she must be willing to “eject hypotheses like so much ballast” if they are found to not be relevant to interpretations that appear during the field work (Okely, 1994: 19). Only through this rigorously ‘naked’ approach can researchers ensure the honesty and dependability that safeguard the value of ethnographies.
Geertz states that the line between “the mode of representation and the substantive content” of ethnographies is “undrawable” (Geertz, 1973: 16). This implies that the ‘write-up’ of ethnographic findings, the data gathering stages and the coding stages, are all inextricably linked. The ethnographer is concerned to turn his or her experiences into “an inspectable form … an account” (Geertz, 1973: 19). This account ‘fixes’ the ethnographers interpretations so that others can understand them. Although the ethnographic write-up should be understood to be principally the author’s interpretations of what he or she experienced, the ‘world’ they recreate must not be their’s in the sense that the world of Oliver Twist is ‘Dickensian’ (Clifford, 1986: 13). Rather, constant reference must be made to both the field work that occurred (thus locating the study in the world depicted), and the ethnographic method that drives the study (thus justifying the author’s right to make interpretive moves) (Clifford, 1986: 14). It must be emphasised that the research is still occurring as the write-up proceeds. As the author finds ways of expressing his or her findings, so his or her interpretations of the situation become explicated. In the write-up the ethnographer brings other theories and arguments from relevant literature into the analysis of the findings, and so this stage represents the confluence of the external theoretical ideas and internal interpretive findings. It is in the write-up that ethnographies plunge from their sheer beginnings into the deep waters only vaguely charted by other commentators (Geertz, 1973: 25).
Thus, an ethnography can be represented as starting with the field work and progressing through the note taking and transcription phases to the write-up. But this is an artificially linear construction of the integrated, interdependent and holistic process that gives ethnography its strength. The importance of the author’s interpretations guarantees that each stage of the development of these interpretations is equally important and reliant on every other stage. No one part of the process can make any real sense without the others.
2.3 Relevant Ethnographic Studies
This brief review serves as the background for one of the reasons for the use of ethnographic methods, and should not be viewed as the presentation of the theoretical literature used to analyse the findings, which is presented in the Theoretical Literature section later in the dissertation.
The context and complexities that constitute the jobs people perform is a source of interest to many authors because even though “work is a constant part of our lives” (Orr, 1996: 1), it has often been labelled “routine, unskilled… or even trivial” (Smith, 2001: 221). Barley argues that “occupational images” exist which distort our ideas of what it is that occupations actually do (Barley, 1996: 406-407). Only by embracing ethnographic methods can researchers dispel these images and arrive at the genuinely informative descriptions of what people do whilst at work.
Descriptions of the actual work of librarians when studied at a local level and described in ‘thick’ detail are not common. George et al state that “few studies have been done of libraries…using ethnographic methods” (George et al, 2003: 2) and of these few, the most influential and honestly ethnographic is Nardi and O’Day’s study of librarians as intelligent systems at the Apple Reseach Laboratories (Nardi and O’Day, 1996). They found that librarians to perform complex, multi-faceted roles that greatly assisted their users (Nardi and O’Day, 1996: 80). This generous view of the work of librarians is echoed in George et al, 2003, which pictures librarians a “key-stone species” in the knowledge ecology: without librarians all other parts of this ecology could not function. Plum, 1994, expresses this sentiment and states that librarians “create communities” using their “rituals of knowledge” to bind users together (Plum, 1994: 500). Klopfer, 2004, shows how commercial libraries in an Indian city have managed to occupy a niche, created by the short-comings of Indian public libraries, and are thus, greatly appreciated by users.
The small selection presented above represents a large percentage of all the ethnographic studies conducted in libraries, which in its self is a justification for more studies that use the techniques of ethnography to examine the actual work of librarians. All the studies above set out with the purpose of demonstrating the worth of librarians, at the expense of a more even-handed depiction of their work practices, a feature commented on by Sandstrom and Sandstrom, 1995: 175. So, an even-handed ethnography that maintains the author’s disponibility or openness to honest interpretations of the actual state of affairs is called for. This dissertation represents an attempt to satisfy this gap in the literature.
2.4 Additional reasons for the use ethnographic methods
The author noticed significant differences between CiCS and Library staff whilst working at the Information Commons, and from these observations grew this dissertation, and so from the project’s inception, the author’s interpretation of events was at its core. Ethnography is the only method to allow for the author’s interpretation of events to assume such importance, and so it presented its self as an attractive methodologic option.
As a member of the group to be studied, the author and the subject would be particularly closely bound. This raised significant ethical issues (discussed below), and also the epistemic demand that the crucial role of the author’s interpretations in the development of this project be embraced and scrutinised. ‘Participant observation’, a type of ethnographic study (Jorgensen, 1989: 8), allowed for this demand to be met, since like all ethnographic methods, it emphasises the role of the researcher at the centre of the study. Participant observation allows the researcher to completely adopt the weltanschauung, or world-view, of the subjects by literally being one of them (Baker, 2006: 179), and was therefore particularly suited to this study .
The other crucial aspect of this study which demands an ethnographic approach was its subject matter. The working patterns and the interactions of the library and CiCS people were what initially motivated the study, and ethnography is a powerful way of examining the very “local textures” that define people’s work-lives (Smith, 2001: 220). Using a method which took people out of their normal work context (such as focus groups or formal interviews) would divorce the subjects of this study from the context that gave their actions meaning and enabled the initial interpretations of them. In addition, the opening of the Information Commons was intended to signal a new era of cooperation and convergence between Sheffield University Library and CiCS staff. This study of the differences between these two groups could have resulted in a failure to gather useful or insightful data if the subjects of the study were put in situations where they were fully aware that their actions and answers to questions were being used to study how they differed. Only by retaining the workplace context could it be guaranteed that their actions were ‘natural’ and not conditioned or normalised by the organisational changes that had occurred. From an epistemic point of view, this study demands that the natural contexts of work in the IC be preserved, and so ethnography appeared the most fitting methodology for this study.
Thus, the lack of a substantial body of literature that ethnographically addresses the ‘occupational images’ that are widely held of people working in libraries, the fact that the author’s interpretation of events originally prompted the project, the author’s proximity to the staff of the IC, and the fact that the IC staff needed to be studied in their natural work environment, all motivated the use ethnographic methods.
2.5 Epistemic Issues
The central epistemic issue that is raised by this study of the staff of the IC concerns the fact that the author is a member of library staff. This could potentially influence attempts to record and interpret the events and occurrences that are witnessed. It could be that situations will be inadvertently interpreted favourably towards the library staff. Alternatively, the author may over-compensate for his historic library bias by interpreting situations favourably towards the CiCS people. There are two main responses to these possibilities. Firstly, ethnography emphasises the value of the ethnographer’s ‘closeness’ to the phenomena, and so the author’s proximity to the issues and his privileged position within the working environment of the IC should perhaps be viewed as an epistemic boon and not as a drawback to this study. And secondly, the central importance of the ethnographer’s interpretation of events to the value of ethnographies is crucial. Thus, if it is made clear that all the meaning drawn from the events witnessed is ascribed by the author, and that many of the layers of significance will have been added by the author, then it will be possible to produce research that is honest and valuable.
Another epistemic concern raised here that distinguishes this from other studies, is the fact that the author must make the conceptual move from “complete participant” to observer (Baker, 2006: 174). This is in contrast to the majority of studies, where the move is generally in the opposite direction, with the researcher beginning as a “complete observer” and only slowly gaining the insight of a participant. Tedlock (1991) argues that making the epistemic move taken in this study encourages a high level of honesty because as the unique position of the author is made more and more important, so the ability of the readers to triangulate the author’s findings using the work of others becomes more difficult (Tedlock, 1991: 77-78). Thus, a guiding and defining principle in this study must be the honesty that an ethnographic approach demands.
More generally, another epistemic issue raised by the fact of the author’s closeness to the subjects of this study, is that the “freshness cycle” (Goffman, 1989: 130) will be vastly truncated, or might possibly have prematurely expired. This means that many of the ‘unusual’ events that define the IC staff’s view of the world will not appear as such to the author because he is accustomed to them. Perhaps more damaging to the epistemic credibility of this study, it could be that the author is able to recognise unusual events among the CiCS people, but not among the library people. This could result in a study that focuses more on the CiCS people’s behaviour than it does on the Library people’s, whereas this dissertation intends to study both these groups.
