Wednesday, July 24, 2013

neoliberalism: little pink libraries for you and me

I was attempting to encapsulate where neoliberalism in libraries is going and since I tend to use images, not words, the "little pink houses" metaphor came to mind. To me, they are boring, stale and repetitive and allow for/reflect minimal creativity. An ink pad and stamp also comes to mind. One picture/version of reality being imposed (stamped) across all libraries.

It seems that one of the threads I perceive with many competencies (lists of knowledge, skills and attributes) promulgated by administrators, associations and even individuals, is the attempt to create a "stamp" representing a specific type of librarian and/or facet/quality such as leadership, that anyone might replicate in their library. Replication is easy since intent or statement that something is a certain way is considered the equivalent to it being that way, regardless of the reality of bleeding edges or bad fit, as though by brute, neoliberal categorization one may force it into the desired mode. There is  a "sameness" to our work under neoliberal descriptions.

I find it ironic/satirical that neoliberalism is in the process of introducing a new stereotype/image of librarians. This stereotype is one where the representation (clean edged with discrete categories, [and negative in a "those poor souls, they don't understand" kind of way that undermines expertise]) is more important than the reality, more important than attempting to  reflect and honour the blurred edges/expertise of our work.

The attacks on librarianship are important to suborn the people within the field and bring them under the control of neoliberal values and ideologies. Many would argue against this description of what is happening, as neoliberal statements quote creativity, vision, leadership and all sorts of other yummy words. But no one has yet done a study that asks "on-the-ground" librarians whether they are actively able to act or perform in such a way to meet those selfsame competencies' statements. My suspicion (and I've become a knee-jerk skeptic) is that most of these librarians would say they do not meet those statements and that they are not able to act professionally in a manner that would meet and exceed these statements. Thus complaints about deskilling which in reality are an indicator of deprofessionalization. (yay! I think I just discovered a method of measuring the perceived presence of neoliberalism in academic libraries).

The "sameness" introduced by administrations, etc. would allow for comparative evaluation, one of the strategies used by neoliberalism to reduce the number of persons doing the work and the expense of the work, and to push responsibility for the relative success or failure of libraries on to the individuals involved (individual responsibility, not collective, egad, never collective as the latter is an abomination), excluding library administrators.

Cynical yes. Can we "prove" it? Takes a greater depth of understanding than I currently have and huge study to understand and link the neoliberal values with their strategies and the new infrastructures pointedly designed to keep librarians down (similar to complaints by women re: structural inequities that reduce/negate options). I can read about it and share what I'm learning in these blog entries but proving it is much harder.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home