The 21st Century Academic Library

Global Patterns of Organization and Discourse

Mary K. Bolin

• Publisher: Chandos Publishing
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780081018668
• eBook ISBN: 9780081018675
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The 21st Century Academic Library: Global Patterns of Organization and Discourse discusses the organization of academic libraries, drawing on detailed research and data.The organization of the library follows the path of a print book or journal: acquisitions, cataloguing, circulation, reference, instruction, preservation and general administration. Most libraries still have public services and technical services, and are still very print-based in their organization, while their collections and services are increasingly electronic and virtual.This book gathers information on organizational patterns of large academic libraries in the US and Europe, providing data that could motivate libraries to adopt innovative organizational structures or assess the effectiveness of their current organizational patterns.- Contributes to the literature on the globalization of information and of library and information science- Analyzes and presents data in a way that allows librarians and library administrators to consider what organizational patterns are the most effective for the goals they are pursuing- Includes emerging patterns that are not widely seen in the academic library population

Chapter 1

Introduction

Abstract

This chapter describes the goals, frameworks, methods, and data for this project, including the creation of a typology of academic library organizational patterns, based on a population of 210 libraries in regions that include North America, South Asia, Africa, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. The theoretical frameworks are linguistic typology, discourse analysis, institutional isomorphism, and comparative education. Methodology includes genre and register analysis using academic library organizational charts and websites as sources of data.

Keywords

Academic libraries; typology; organization; discourse analysis

Organizations and Institutions

We all know what “organization” means. It means more than one thing, including the various methods of arranging information and objects in a way that makes sense to us. In this book, “organization” is used to mean several things. Its most prominent meaning is a “corporate body,” as catalogers say, a firm, corporation, club, charity, or any of the many public service entities such as governments, schools, healthcare agencies, and, most certainly libraries. Libraries are an organization in the sense that they are groups of people employed to provide library service to a constituency. They have common missions, goals, and objectives, and they communicate and work together to carry them out. In most cases, they are paid to do so by a governing body such as a university or a municipal government, for example. “Organization” also means the structures that entities such as libraries use to divide labor, develop expertise and specialization, and carry out the library’s mission in the most efficient and effective way. That generally means that the library is divided into departments and units who are responsible for some part of that mission: acquiring library resources, for example, or cataloging them, or helping users find and use them. There is an administrative structure that is generally hierarchical to a greater or lesser extent, with a library director at the top of the hierarchy.

Likewise, the word “institution” is well-known to most people and it also has several meanings. It can be used as a synonym for “organization,” as in “institution of higher education,” which means a college or university. It can also be used in the sense of something established, long-standing, a tradition, and part of the fabric of everyday life, e.g., “football is an institution on this campus.” Individuals are sometimes described this way as well, i.e., “Professor Smith has been here 40 years and is an institution at this university,” meaning that Prof. Smith is well-known, admired, and an inextricable part of the university’s community and identity. We will use “institution” in both senses: in its common meaning as a synonym for organization, but, more importantly as part of the phenomenon of “institutionalization,” which is the subject of numerous theories and a great deal of scholarship. The institutionalist lens looks at how practices and entities become institutionalized: become something widely recognized, accepted, and bound up with other aspects of society and culture. Education is “an institution,” and many aspects of education are institutionalized. Libraries are institutionalized as well, as are the components of library organization and practice. The theoretical framework of institutionalism plays a crucial role in analyzing the data collected for this book, and it will be discussed in more detail in this chapter and others.

This book looks at the organization of academic libraries from four perspectives:

• Who we are: using data from organizational charts and other sources to look at the actual patterns of departmental structure in academic libraries around the world.

• What we say about who we are: using discourse analysis and genres of organizational communication to analyze the way we present ourselves in our web presence and in information about our organizations.

• How we got where we are: examining the mechanisms of “institutionalism” to analyze the forces that shape our organizations and foster stasis or change.