The deeply interpretive nature of ethnography as a method and the author’s proximity to the events discussed means the sections in this dissertation in which the ethnographic findings are presented will be written from a first person perspective. This is because third person accounts can be seen as “deceptive” in the presentation of findings from qualitative research – the social interaction implicit in research is obliterated if the ‘I’ is not used according to some authors (Webb, 1992: 749). In addition, ethnographic accounts deal with “complex and ambiguous” subjective situations which require the place of the first person to be not only admitted to but explicitly referenced if they are to make sense (Tedlock, 1991: 78). The importance of ‘the subjective’ will not only be evident from the use of first person vernacular during the presentation of findings, but is also indicated by the structure of this dissertation, because the way this study is organised represents an attempt to honestly record the order that the research process were undertaken and therefore, the progression of the author’s personal engagement with these processes. The structure of this dissertation is outlined below. In keeping with traditional academic rigour and formality, references to the first person will be absent from the rest of this study.
These epistemic issues are discussed with reference to how well they were
resolved in this study, in the ‘Discussion of the Method’ section.
2.6 Ethical Issues
All research that involves human participants raises certain ethical issues about the treatment of those participants. It has been argued that ethnography is actually the most ethically sound of all qualitative research methods because it “does not have human subjects” (Jorgensen, 1989: 28, emphasis in original). Jorgensen states that since the subjects of all ethnographic research are studied under the ordinary conditions of their everyday lives with the minimum of intrusion from the researcher, the ethnographer has “no more or less of an ethical obligation to… [them]… than he or she would have under other everyday life circumstances” (Jorgensen, 1989: 28). However, it seems crude to suggest that participants in ethnographies are not affected at all by research that involves them as subjects, and so some potential impact upon the subjects of this study will be outlined and, the ways in which these impacts have been minimised will be discussed.
The actual process of extracting information from participants could potentially cause embarrassment, shame, anxiety, guilt or damage to self-esteem (Murphy and Dingwall, 2001: 340). However, these effects are felt largely by subjects involved in studies where they are put into unusual settings and asked to answer difficult or complicated questions. In this study, all findings will be drawn from observations conducted whilst the participants are working, from informal conversations between the author and the subjects, or from conversations overheard between the subjects and their colleagues. Thus, since their actions need not diverge from naturalistic behaviour, much of the pressure normally placed on the subjects of research will be avoided in this study.
Ethnography involves close contact with people, meaning that a relationship between the researcher and the subjects inevitable develops. This relationship can be abruptly ended when the research finishes, or it can often result in the subject feeling cheated and objectified by the researcher who could be seen as ‘using them for information’. In this dissertation, the author had worked with the subjects for over a year, and so had already developed a relationship of trust with them. In addition, when the field research was completed contact with the subject’s was not abruptly terminated, thus hopefully, avoiding any feelings of objectification being caused.
The publication of ethnographic research can also adversely affect participants. With the exposure of the views of peers, the existence of unrealised relationships, or the description of hidden social hierarchies, can come feelings of rejection and self-doubt. Studies that radically alter the status quo inside social groups are not considered to be methodologically sound ethnographies (Murphy and Dingwall, 2001: 341). To alleviate ethical concerns along these lines, this dissertation will not be consultable for five years after its completion, and even then, it will not be published.
This prior reflection upon and rigorous adherence to the ethical issues surrounding qualitative research is intended to ensure that none of the subjects in this study were adversely affected by this research. The extent to which this was realised is discussed in the Discussion of Method section. Below, the stages that were undertaken in this dissertation are explicated.
2.7 Research Procedure
As has been remarked upon before, the author’s interpretation of the differences between Library and CiCS staff in the Information Commons is what provoked this study, so an investigation of various methods which could incorporate these interpretations was embarked upon as the first stage in this dissertation. Once ethnography had been settled upon as the most appropriate method (for the reasons listed above), the manager of the IC was applied to for permission to study the staff whilst they worked. This permission was granted in May, so ‘entry’ into the IC was secured. Although it was impossible to formally inform all the people who were observed in the IC since many of them only worked there transiently and only formed fleeting parts of some observations, all the people who were observed closely and all people engaged in conversation by the author were explicitly informed as to the existence of the study.
The author began to take brief notes of any salient differences that were observed from shortly after formal permission had been granted for the study to go ahead. Copies of crib sheets were also collected, as were emails, notices and other objects that might have formed the basis for some comparative analysis.
In the first week of June (the last week of semester, and so the last opportunity to observe the IC staff at their busiest), the author was placed on the Library staff rota to work three full days in the IC (Tuesday-Thursday). The author worked exactly as the full time staff in the IC worked, and so served on the counter for more than half the day, shadowed the IC staff when they ‘roved’, and sat in the staff area and observed whilst the other IC staff performed their ‘off-counter’ duties.
The author did ‘work’ whilst doing the field research because it was a busy period, and the IC were glad of extra help, but simultaneously, what Emerson et al call “jotted notes” were taken (Emerson et al, 2001: 356). Very brief key words and phrases were recorded to serve as reminders of events that seemed significant at the time. These were written in a small, unobtrusive notebook so as not to disturb the flow of the discourse that was occurring at the same time.
At opportune moments (for example at lunch times, or when changes of personnel occurred at the counter), the author would retire to the student café attached to the IC to do the first write up of these notes. This initial write up was conducted away from the staff area so that the author would not to be distracted by other relevant events, and so as not to raise the profile of the study amongst the staff, or compromise the naturalistic attitudes that were required. Initially, the events recorded in the jotted notes were elaborated upon, and this process served to remind the author of countless other events that had occurred during the observation stage. After Geertz (1973) these events were recorded as “thickly” as possible, with as much of the author’s own understanding and interpretation of the events as possible included in the initial write up. This process proved very productive, and would provoke the author to go back to the IC staff with wholly altered ideas as to what counted as significant events to record. The author reflected these changing priorities by putting key words at the top of each page to refer to the subjects that were considered the most significant whilst the observations were made.
After three days of observation, large quantities of hand-written A5 pages had been produced, and these were typed up with any additional interpretations that occurred to the author included in this second stage of the write-up. Several copies of the typed up notes were printed off, with one observed event or sequence of interaction to an A4 sheet. These were then organised into thematic categories, with the same observation going into more than one category if necessary. By reading and re-reading the notes, eventually 5 broad and overlapping categories were decided upon: ‘expertise’, ‘job propriety’, ‘jurisdiction’, ‘elaboration’ and ‘de-skilling’.
At this stage the collection of relevant theoretical literature that might explain or be applicable to the findings began. Originally, literature that sought to explain the differences between library and computer staff was researched, but this was scant and much of it was largely to do with macro-level factors and so not relevant to this local study. The literature on jurisdictional claims proved more fertile, with Andrew Abbott’s The System of Professions (Abbott, 1988) appearing to have particular explanatory power in the context of this dissertation. The literature of expertise was also explored. This research enabled the author to return to the categories that the observations had provisionally been organised into, and discarded observations that did not fall into the two most fertile categories remaining after the survey of the theoretic literature: ‘expertise’ and ‘jurisdiction’ (the observations in the ‘job propriety’ category were found to be highly relevant to the literature to do with jurisdiction, so this and the jurisdiction category were collapsed into one).
The field notes were then written up again using spatial not thematic categories: observations from the whole of the IC; observations from the counter; and observations from the staff area. This was intended to present a more narratologically appealing Findings section, akin to the vignettes that Orr presents (for example, Orr, 1996: 15-23), or the scene setting used by Kunda (Kunda, 1992: 26-30). This write-up of the findings was then used to discuss and apply the theoretical literature to this study. The write-up stages of ethnography illustrate just how holistic the method is. The final form of the write-up of the Findings depended upon the Theoretical Literature because the latter section determines which of the findings will be most fertile for discussion, but what was relevant theoretical literature could not have been decided upon without a clear idea of the themes that were to be present in the Findings section.
The structure of this dissertation is an attempt to honestly reflect the stages of the research as they happened, despite the fact that attempts to represent the process of ethnography in a linear way somewhat ignore the method’s holistic nature. Thus, the method is what was initially researched and is what should be seen to ‘drive’ the rest of the study, so the Methodology section is placed first. The Findings are placed before the Theoretical Literature because they suggested the areas that were researched and were extant before the literature had been extensively explored. The Theoretical Literature needs to be presented before the Discussion of Findings because this latter section exists only in the light of the literature and was produced after the findings and the literature had been collected. The Discussion of Method section can clearly only appear after the use of these methods has taken place. The fact that this dissertation is structured like this also serves to constantly relate it to the methodological principles that ensure it is transparent and open, and therefore, valuable. The impact of the decision to separate the sections of this dissertation in this way is discussed in the Discussion of Method section.
