The Library as Institution: Understanding Bureaucracy and Organizational Change
Janice Cheryl Beaver
Information Research Specialist
Library of Congress
Recent scholarship on libraries has attempted to develop more sophisticated
conceptions of how libraries interact with changing forms of technology, media, and
culture. To this end, information science has productively engaged social and cultural
theories of mediation and language. In this vein, I would like to consider another branch
of social theory that I believe can help to elucidate some important issues in librarianship.
In particular, I want to consider possible contributions that the “New Institutionalism”
can make toward understanding the institutional and bureaucratic nature of libraries
themselves, especially in regards to how libraries approach organizational change.
In his “Constructing an Organizational Field as a Professional Project: U.S. Art
Museums, 1920-1940,” Paul J. Dimaggio describes the tensions within the organizational
field of U.S. art museums. He claims that organizational analysis has largely
characterized institutional change as “taken-for-granted, nondirected, nonconflictual
evolution at the expense of intentional (if boundedly rational), directive, and conflictladen processes that define fields and set them upon trajectories that eventually appear as
‘natural’ developments to participants and observers alike” (DiMaggio, 268). While
Dimaggio’s focus is on American art museums, I believe that many of his insights would
hold for the ways in which librarianship also considers organizational change.
While my juxtaposition of the professional field of librarianship vis-a-vis
Dimaggio’s theoretical assertions does not suggest a historical equivalence between the
two professional arenas, his essay offers insight into the often unexplored or certainly
underexplored dichotomy between those who work in libraries and those writing about
the field in blogs, scholarly publications, or in the context of their membership in
professional organizations (such as the American Library Association or Special
Libraries Association). Of course, these are often the same people; however, I would
propose that there is a dual consciousness dividing professionals fulfilling institutional
roles and those in professional organizations. Thus, what Dimaggio suggests about art
museums might also hold for libraries. As he states, “what is striking, however, is how
little conflict occurred inside organizations and how much was played out at the level of
the field. Professionals seem to have possessed a dual consciousness that enabled them to
function as conservatives in organizational roles at the same time they used fieldwide
organizations to launch attacks on the system that employed them” (268). What this
amounts to in practice is often a call for innovation, creativity, and outside-the-box
thinking that exists simultaneously with a whole host of bureaucratic mechanisms that
maintain institutionally conservative logics that are resistant to change.
While my paper will focus on recent and known examples of this dual
consciousness, such as the SLA “name change” controversy, I will also explore my
experiences of being a graduate student navigating a largely positivist (with some
important exceptions) LIS curriculum in what I understood to be a post-positivist world.
One example I will explore in my presentation focuses on how calls for scholarly
innovation in LIS are met with a mix of abstract agreement and practical skepticism.
Despite laying out the red carpet for Wayne Wiegand (the then co-editor of the
prestigious Library Quarterly) by the heavily-endowed University of Texas’s Harry
Ransom Center, many faculty at the School of Information grumbled at what they
thought was a personal indictment delivered against their academic careers. Certainly,
some faculty who focused on gathering pure, unmediated data did not possess a dual
consciousness to the extent that they did not bother to advocate innovative approaches to
library science. But many other faculty paid passing homage to Wiegand and his
perceived attack on the LIS community by assigning his 1999 article, “Tunnel Vision and
Blind Spots: What the Past Tells us About the Present: Reflections on the Twentieth
Century History of American Librarianship” in syllabi still largely composed of the
aforementioned positivist, social-scientific research (or maybe interspersed with the
wisdom of evangelical Christian texts such as Habits of the High-Tech Heart: Living
Virtuously in the Information Age). Consistent with Dimaggio’s observations about dual
consciousness, assigning Wiegand’s essay functioned as a kind of rhetorical tribute to
innovation while the bulk of the practical training focused on reproducing traditional
approaches to library science.
The irony is that on the macro-organizational level there may be an official
endorsement of innovation (be it scholarly or otherwise), but within library institutions
themselves, actors, be it staff or those in more senior positions, often replicate standard
practices in opposition to those innovations and innovators hailed by professional library
organizations and well-respected librarians in the field. For example, social media
revolutionaries such as Chris Rasmussen and Micheal Wesch are often venerated in
library circles. They are not librarians, but they are paid significant honorariums to speak
at professional library and information conferences. When Wesch was invited by the
Kluge Center to speak at the Library of Congress, late comers found themselves in the
rare position of being chairless. Given the persistent and frequent use of the term “library
automation” to refer to information technology, particularly in job announcements
designed to lure the best and brightest applicants, the wide-spread interest in Wesch and
his viral-video phenomenon might seem puzzling. My point here, however, is not to
suggest or denounce hypocrisy as much as to understand the breakdown between
individual intentions, fieldwide endorsements, and institutional practices.
In Bill Drew’s Blog, “Baby Boomer Librarian,” he produced the popular post,
“How to Kill a Young Librarian’s Love of Librarianship.” The post, widely linked to
throughout the librarian blogosphere, in part, describes his conversation that he had with
a young librarian at a SUNYLA conference:
This librarian has been in a SUNY library for over 5 years. He is enthusiastic,
excited, and extremely intelligent. However, the library he works in has gone through
a major regression in management style over the past decade. It has gone from being
a dynamic forward thinking and innovative environment to one laden with unwilling
and staid librarians with a bureaucratic and fifties style organization structure. It has
added many layers of middle management in the last couple of years instead of being
a flat organizational model as most libraries in SUNY are striving to become. Many
librarians there that used to be innovative when I first knew them 24 years ago are
now protecting their turf and working on maintaining the status quo. The worst part
of it is that librarians there do not even recognize what has happened.
Drew follows the conversation with his often republished “list of how to kill a
young librarian's love of librarianship.” My sympathy for the list and post is shared by
many librarians of all ages, and I do have certain prescriptive goals for integrating
innovation into librarianship. However, by drawing on the New Institutionalism, I am
hoping to first understand how bureaucracies work. To this end, it is crucial to be able to
explain the institutional conditions under which individual commitments to change have
to face practical incentives to maintain bureaucratic order.