• How we compare: using the framework of comparative education to examine how patterns of organization differ in the countries that are the sources of data.

University libraries are organized in this specialized and hierarchical way, and have recognizable patterns of organization that whose general outlines have been in place for decades. This book examines those patterns, using a variety of techniques and theoretical lenses to discover how academic libraries in selected regions of the globe are organized, and what we can infer and learn from these patterns. Those theoretical frameworks include using data from an international population to create a typology of organizational types and then analyzing those types using discourse analysis (Halliday, 1978; Fairclough, 1989; Hoey, 2001; Hodge & Cress, 1988, 1993; Swales, 1990), theories of structuration (Giddens, 1979, 1984), bureaucracy (Weber, 1968/1922), and institutionalism (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). It also draws on sociological theories by Durkheim (n.d., 1893). Typology, discourse analysis, and institutionalism are all related. Sociolinguistics is the foundation of discourse analysis: language in use in a social context. Typology is used in many disciplines and is an important area of linguistic analysis. Institutionalization is used in disciplines such as sociology and political science, and aspects of society become institutionalized by talking about them: communication, texts, conversations, documents, discourses, and so on.

This book uses mixed methods to create a typology of academic libraries in selected countries worldwide. It analyzes the characteristics of the organizational types to gain insight into the challenges of academic libraries in the 21st century and the libraries’ responses to these challenges. In addition to creating a typology of organizations, the book includes an analysis of the discourse of the web presence of the libraries in the population, using both the organizational data (organizational chart or web page listing library departments) and the library website home page. The book is informed by linguistic analysis that includes linguistic universals and typology, as well as techniques and frameworks of discourse analysis, including Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), and genre theory. These techniques and approaches are used to uncover the values, discourses, motivations, and conflicts that embody and drive librarianship and particularly academic libraries.

The methodological and epistemological frameworks are a combination of constructivist and pragmatic, as proposed by Morgan (2007). Whereas quantitative research uses inductive reasoning, and emphasizes objectivity and generality, and qualitative methods use deductive reasoning with subjectivity and context, a pragmatic framework uses abductive reasoning, intersubjectivity, and transferability (Morgan, 2007, p. 71). Abductive reasoning, “moves back and forth between induction and deduction—first converting observations into theories and then assessing those theories through action” (p. 71). While this research is heavily constructivist, seeing education, libraries, and their many institutionalized aspects as social constructs created by social actors, it also favors a pragmatic worldview, in which the answer to most yes/no questions is “both,” “neither,” and “both and neither.”

The quantitative data consist of lists of universities and frequencies of organizational types, broken down by regions and aggregated for a total distribution of types. The typology is intended to be transferable, and could be tested on other populations (and refined, changed, or discarded.) The typology data are “intersubjective,” i.e., it is based on empirical data, but is much less of an objective fact than something like the number of students who attend a university. It is intersubjective in the sense that a group of people who are all academic librarians might be expected to understand how observable facts (i.e., information on an organizational chart) were used to create the typology. The qualitative data analyze the nature of those organizational types through the voices and discourses found in organizational charts and library websites, including mechanisms of institutionalization.

The discussion and analysis of the discourse found in the data and the literature on discourse analysis that is presented draw heavily on Bolin (2007). Language is a crucial means of social action and of every kind of communication that is used by people in nearly every situation. Discourse is “language in use” or “above the level of the sentence,” texts with a social context and which are actual and natural speech or writing. The analysis of discourse includes “discourses,” i.e., “an institutionalized way of thinking, a social boundary defining what can be said about a specific topic” (“Discourse”, 2017), and the analysis of language in its social context. Halliday (1978) calls language a “social semiotic,” which means a system of signs for encoding meaning. A text is “realized by” sentences and expresses three aspects of meaning: ideational, interpersonal, and textual. Ideational meaning is what the discourse is “about,” interpersonal is who the participants are, and textual is the ways that elements of the text are related. The social setting of language includes “discourse communities” (Nystrand, 1982), e.g., professional or occupational groups, who use language that identifies them as a member of the community and strengthens its mission and goals.