Ethnography investigates social groups and makes the ethnographer’s interpretation of findings accessible to members of other social groups. In common with all methods of investigating aspects of the world, at its foundation ethnography has various assumptions about the nature of reality, and about the relationship between the researcher and that reality. Ethnographers assume that their subjects (social groups) have unique understandings and impressions of the world that inform their behaviour, their interactions with others and their attitudes towards the world. This is not to say that ethnographers deny the existence of a world of shared “objects, events and processes” (Guba and Lincoln, 1988: 81), but that this world of ‘things’ does not compare in significance to the world of constructed ‘facts’ when studying groups of people. Believing that the world of facts is more interesting than the world of things, ethnographers place themselves firmly in the research paradigm known variously as the naturalistic (Guba and Lincoln, 1988), the interpretive (Geertz, 1973) or the constructivist (Williamson, 2006) paradigm (see Lincoln and Guba, 2000, for a discussion of these and various other names for this paradigm). Although they do describe differing approaches to research, ethnography can be seen as exhibiting aspects of all of these approaches (Williamson, 2006: 83-84) and they shall be referred to as ‘interpretive paradigms’ in this dissertations, after Geertz, 1973.
As well as their assumption as to the existence and importance of differing interpretations of the world, methodologies informed by the interpretive paradigms are also united by an assumption about the role of the researcher. Traditional scientific research is located within the ‘positivist’ paradigm and holds that the researcher is an instrument which designs experiments to test hypotheses, records the results from these experiments, and reasons from these results to larger generalisations. Researchers in the interpretive paradigms have a more “messy” view of their relationship with the data (Guba and Lincoln, 1988: 82). Interpretivists embrace the fact that all representations of data are constructed from someone’s (the researcher’s) experiences. Ethnography in particular emphasises the crucial role that the humanity (the non-mechanical nature) of the researcher plays in the collection and presentation of data. The ethnographer accepts that the human mind is fallible, easily moved, error prone and extensively forgetful, but argues that the insight and synthetic abilities that the prism of another human mind can apply to the facts of someone else’s world are entirely invaluable and irreplaceable. What an ethnographer presents is his or her “own construction of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to” (Geertz, 1973: 9).
The central role given to the researcher’s interpretations in ethnographic studies clearly raises questions about the objectivity, the validity and the authenticity of ethnographic findings. Some authors have argued for the replacement of these typically positivist terms with other concepts that better convey the nature and the strengths of interpretive research, such as “dependability”, “openness” and “fairness” (Guba and Lincoln, 1988: 84-85). When applied, ‘dependability’ means that ethnographers must explicitly record and keep referring to his or her method; ‘openness’ means that the ethnographer must be honest to the point of ‘nakedness’, with clearly no embellishment or fabrication of details, and a frank exposure of his or her own feelings and impressions; and ‘fairness’ means that the ethnographer must ignore any personal prejudice in reporting the data. By occupying a privileged position inside the group to the studied, the ethnographer has access to events and occurrences of interest. Through a thorough application of principles of the method, a successful ethnography can be produced if the ethnographer succeeds in “fixing” his or her impressions of these occurrences and turning them into an account which others can experience (Geertz, 1973: 19). The fully embraced importance of the researcher’s own interpretation, the privileged position of the researcher and the constant reference to method make ethnography “less vulnerable than empirical [sociology] to demands for positivist legitimacy in methods” according to Okely, 1994: 19.
The rest of this section will explain what ethnography involves at a practical level, outline some relevant applications of this method, explain why this method was used and any ethical or epistemic concerns raised by its use, and the precise research procedure will be described.
2.2 What ethnography involves
Ethnographies provide “rich and contextualised understandings” of social situations (Smith, 2001: 220). The process by which these understandings are reached is an involved and complex one. Any separations that this account projects onto the ethnographic research process are only present for pragmatic reasons, and in reality, ethnography is a thoroughly integrated and holistic process.
‘Ethnographic field work’ describes what the ethnographer does when he or she is directly exposed to the raw data of the study. The first step is to decide upon a subject for study, and then to secure entry into this social group – a feat that is treated briefly here purely because the author’s entry into the staff of the Information Commons was not difficult, but many authors go to extraordinary lengths to gain access to groups which are initially unwilling to admit researchers into their midst: see Smith, 2001: 220-221. The ethnographer must then “penetrate” the group (Goffman, 1989: 129) and immerse him or herself in the activities and day to day lives of those being studied. Geertz asserts that only by close and prolonged exposure to a group will the unexpected and chance events occur which reveal the defining characteristics of the group’s view of the world (Geertz, 1973a: 412-413). This exposure and involvement in the group should occur over a very long period of time: Goffman states, “I think you should spend at least a year in the field” (Goffman, 1989: 130), and Okely describes a study in which researchers lived for the duration of an entire generation with their subjects in order to learn about attitudes towards inheritance (Okely, 1994: 23). This degree of interaction with a social group is intended to give the ethnographer a “deep familiarity” (Goffman, 1989: 130) with the conventions, norms and “piled-up structures of implication” that define the world as the subject sees it (Geertz, 1973: 7).
What the ethnographer does during the field work stage is not spelled out in any great detail in the literature and differs greatly depending upon the group to be studied. It can involve the collection of a great range of types of data, but the essential features of the research are that it must not be intrusive or entirely dependent upon the creation of artificial situations like interviews (although it can involve interviews); it must collect data about the ‘actual’ lives or work patterns of the subjects, so it must not rely solely on second hand accounts of what occurs in the group; and it must ignore no details, however trivial they may seem at the time (Okely, 1994; Emerson et al, 2001; Baker, 2006).
There is a “freshness cycle” involved in ethnographic research which means that the researcher will notice more on his first day in the field than on his second day and so on because what is strange early on in the research process will become expected and un-noteworthy as time progresses (Goffman, 1989: 130). Thus, it is essential that some record of these events is made to fix them in the mind of the ethnographer, and this record takes the form of ‘field notes’. Considerable debate exists as to the way field notes should be taken and as to what their content should be (see Emerson et al, 2001). What is widely agreed is that they should be as “thick” as possible (Geertz, 1973), with as much detail of “everything [the researcher happens to] hear, smell and see; even the colour of the carpets” (Okely, 1994: 23). Field notes are written whilst the researcher is in the midst of the ‘field’, and little attention is paid to style or even legibility, with notes often being “incomprehensible to onlookers” (Emerson et al, 2001: 356). But a record will then exist of what the researcher experienced as he or she experienced it – the notes will be a unique record of the ethnographer’s interpretation of other people’s interpretations of events as close to them happening as possible.
Once the ethnographer has completed their time in the field they will commonly transcribe their field notes. This is not a process that simply provides a bridge to other stages of the research, but rather a centrally important task that widely influences the rest of the project (Okely, 1994: 24). The process of writing up what was experienced allows themes to emerge, interpretations to be extended and entirely new understandings of what occurred to be incorporated. What allows ethnography to become the powerful tool it can be is the way in which the gathering of data, the analysis of the data and the writing up of this data becomes one interdependent process. Only by being disponible (Okely, 1994: 19) to new ideas and interpretations of the data can the ethnographer ensure that they are actually reporting “the structures of significance” as they see them (Geertz, 1973: 8). The layers of interpretation that the ethnographer adds to the interpretations of others are crucial to record, and emerge gradually as the data is examined. Okely recommends dividing up the data into overlapping categories, with some observations placed in many different categories if necessary (Okely, 1994: 23). As the ethnographer examines the data in the categories, themes that unite it or describe its differences will begin to emerge and these will form the criteria for selecting the theoretical literature to be reviewed – only once the data has been collected can a satisfactory analysis of relevant literature be attempted, if the ethnographer’s disponibility and complete openness to new ideas is to be preserved. This is a counter-intuitive element of ethnography, but as Okely sates, although the ethnographer may conduct extensive reviews of the literature before the field research begins, he or she must be willing to “eject hypotheses like so much ballast” if they are found to not be relevant to interpretations that appear during the field work (Okely, 1994: 19). Only through this rigorously ‘naked’ approach can researchers ensure the honesty and dependability that safeguard the value of ethnographies.
Geertz states that the line between “the mode of representation and the substantive content” of ethnographies is “undrawable” (Geertz, 1973: 16). This implies that the ‘write-up’ of ethnographic findings, the data gathering stages and the coding stages, are all inextricably linked. The ethnographer is concerned to turn his or her experiences into “an inspectable form … an account” (Geertz, 1973: 19). This account ‘fixes’ the ethnographers interpretations so that others can understand them. Although the ethnographic write-up should be understood to be principally the author’s interpretations of what he or she experienced, the ‘world’ they recreate must not be their’s in the sense that the world of Oliver Twist is ‘Dickensian’ (Clifford, 1986: 13). Rather, constant reference must be made to both the field work that occurred (thus locating the study in the world depicted), and the ethnographic method that drives the study (thus justifying the author’s right to make interpretive moves) (Clifford, 1986: 14). It must be emphasised that the research is still occurring as the write-up proceeds. As the author finds ways of expressing his or her findings, so his or her interpretations of the situation become explicated. In the write-up the ethnographer brings other theories and arguments from relevant literature into the analysis of the findings, and so this stage represents the confluence of the external theoretical ideas and internal interpretive findings. It is in the write-up that ethnographies plunge from their sheer beginnings into the deep waters only vaguely charted by other commentators (Geertz, 1973: 25).
Thus, an ethnography can be represented as starting with the field work and progressing through the note taking and transcription phases to the write-up. But this is an artificially linear construction of the integrated, interdependent and holistic process that gives ethnography its strength. The importance of the author’s interpretations guarantees that each stage of the development of these interpretations is equally important and reliant on every other stage. No one part of the process can make any real sense without the others.
2.3 Relevant Ethnographic Studies
This brief review serves as the background for one of the reasons for the use of ethnographic methods, and should not be viewed as the presentation of the theoretical literature used to analyse the findings, which is presented in the Theoretical Literature section later in the dissertation.
The context and complexities that constitute the jobs people perform is a source of interest to many authors because even though “work is a constant part of our lives” (Orr, 1996: 1), it has often been labelled “routine, unskilled… or even trivial” (Smith, 2001: 221). Barley argues that “occupational images” exist which distort our ideas of what it is that occupations actually do (Barley, 1996: 406-407). Only by embracing ethnographic methods can researchers dispel these images and arrive at the genuinely informative descriptions of what people do whilst at work.
Descriptions of the actual work of librarians when studied at a local level and described in ‘thick’ detail are not common. George et al state that “few studies have been done of libraries…using ethnographic methods” (George et al, 2003: 2) and of these few, the most influential and honestly ethnographic is Nardi and O’Day’s study of librarians as intelligent systems at the Apple Reseach Laboratories (Nardi and O’Day, 1996). They found that librarians to perform complex, multi-faceted roles that greatly assisted their users (Nardi and O’Day, 1996: 80). This generous view of the work of librarians is echoed in George et al, 2003, which pictures librarians a “key-stone species” in the knowledge ecology: without librarians all other parts of this ecology could not function. Plum, 1994, expresses this sentiment and states that librarians “create communities” using their “rituals of knowledge” to bind users together (Plum, 1994: 500). Klopfer, 2004, shows how commercial libraries in an Indian city have managed to occupy a niche, created by the short-comings of Indian public libraries, and are thus, greatly appreciated by users.
The small selection presented above represents a large percentage of all the ethnographic studies conducted in libraries, which in its self is a justification for more studies that use the techniques of ethnography to examine the actual work of librarians. All the studies above set out with the purpose of demonstrating the worth of librarians, at the expense of a more even-handed depiction of their work practices, a feature commented on by Sandstrom and Sandstrom, 1995: 175. So, an even-handed ethnography that maintains the author’s disponibility or openness to honest interpretations of the actual state of affairs is called for. This dissertation represents an attempt to satisfy this gap in the literature.
2.4 Additional reasons for the use ethnographic methods
The author noticed significant differences between CiCS and Library staff whilst working at the Information Commons, and from these observations grew this dissertation, and so from the project’s inception, the author’s interpretation of events was at its core. Ethnography is the only method to allow for the author’s interpretation of events to assume such importance, and so it presented its self as an attractive methodologic option.
As a member of the group to be studied, the author and the subject would be particularly closely bound. This raised significant ethical issues (discussed below), and also the epistemic demand that the crucial role of the author’s interpretations in the development of this project be embraced and scrutinised. ‘Participant observation’, a type of ethnographic study (Jorgensen, 1989: 8), allowed for this demand to be met, since like all ethnographic methods, it emphasises the role of the researcher at the centre of the study. Participant observation allows the researcher to completely adopt the weltanschauung, or world-view, of the subjects by literally being one of them (Baker, 2006: 179), and was therefore particularly suited to this study .
The other crucial aspect of this study which demands an ethnographic approach was its subject matter. The working patterns and the interactions of the library and CiCS people were what initially motivated the study, and ethnography is a powerful way of examining the very “local textures” that define people’s work-lives (Smith, 2001: 220). Using a method which took people out of their normal work context (such as focus groups or formal interviews) would divorce the subjects of this study from the context that gave their actions meaning and enabled the initial interpretations of them. In addition, the opening of the Information Commons was intended to signal a new era of cooperation and convergence between Sheffield University Library and CiCS staff. This study of the differences between these two groups could have resulted in a failure to gather useful or insightful data if the subjects of the study were put in situations where they were fully aware that their actions and answers to questions were being used to study how they differed. Only by retaining the workplace context could it be guaranteed that their actions were ‘natural’ and not conditioned or normalised by the organisational changes that had occurred. From an epistemic point of view, this study demands that the natural contexts of work in the IC be preserved, and so ethnography appeared the most fitting methodology for this study.
Thus, the lack of a substantial body of literature that ethnographically addresses the ‘occupational images’ that are widely held of people working in libraries, the fact that the author’s interpretation of events originally prompted the project, the author’s proximity to the staff of the IC, and the fact that the IC staff needed to be studied in their natural work environment, all motivated the use ethnographic methods.
2.5 Epistemic Issues
The central epistemic issue that is raised by this study of the staff of the IC concerns the fact that the author is a member of library staff. This could potentially influence attempts to record and interpret the events and occurrences that are witnessed. It could be that situations will be inadvertently interpreted favourably towards the library staff. Alternatively, the author may over-compensate for his historic library bias by interpreting situations favourably towards the CiCS people. There are two main responses to these possibilities. Firstly, ethnography emphasises the value of the ethnographer’s ‘closeness’ to the phenomena, and so the author’s proximity to the issues and his privileged position within the working environment of the IC should perhaps be viewed as an epistemic boon and not as a drawback to this study. And secondly, the central importance of the ethnographer’s interpretation of events to the value of ethnographies is crucial. Thus, if it is made clear that all the meaning drawn from the events witnessed is ascribed by the author, and that many of the layers of significance will have been added by the author, then it will be possible to produce research that is honest and valuable.
Another epistemic concern raised here that distinguishes this from other studies, is the fact that the author must make the conceptual move from “complete participant” to observer (Baker, 2006: 174). This is in contrast to the majority of studies, where the move is generally in the opposite direction, with the researcher beginning as a “complete observer” and only slowly gaining the insight of a participant. Tedlock (1991) argues that making the epistemic move taken in this study encourages a high level of honesty because as the unique position of the author is made more and more important, so the ability of the readers to triangulate the author’s findings using the work of others becomes more difficult (Tedlock, 1991: 77-78). Thus, a guiding and defining principle in this study must be the honesty that an ethnographic approach demands.
More generally, another epistemic issue raised by the fact of the author’s closeness to the subjects of this study, is that the “freshness cycle” (Goffman, 1989: 130) will be vastly truncated, or might possibly have prematurely expired. This means that many of the ‘unusual’ events that define the IC staff’s view of the world will not appear as such to the author because he is accustomed to them. Perhaps more damaging to the epistemic credibility of this study, it could be that the author is able to recognise unusual events among the CiCS people, but not among the library people. This could result in a study that focuses more on the CiCS people’s behaviour than it does on the Library people’s, whereas this dissertation intends to study both these groups.
The deeply interpretive nature of ethnography as a method and the author’s proximity to the events discussed means the sections in this dissertation in which the ethnographic findings are presented will be written from a first person perspective. This is because third person accounts can be seen as “deceptive” in the presentation of findings from qualitative research – the social interaction implicit in research is obliterated if the ‘I’ is not used according to some authors (Webb, 1992: 749). In addition, ethnographic accounts deal with “complex and ambiguous” subjective situations which require the place of the first person to be not only admitted to but explicitly referenced if they are to make sense (Tedlock, 1991: 78). The importance of ‘the subjective’ will not only be evident from the use of first person vernacular during the presentation of findings, but is also indicated by the structure of this dissertation, because the way this study is organised represents an attempt to honestly record the order that the research process were undertaken and therefore, the progression of the author’s personal engagement with these processes. The structure of this dissertation is outlined below. In keeping with traditional academic rigour and formality, references to the first person will be absent from the rest of this study.
These epistemic issues are discussed with reference to how well they were
resolved in this study, in the ‘Discussion of the Method’ section.
2.6 Ethical Issues
All research that involves human participants raises certain ethical issues about the treatment of those participants. It has been argued that ethnography is actually the most ethically sound of all qualitative research methods because it “does not have human subjects” (Jorgensen, 1989: 28, emphasis in original). Jorgensen states that since the subjects of all ethnographic research are studied under the ordinary conditions of their everyday lives with the minimum of intrusion from the researcher, the ethnographer has “no more or less of an ethical obligation to… [them]… than he or she would have under other everyday life circumstances” (Jorgensen, 1989: 28). However, it seems crude to suggest that participants in ethnographies are not affected at all by research that involves them as subjects, and so some potential impact upon the subjects of this study will be outlined and, the ways in which these impacts have been minimised will be discussed.