This book uses discourse analysis techniques starting with the systemic-functional linguistics (SFL) of Halliday (1978). SFL analyzes language according to its function: the ways linguistic elements are used to create meaning. SFL describes “system networks,” intersecting linguistic systems in which speakers have choices that are constrained by social identities and social situations. The options create “registers” of a language. Halliday calls register “a recognizable language variety” (1978, p. 7), examples of which are the language of advertising, business, law, or of a situation such as a job interview. In SFL “register variables” encode meaning. “Field” is associated with ideational meaning, “Tenor” with interpersonal meaning, and “Mode” with textual meaning, the devices that link the text together. Fig. 1.1, from Halliday and Martin (1993), illustrates relationships among social contexts, language, register, and genre. Language resides within cultural and situational contexts. Context is expressed by register, which has three variables: Field, Tenor, and Mode. Genre is the outermost layer, the level of the cultural context that represents all genres used by a culture.

Figure 1.1 Context of situation: Field, Tenor, and Mode (Halliday and Martin, 1993).

Another important framework is Swales’s (1990, 2004) genre analysis, which classifies texts according to their purpose in the communities that use them. Important work in genre analysis and the analysis of written texts includes Hoey (2001), Fairclough (1995), Van Dijk (1995), Lemke (1995), Yates (1989), Yates and Orlikowski (2002), and Orlikowski and Yates (1994). Discourse communities use genres and their registers to communicate. Community members have mastered these genres and registers.

An analysis of genre and register includes authorship, authority, attitude, interaction with these texts, intertextuality (the relationship of one text with another), power relationships, and so on. The data for this book come from at least two genres. One is the organizational chart or departmental listing. These kinds of documents are common and can be found in many places for many kinds of organization. The data collected here come from academic library websites and contains information about the organizational structure of the library. The other genre is the academic library website’s home page. The documents are part of a “communicative event” (Gumperz and Hymes, 1972) that has rules and expectations understood by members of a discourse community. In this case the communicative event is the academic library presenting itself and communicating about itself, its employees, programs, and services. The organizational information is an internal document, particularly if it is actually an organizational chart. The home page is a portal, where the library invites users to interact with information and with the library organization.

This is a “thick” (Geertz, 1973) description, which explores academic culture from inside a discourse community. Pike (1967) contrasted “emic” and “etic” description, terms that refer to the linguistic terms “phonemic” and “phonetic.” “Etic” is a description from the outside, while “emic” is from the inside. This is an emic description but the analysis presented here is not complete or definitive.

Typology is a concept that is used in linguistics. Comrie (1989), Croft (1990), Greenberg (2005), and others compare the world’s languages, define types, and look at frequency, clustering, and correlation. The typology is informed by prototype semantics. Semantic prototypes have been described by Rosch (1973, 1977), and Lakoff (1986), among others. Prototype theory sees categories as having central and peripheral members. Community members may not agree on where the boundaries of a category are, but there is more agreement on the middle, or the best representative, e.g., a robin or a sparrow is a better example of a bird than a penguin.

In addition to these linguistic and discursive lenses, this research is framed and informed by the ideas of bureaucracy and institutionalism. Weber (1968/1922) defined the characteristics of bureaucracy: a hierarchical structure, a well-defined division of labor, specialized knowledge and training. These characteristics are what allow bureaucratic organizations to carry out work on a large scale and with efficiency. They are part of what Weber called “rationalization,” the creation of a framework of norms, rules, and procedures for a...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• About the Author
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Introduction
• Chapter 2. Background
• Chapter 3. Academic Library Organization
• Chapter 4. Literature Review
• Chapter 5. Data, Results, and Discussion
• Chapter 6. Conclusion
• Appendix 1. List of Universities
• Appendix 2. Discourse Analysis Instrument
• References
• Index