The actual process of extracting information from participants could potentially cause embarrassment, shame, anxiety, guilt or damage to self-esteem (Murphy and Dingwall, 2001: 340). However, these effects are felt largely by subjects involved in studies where they are put into unusual settings and asked to answer difficult or complicated questions. In this study, all findings will be drawn from observations conducted whilst the participants are working, from informal conversations between the author and the subjects, or from conversations overheard between the subjects and their colleagues. Thus, since their actions need not diverge from naturalistic behaviour, much of the pressure normally placed on the subjects of research will be avoided in this study.
Ethnography involves close contact with people, meaning that a relationship between the researcher and the subjects inevitable develops. This relationship can be abruptly ended when the research finishes, or it can often result in the subject feeling cheated and objectified by the researcher who could be seen as ‘using them for information’. In this dissertation, the author had worked with the subjects for over a year, and so had already developed a relationship of trust with them. In addition, when the field research was completed contact with the subject’s was not abruptly terminated, thus hopefully, avoiding any feelings of objectification being caused.
The publication of ethnographic research can also adversely affect participants. With the exposure of the views of peers, the existence of unrealised relationships, or the description of hidden social hierarchies, can come feelings of rejection and self-doubt. Studies that radically alter the status quo inside social groups are not considered to be methodologically sound ethnographies (Murphy and Dingwall, 2001: 341). To alleviate ethical concerns along these lines, this dissertation will not be consultable for five years after its completion, and even then, it will not be published.
This prior reflection upon and rigorous adherence to the ethical issues surrounding qualitative research is intended to ensure that none of the subjects in this study were adversely affected by this research. The extent to which this was realised is discussed in the Discussion of Method section. Below, the stages that were undertaken in this dissertation are explicated.
2.7 Research Procedure
As has been remarked upon before, the author’s interpretation of the differences between Library and CiCS staff in the Information Commons is what provoked this study, so an investigation of various methods which could incorporate these interpretations was embarked upon as the first stage in this dissertation. Once ethnography had been settled upon as the most appropriate method (for the reasons listed above), the manager of the IC was applied to for permission to study the staff whilst they worked. This permission was granted in May, so ‘entry’ into the IC was secured. Although it was impossible to formally inform all the people who were observed in the IC since many of them only worked there transiently and only formed fleeting parts of some observations, all the people who were observed closely and all people engaged in conversation by the author were explicitly informed as to the existence of the study.
The author began to take brief notes of any salient differences that were observed from shortly after formal permission had been granted for the study to go ahead. Copies of crib sheets were also collected, as were emails, notices and other objects that might have formed the basis for some comparative analysis.
In the first week of June (the last week of semester, and so the last opportunity to observe the IC staff at their busiest), the author was placed on the Library staff rota to work three full days in the IC (Tuesday-Thursday). The author worked exactly as the full time staff in the IC worked, and so served on the counter for more than half the day, shadowed the IC staff when they ‘roved’, and sat in the staff area and observed whilst the other IC staff performed their ‘off-counter’ duties.
The author did ‘work’ whilst doing the field research because it was a busy period, and the IC were glad of extra help, but simultaneously, what Emerson et al call “jotted notes” were taken (Emerson et al, 2001: 356). Very brief key words and phrases were recorded to serve as reminders of events that seemed significant at the time. These were written in a small, unobtrusive notebook so as not to disturb the flow of the discourse that was occurring at the same time.
At opportune moments (for example at lunch times, or when changes of personnel occurred at the counter), the author would retire to the student café attached to the IC to do the first write up of these notes. This initial write up was conducted away from the staff area so that the author would not to be distracted by other relevant events, and so as not to raise the profile of the study amongst the staff, or compromise the naturalistic attitudes that were required. Initially, the events recorded in the jotted notes were elaborated upon, and this process served to remind the author of countless other events that had occurred during the observation stage. After Geertz (1973) these events were recorded as “thickly” as possible, with as much of the author’s own understanding and interpretation of the events as possible included in the initial write up. This process proved very productive, and would provoke the author to go back to the IC staff with wholly altered ideas as to what counted as significant events to record. The author reflected these changing priorities by putting key words at the top of each page to refer to the subjects that were considered the most significant whilst the observations were made.
After three days of observation, large quantities of hand-written A5 pages had been produced, and these were typed up with any additional interpretations that occurred to the author included in this second stage of the write-up. Several copies of the typed up notes were printed off, with one observed event or sequence of interaction to an A4 sheet. These were then organised into thematic categories, with the same observation going into more than one category if necessary. By reading and re-reading the notes, eventually 5 broad and overlapping categories were decided upon: ‘expertise’, ‘job propriety’, ‘jurisdiction’, ‘elaboration’ and ‘de-skilling’.
At this stage the collection of relevant theoretical literature that might explain or be applicable to the findings began. Originally, literature that sought to explain the differences between library and computer staff was researched, but this was scant and much of it was largely to do with macro-level factors and so not relevant to this local study. The literature on jurisdictional claims proved more fertile, with Andrew Abbott’s The System of Professions (Abbott, 1988) appearing to have particular explanatory power in the context of this dissertation. The literature of expertise was also explored. This research enabled the author to return to the categories that the observations had provisionally been organised into, and discarded observations that did not fall into the two most fertile categories remaining after the survey of the theoretic literature: ‘expertise’ and ‘jurisdiction’ (the observations in the ‘job propriety’ category were found to be highly relevant to the literature to do with jurisdiction, so this and the jurisdiction category were collapsed into one).
The field notes were then written up again using spatial not thematic categories: observations from the whole of the IC; observations from the counter; and observations from the staff area. This was intended to present a more narratologically appealing Findings section, akin to the vignettes that Orr presents (for example, Orr, 1996: 15-23), or the scene setting used by Kunda (Kunda, 1992: 26-30). This write-up of the findings was then used to discuss and apply the theoretical literature to this study. The write-up stages of ethnography illustrate just how holistic the method is. The final form of the write-up of the Findings depended upon the Theoretical Literature because the latter section determines which of the findings will be most fertile for discussion, but what was relevant theoretical literature could not have been decided upon without a clear idea of the themes that were to be present in the Findings section.
The structure of this dissertation is an attempt to honestly reflect the stages of the research as they happened, despite the fact that attempts to represent the process of ethnography in a linear way somewhat ignore the method’s holistic nature. Thus, the method is what was initially researched and is what should be seen to ‘drive’ the rest of the study, so the Methodology section is placed first. The Findings are placed before the Theoretical Literature because they suggested the areas that were researched and were extant before the literature had been extensively explored. The Theoretical Literature needs to be presented before the Discussion of Findings because this latter section exists only in the light of the literature and was produced after the findings and the literature had been collected. The Discussion of Method section can clearly only appear after the use of these methods has taken place. The fact that this dissertation is structured like this also serves to constantly relate it to the methodological principles that ensure it is transparent and open, and therefore, valuable. The impact of the decision to separate the sections of this dissertation in this way is discussed in the Discussion of Method section.
Findings
This section presents an honest representation of the author’s interpretation of the work of the staff of the Information Commons. It begins with a description of the salient features of the IC as they appeared to the author, and goes onto detail various observations that were made during the field work stage of this dissertation that were found to be relevant in the light of the theoretical literature. These observations are organised into categories that involve the actions of staff on the counter and then the actions of staff ‘off-counter’.
3.1 “…born out of completely fresh thinking…”
In April 2007 the Information Commons opened at Sheffield University. Intended as an undergraduate study facility, this £24M building contained 1300 study spaces, 550 PCs and around 100,000 books spread over seven floors. Intending to serve the needs of “the 21st Century student”, the IC was designed to contain “a whole range of study experiences within a single…building” (University of Sheffield, 2007). Thus, silent study areas are complimented by areas for more relaxed study; bookable group rooms co-exist with flexible study spaces containing moveable tables and screens; and RFID tagged books are managed by wholly self-service issue and return machines. Wire-less internet connection is available throughout the building, meaning that the café and the various sofa-areas are also capable of serving student’s study needs. The IC was the first addition to the University of Sheffield’s Library infrastructure in over 15 years and had taken over nine years to plan, design and build (Information Commons, 2007). As such, it was greatly anticipated and warmly received by the majority of the student body.
The fabric of the building is determinedly “future-proof” (University of Sheffield, 2007). The ecological impact of building is to be reduced by the use of movement sensitive shelf-lighting, self-regulating air conditioning, and a “grey water” system that recycles rain water for use in the toilettes. Students are encouraged to discard their rubbish in the clearly marked bins for paper, plastic or non-recyclable waste. Clad in “pre-patinated copper and grey terracotta” (Information Commons, 2007), the IC also boasts double-height, floor-to-ceiling windows, a series of ‘north-lights’ that let in large amounts of natural light all day but minimise solar glare, and soothing tones of off-white throughout. Each floor is highlighted with bright colours, and the IC’s promotional material is decorated with a diagonal band that echoes these colours. 24 hours a day and seven days a week, the IC is available exclusively to the students and staff of Sheffield University (others trying to get in are refused access), and the addition of this building on its “gateway site” beside one of Sheffield’s busiest arterial roads, is intended to give the University a service and an icon that is “the envy of its competitors” (University of Sheffield, 2007).
The University Library and CiCS jointly run all services in the IC. CiCS and the Library had worked together in the past, but mainly on short-term and small scale projects (Lewis and Sexton, 2000: 3). In anticipation of the joint running of the IC, all front-line Library staff and all front-line CiCS staff were given the opportunity to work in the front-line of the other department. All the IC jobs were advertised internally, except for the building manager’s job which was advertised nationally, and the Library Service and CiCS service managers’ jobs, which were offered to specific people.
The professionally choreographed branding and the image conscious design of the IC building also played a part in the selection of staff, and eight months prior to the opening of the building, a core of 16 people were appointed to work in the IC, seven of whom had worked for the Library previously, and nine of whom worked for CiCS previously. One Library person commented to me that: “I think they got the best people for those jobs…they only really wanted techie people…”. This assessment does seem fair, since all the Library people appointed to work in the IC are proficient and confident working with IT. It also struck me that they were younger than the majority of other front-line Library staff, suggesting that by accident or design, the staff would reflect the image of the building, and be more modern than the rest of the University’s library facilities. In order to further emphasise the unique qualities of the staff in the IC, fitted T-shirts in the bright colours of the floors and black fleeces with an embroidered IC badge were issued to staff, and they are obliged to wear some combination of these items when at work.
CiCS and Library staff share all front-line duties. These include customer service duties on the counter (called the ‘Help Desk’, “to avoid the old fashioned connotations of ‘Enquiry Desk’”, said one library person), ‘roving’ duties, and some off-counter duties specific to each person. The counter duties include library tasks such as issuing and discharging books; placing and satisfying reservations; and assisting students to find books and electronic resources. It is notable that there is no specified enquiry desk in the IC, and library people are not expected to give prolonged assistance to students in the traditional way: the senior library people commented that this was one of the reasons why “so many of us feel deskilled”. Tasks that would normally have been done exclusively by CiCS include assisting students who cannot connect to the wireless network; resolving problems to do with user accounts and passwords; enabling and unlocking print jobs; and resolving miscellaneous software problems.
Roving involves walking around the building in the distinctive IC staff T-shirts, and assisting students who ask for help; attending to problems that are pointed out by counter staff who stay in contact with the rovers by mobile phone; making sure that the printers and photocopiers are all well stocked with toner and paper; and shelving books. Many staff members hate the roving part of their job, with one CiCS person commenting to me that: “I’m not a librarian, so why should I have to shelve books?”, suggesting that many of the rovers’ intended duties are not enacted, a suggestion backed up by my observations in the IC – students approached the rovers rarely, meaning that most of their time was taken up with shelving.
Off-counter duties vary from person to person: one Library person works as the reservations co-ordinator, another is in charge of invoicing students for lost or stolen books, and another is in charge of logging the “comment, compliment, complaint” postcards that students are encouraged to fill in. The CiCS people have similarly diverse off-counter jobs, with one being in charge of programming and keeping up to date content on the information screens that can be found throughout the building, whilst another is in charge of fixing hardware problems found on PCs, and yet another is in charge of all staff PC problems and updates. However, it is important to note that, in fact, the majority of everyone’s time is spent in a directly customer serving environment, either on the counter or roving.
Occupancy statistics suggest that the IC is popular with students: it is regularly filled to capacity during term time. In fact, the volume of use that some of the services experienced following the first week of opening was so high that the Library had to appoint six more part-time shelvers, and second some members of counter staff from other library sites to work in the IC on a part-time basis.
3.2 The Help Desk: “…you won’t need to note this down…”
Work on the Help Desk is tiring and monotonous. It is intended that all CiCS and Library staff deal with any type of query. However, one CiCS person commented, “I pass all the book questions straight over to a Library person”, and this attitude did seem to be fairly common among the CiCS people. But, none of the Library people were keen to admit that they were not able to do the CiCS jobs, and would only ask for assistance from a CiCS person once they had attempted to help the user on their own.
It is common for students to come to the Help Desk with trouble connecting to the wireless network. On one occasion whilst I was observing, a student came to the Help Desk without a laptop, but wanting to know how to connect to the network. A CiCS person gave him the web page address with the instructions on and the student wrote this down. The CiCS person then said, “I’ll quickly run through the process on this computer to show you how simple it is”. The student was taking notes and trying to keep up, and the CiCS person kept saying “it’s all on the website, so you won’t need to note this down”. The CiCS person ran through the process very quickly, so quickly that the student was left not having gained anything from the demonstration that would have helped him connect to the wireless network later – the only useful thing that he took from the exchange was the web address. The CiCS person’s insistence on performing the demonstration appeared to serve the sole purpose of impressing upon anyone who was listening that the CiCS person was able to connect to the wireless network.
In contrast to this query handling example, a student approached a Library person and asked what time one of the other library sites was open until that evening. The Library person said he did not know but found the relevant library web page. He invited the student to come round the Help Desk and look at the web page, and then showed him how to get there from the library home page, and finally printed the relevant page off for the student. What is interesting about this example is not that the Library person’s assistance was more helpful to the student than the help that the CiCS person gave in the previous example (in fact, the student seemed a little annoyed that his simple query had provoked so long-winded a response from the Library person), but rather that the Library person seemed so keen to exhaustively disseminate what knowledge he had of the subject.
There is a notable symmetry between the differing ways that CiCS and Library people pass knowledge and information on to students and between the differing ways that they pass knowledge and information on to their colleagues. I asked the senior Library person “what do I do at the end of the day with the deposits people have left for booked rooms?” She said: “I made a crib sheet that was emailed round…I’ll print it off for you”. She then opened the email on her computer and took me through the process with the printed copy, and the email in front of us. I asked the same question of the senior CiCS person the next day and she said “you give the folder with deposits and U-cards to the porters”. This was a succinct, accurate summary of the information that the senior Library person had given to me the day before, but did not show me how I might find that information out again in the event of me forgetting, and seemed to preserve the CiCS person’s cache of unique knowledge: I only knew the bare minimum after this exchange, whereas I think that the Library person had given me all the information that there was on the subject.
Another striking example of how distinct the attitudes of CiCS people are to the attitudes of Library people in relation to disseminating information amongst colleagues occurred on the first morning of my observations. As is typical, one of the library co-ordinators was keen to fill me in on changes that had occurred since I had last worked. The self-service return machine had been freezing at often but arbitrary moments. The only way to resolve this problem was to re-start the PC that ran the self-return machine, which was housed in a cupboard underneath the RFID scanner. The Library co-ordinator took me through this process, and then showed me a crib-sheet that he had produced to make sure that I understood it. He said that this would be available behind the counter, and that he would email it to all staff. The crib-sheet involved eight stages and most of them were very trivial: “get the key marked ‘return machine’ from the key box in cupboard 5 behind the counter”; “from the start menu select ‘restart’ and then click ‘OK’”; “close and lock the cupboard and replace the key in the key box”. It seemed as though these instructions were intended for someone who had not only never worked in the building before, but who had also never used a PC before.
The striking depth that these crib sheets went in to relative to the complexity of the task they described, and the striking lengths to which the library co-ordinator went to guarantee that staff were aware of the task, is emphasised when juxtaposed with an exchange that occurred between me and a CiCS co-ordinator later that day. I asked the CiCS person if there were any crib-sheets for the most commonly occurring software problems that we would have to resolve and she said that “you won’t really need them…they’ll always be a CiCS person around for you to ask, and anyway, the problems are always so easy that it would be a waste of time to make up crib sheets for them”. I asked her what the most common problems were, and she said, “…mainly Word problems like setting up section breaks, using footnotes and sometimes Endnote…enabling more file store in users’ managed accounts…” Although a lot of these things are fairly trivial, all of them are as complicated, if not more complicated than the self-service machine restart that the library co-ordinator spent so much time detailing. These examples struck me as illustrating a fundamental difference between the way CiCS and Library people pass on knowledge to colleagues and users of the IC.
3.3 Off-Counter: “…I’m a Mac person...”
The staff area is separated from the Help Desk by a glass wall. There are 20 desks organised into facing rows with between two and six desks in each row. The building manager and the Library and CiCS seniors have desks in offices separated from the main staff area by other glass walls. Although not by design, the Library and CiCS people have separated and now sit in two distinct groups. Since the CiCS people need more space for PCs that need mending and other equipment that they are using, they have adopted the largest bank of desks. The library people need desks against which they can place book trolleys, and so they have adopted the bank of desks with the easiest access and surrounded by the most space. As well as sitting slightly apart, the Library and CiCS people also take their breaks in ways that reinforce the fact that they are different groups: the CiCS people invariably have cups of coffee and eat their lunch sitting at their desks, whilst the Library people will normally go to the staff room or go out for their breaks. However, although there are differences between the groups reflected in their working patterns, the atmosphere in the staff area is harmonious and on an individual level I saw no evidence of animosity between members of the two groups during my time observing.
CiCS people regularly tell jokes to one another that rely upon the computing strengths and weaknesses of their colleagues: “…don’t give that to him, he’ll code it in PHP…”; “...I hate Mondays, but he doesn’t because it lets him get back to re-imaging PCs…”; “…we’ll be here all night if he’s programming the printer queues…”. These jokes are not amusing but never fail to provoke knowing chuckles from the CiCS people. I also heard a CiCS person who did not work in the IC comment to one of the CiCS people who had been moved there, “…how’s the shelving going?”.
These jokes succeed in giving the impression that the CiCS people have a fairly advanced system of reputation ascription. This system is also evident in the actions of CiCS people when they are solving problems that their colleagues bring to them. I heard one CiCS person ask another to help him install some security updates on a Chinese format PC (requiring a high level of familiarity with Windows). The other CiCS person replied “…I’m a Mac person, so I’m not really the best person to ask about this”. This seems to show that the CiCS person is fully aware of his own strengths and weakness, and is not afraid of drawing his colleague’s attention to any weakness that he may have, because in doing so he also indicated that he had strengths in other areas. This recognition and then exhibition of talents for particular tasks is not something that happens amongst the Library people: there seems to be no desire to be thought of as someone who can do some tasks but cannot do others.
The way CiCS people talk about the organisation that they exist within is also strikingly different from the way that the Library people talk about the larger library. A CiCS person was complaining to me about his lack of ability to get his suggestions heard by the more senior people in CiCS, or to get any changes that he recommended enacted. He said “…its annoying that there are so many little kingdoms in CiCS”. This comment is significant because it demonstrates that even quite a junior member of the CiCS staff is interested enough in the organisation that he works for to come up with a description of it that reveals so much about the character of its structure. Although the phrase “little kingdoms” does indicate that the CiCS person perceives rivalries and petty jealousy in CiCS, it also carries the connotation of significant and clearly defined areas of jurisdiction that require defending, and are being defended successfully. The word ‘kingdom’ itself is laden with suggestions of grandeur, exclusivity and distinctiveness.
In contrast to this example of a CiCS person’s interpretation of their organisation, stands an exchange that I overheard between two library people. They were discussing whether or not a student who had not paid his accumulated fines all year would get them waived at the beginning of the following academic year (from September 2006, every student’s first fine was waived in a goodwill gesture by the library). One of the Library people commented, “…I bet nobody has thought of that”. This ended their discussion, and implied that they had very different conceptions of their organisation than the CiCS people had of their’s. The Library people appeared to not know, and not care who was in charge of this sort of policy refinement. They were also clearly of the opinion that the decision was nothing to do with them, and anyway that they didn’t really mind how the problem was resolved. In addition, it is clear from this comment that they do not think very highly of the library’s ability to think through this sort of practical decision. Thus, the Library people’s perception of their organisation is on the whole negative, whist the CiCS people’s perception of CiCS, although with an outwardly negative tinge to it, is in fact roundly positive.
3.1 “…born out of completely fresh thinking…”
In April 2007 the Information Commons opened at Sheffield University. Intended as an undergraduate study facility, this £24M building contained 1300 study spaces, 550 PCs and around 100,000 books spread over seven floors. Intending to serve the needs of “the 21st Century student”, the IC was designed to contain “a whole range of study experiences within a single…building” (University of Sheffield, 2007). Thus, silent study areas are complimented by areas for more relaxed study; bookable group rooms co-exist with flexible study spaces containing moveable tables and screens; and RFID tagged books are managed by wholly self-service issue and return machines. Wire-less internet connection is available throughout the building, meaning that the café and the various sofa-areas are also capable of serving student’s study needs. The IC was the first addition to the University of Sheffield’s Library infrastructure in over 15 years and had taken over nine years to plan, design and build (Information Commons, 2007). As such, it was greatly anticipated and warmly received by the majority of the student body.
The fabric of the building is determinedly “future-proof” (University of Sheffield, 2007). The ecological impact of building is to be reduced by the use of movement sensitive shelf-lighting, self-regulating air conditioning, and a “grey water” system that recycles rain water for use in the toilettes. Students are encouraged to discard their rubbish in the clearly marked bins for paper, plastic or non-recyclable waste. Clad in “pre-patinated copper and grey terracotta” (Information Commons, 2007), the IC also boasts double-height, floor-to-ceiling windows, a series of ‘north-lights’ that let in large amounts of natural light all day but minimise solar glare, and soothing tones of off-white throughout. Each floor is highlighted with bright colours, and the IC’s promotional material is decorated with a diagonal band that echoes these colours. 24 hours a day and seven days a week, the IC is available exclusively to the students and staff of Sheffield University (others trying to get in are refused access), and the addition of this building on its “gateway site” beside one of Sheffield’s busiest arterial roads, is intended to give the University a service and an icon that is “the envy of its competitors” (University of Sheffield, 2007).
The University Library and CiCS jointly run all services in the IC. CiCS and the Library had worked together in the past, but mainly on short-term and small scale projects (Lewis and Sexton, 2000: 3). In anticipation of the joint running of the IC, all front-line Library staff and all front-line CiCS staff were given the opportunity to work in the front-line of the other department. All the IC jobs were advertised internally, except for the building manager’s job which was advertised nationally, and the Library Service and CiCS service managers’ jobs, which were offered to specific people.
The professionally choreographed branding and the image conscious design of the IC building also played a part in the selection of staff, and eight months prior to the opening of the building, a core of 16 people were appointed to work in the IC, seven of whom had worked for the Library previously, and nine of whom worked for CiCS previously. One Library person commented to me that: “I think they got the best people for those jobs…they only really wanted techie people…”. This assessment does seem fair, since all the Library people appointed to work in the IC are proficient and confident working with IT. It also struck me that they were younger than the majority of other front-line Library staff, suggesting that by accident or design, the staff would reflect the image of the building, and be more modern than the rest of the University’s library facilities. In order to further emphasise the unique qualities of the staff in the IC, fitted T-shirts in the bright colours of the floors and black fleeces with an embroidered IC badge were issued to staff, and they are obliged to wear some combination of these items when at work.
CiCS and Library staff share all front-line duties. These include customer service duties on the counter (called the ‘Help Desk’, “to avoid the old fashioned connotations of ‘Enquiry Desk’”, said one library person), ‘roving’ duties, and some off-counter duties specific to each person. The counter duties include library tasks such as issuing and discharging books; placing and satisfying reservations; and assisting students to find books and electronic resources. It is notable that there is no specified enquiry desk in the IC, and library people are not expected to give prolonged assistance to students in the traditional way: the senior library people commented that this was one of the reasons why “so many of us feel deskilled”. Tasks that would normally have been done exclusively by CiCS include assisting students who cannot connect to the wireless network; resolving problems to do with user accounts and passwords; enabling and unlocking print jobs; and resolving miscellaneous software problems.
Roving involves walking around the building in the distinctive IC staff T-shirts, and assisting students who ask for help; attending to problems that are pointed out by counter staff who stay in contact with the rovers by mobile phone; making sure that the printers and photocopiers are all well stocked with toner and paper; and shelving books. Many staff members hate the roving part of their job, with one CiCS person commenting to me that: “I’m not a librarian, so why should I have to shelve books?”, suggesting that many of the rovers’ intended duties are not enacted, a suggestion backed up by my observations in the IC – students approached the rovers rarely, meaning that most of their time was taken up with shelving.
Off-counter duties vary from person to person: one Library person works as the reservations co-ordinator, another is in charge of invoicing students for lost or stolen books, and another is in charge of logging the “comment, compliment, complaint” postcards that students are encouraged to fill in. The CiCS people have similarly diverse off-counter jobs, with one being in charge of programming and keeping up to date content on the information screens that can be found throughout the building, whilst another is in charge of fixing hardware problems found on PCs, and yet another is in charge of all staff PC problems and updates. However, it is important to note that, in fact, the majority of everyone’s time is spent in a directly customer serving environment, either on the counter or roving.
Occupancy statistics suggest that the IC is popular with students: it is regularly filled to capacity during term time. In fact, the volume of use that some of the services experienced following the first week of opening was so high that the Library had to appoint six more part-time shelvers, and second some members of counter staff from other library sites to work in the IC on a part-time basis.
3.2 The Help Desk: “…you won’t need to note this down…”
Work on the Help Desk is tiring and monotonous. It is intended that all CiCS and Library staff deal with any type of query. However, one CiCS person commented, “I pass all the book questions straight over to a Library person”, and this attitude did seem to be fairly common among the CiCS people. But, none of the Library people were keen to admit that they were not able to do the CiCS jobs, and would only ask for assistance from a CiCS person once they had attempted to help the user on their own.
It is common for students to come to the Help Desk with trouble connecting to the wireless network. On one occasion whilst I was observing, a student came to the Help Desk without a laptop, but wanting to know how to connect to the network. A CiCS person gave him the web page address with the instructions on and the student wrote this down. The CiCS person then said, “I’ll quickly run through the process on this computer to show you how simple it is”. The student was taking notes and trying to keep up, and the CiCS person kept saying “it’s all on the website, so you won’t need to note this down”. The CiCS person ran through the process very quickly, so quickly that the student was left not having gained anything from the demonstration that would have helped him connect to the wireless network later – the only useful thing that he took from the exchange was the web address. The CiCS person’s insistence on performing the demonstration appeared to serve the sole purpose of impressing upon anyone who was listening that the CiCS person was able to connect to the wireless network.
In contrast to this query handling example, a student approached a Library person and asked what time one of the other library sites was open until that evening. The Library person said he did not know but found the relevant library web page. He invited the student to come round the Help Desk and look at the web page, and then showed him how to get there from the library home page, and finally printed the relevant page off for the student. What is interesting about this example is not that the Library person’s assistance was more helpful to the student than the help that the CiCS person gave in the previous example (in fact, the student seemed a little annoyed that his simple query had provoked so long-winded a response from the Library person), but rather that the Library person seemed so keen to exhaustively disseminate what knowledge he had of the subject.
There is a notable symmetry between the differing ways that CiCS and Library people pass knowledge and information on to students and between the differing ways that they pass knowledge and information on to their colleagues. I asked the senior Library person “what do I do at the end of the day with the deposits people have left for booked rooms?” She said: “I made a crib sheet that was emailed round…I’ll print it off for you”. She then opened the email on her computer and took me through the process with the printed copy, and the email in front of us. I asked the same question of the senior CiCS person the next day and she said “you give the folder with deposits and U-cards to the porters”. This was a succinct, accurate summary of the information that the senior Library person had given to me the day before, but did not show me how I might find that information out again in the event of me forgetting, and seemed to preserve the CiCS person’s cache of unique knowledge: I only knew the bare minimum after this exchange, whereas I think that the Library person had given me all the information that there was on the subject.
Another striking example of how distinct the attitudes of CiCS people are to the attitudes of Library people in relation to disseminating information amongst colleagues occurred on the first morning of my observations. As is typical, one of the library co-ordinators was keen to fill me in on changes that had occurred since I had last worked. The self-service return machine had been freezing at often but arbitrary moments. The only way to resolve this problem was to re-start the PC that ran the self-return machine, which was housed in a cupboard underneath the RFID scanner. The Library co-ordinator took me through this process, and then showed me a crib-sheet that he had produced to make sure that I understood it. He said that this would be available behind the counter, and that he would email it to all staff. The crib-sheet involved eight stages and most of them were very trivial: “get the key marked ‘return machine’ from the key box in cupboard 5 behind the counter”; “from the start menu select ‘restart’ and then click ‘OK’”; “close and lock the cupboard and replace the key in the key box”. It seemed as though these instructions were intended for someone who had not only never worked in the building before, but who had also never used a PC before.
The striking depth that these crib sheets went in to relative to the complexity of the task they described, and the striking lengths to which the library co-ordinator went to guarantee that staff were aware of the task, is emphasised when juxtaposed with an exchange that occurred between me and a CiCS co-ordinator later that day. I asked the CiCS person if there were any crib-sheets for the most commonly occurring software problems that we would have to resolve and she said that “you won’t really need them…they’ll always be a CiCS person around for you to ask, and anyway, the problems are always so easy that it would be a waste of time to make up crib sheets for them”. I asked her what the most common problems were, and she said, “…mainly Word problems like setting up section breaks, using footnotes and sometimes Endnote…enabling more file store in users’ managed accounts…” Although a lot of these things are fairly trivial, all of them are as complicated, if not more complicated than the self-service machine restart that the library co-ordinator spent so much time detailing. These examples struck me as illustrating a fundamental difference between the way CiCS and Library people pass on knowledge to colleagues and users of the IC.
3.3 Off-Counter: “…I’m a Mac person...”
The staff area is separated from the Help Desk by a glass wall. There are 20 desks organised into facing rows with between two and six desks in each row. The building manager and the Library and CiCS seniors have desks in offices separated from the main staff area by other glass walls. Although not by design, the Library and CiCS people have separated and now sit in two distinct groups. Since the CiCS people need more space for PCs that need mending and other equipment that they are using, they have adopted the largest bank of desks. The library people need desks against which they can place book trolleys, and so they have adopted the bank of desks with the easiest access and surrounded by the most space. As well as sitting slightly apart, the Library and CiCS people also take their breaks in ways that reinforce the fact that they are different groups: the CiCS people invariably have cups of coffee and eat their lunch sitting at their desks, whilst the Library people will normally go to the staff room or go out for their breaks. However, although there are differences between the groups reflected in their working patterns, the atmosphere in the staff area is harmonious and on an individual level I saw no evidence of animosity between members of the two groups during my time observing.
CiCS people regularly tell jokes to one another that rely upon the computing strengths and weaknesses of their colleagues: “…don’t give that to him, he’ll code it in PHP…”; “...I hate Mondays, but he doesn’t because it lets him get back to re-imaging PCs…”; “…we’ll be here all night if he’s programming the printer queues…”. These jokes are not amusing but never fail to provoke knowing chuckles from the CiCS people. I also heard a CiCS person who did not work in the IC comment to one of the CiCS people who had been moved there, “…how’s the shelving going?”.
These jokes succeed in giving the impression that the CiCS people have a fairly advanced system of reputation ascription. This system is also evident in the actions of CiCS people when they are solving problems that their colleagues bring to them. I heard one CiCS person ask another to help him install some security updates on a Chinese format PC (requiring a high level of familiarity with Windows). The other CiCS person replied “…I’m a Mac person, so I’m not really the best person to ask about this”. This seems to show that the CiCS person is fully aware of his own strengths and weakness, and is not afraid of drawing his colleague’s attention to any weakness that he may have, because in doing so he also indicated that he had strengths in other areas. This recognition and then exhibition of talents for particular tasks is not something that happens amongst the Library people: there seems to be no desire to be thought of as someone who can do some tasks but cannot do others.
The way CiCS people talk about the organisation that they exist within is also strikingly different from the way that the Library people talk about the larger library. A CiCS person was complaining to me about his lack of ability to get his suggestions heard by the more senior people in CiCS, or to get any changes that he recommended enacted. He said “…its annoying that there are so many little kingdoms in CiCS”. This comment is significant because it demonstrates that even quite a junior member of the CiCS staff is interested enough in the organisation that he works for to come up with a description of it that reveals so much about the character of its structure. Although the phrase “little kingdoms” does indicate that the CiCS person perceives rivalries and petty jealousy in CiCS, it also carries the connotation of significant and clearly defined areas of jurisdiction that require defending, and are being defended successfully. The word ‘kingdom’ itself is laden with suggestions of grandeur, exclusivity and distinctiveness.
In contrast to this example of a CiCS person’s interpretation of their organisation, stands an exchange that I overheard between two library people. They were discussing whether or not a student who had not paid his accumulated fines all year would get them waived at the beginning of the following academic year (from September 2006, every student’s first fine was waived in a goodwill gesture by the library). One of the Library people commented, “…I bet nobody has thought of that”. This ended their discussion, and implied that they had very different conceptions of their organisation than the CiCS people had of their’s. The Library people appeared to not know, and not care who was in charge of this sort of policy refinement. They were also clearly of the opinion that the decision was nothing to do with them, and anyway that they didn’t really mind how the problem was resolved. In addition, it is clear from this comment that they do not think very highly of the library’s ability to think through this sort of practical decision. Thus, the Library people’s perception of their organisation is on the whole negative, whist the CiCS people’s perception of CiCS, although with an outwardly negative tinge to it, is in fact roundly positive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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