Visionary Leaders for Information

Arthur Winzenried

• Publisher: Chandos Publishing
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781876938857
• eBook ISBN: 9781780634104
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book examines the theory, behaviour, connections and issues of modern information organizations. Asking leading professionals where we may be in the near future, it challenges both our perceptions and preconceptions. Posing perhaps the most vital question of all… Are we prepared? Do we have a vision?

Chapter 1

Towards an organisational theory for information professionals

Effective leading and managing in the modern information context must recognise increased responsibility for the development of citizens who will occupy, quite probably, a very different world to our own. If scenarios such as those proposed by Healy and Johnson (chapter 3) in particular are realistic possibilities, then the future will be exceptionally challenging. Preparing our clients for that sort of future, or any sort of future for that matter, is a serious task. There needs to be a plan. For organisations dealing with information, and there are not many that do not do so in some way, there is a growing concern about the cost and cost effectiveness of information provision. Organisational theories that underpin and help to explain these concerns need to include an understanding of the ways in which information is harvested, processed and delivered to the end user.

The Industrial Age tended to concern itself with producing human clones suitable for repetitive industrial production. Factory work styles, mass production, assembly lines and like-alike products encouraged information providers to think in terms of storehouses (Dowler 1997, pp.97-98; Raitt 1997, p. 10; Beck 1998, p. 13). The same storehouse model tended to dominate education (Warner, chapter 3; Beare 2001, p.42). Learners were containers waiting to be filled with a finite set of facts so that they would be fit for ‘assembly line’ type operations. This might well be termed the ‘Gradgrind approach’ made notorious by Charles Dickens in the nineteenth century (Dickens 1996, p. 17). Neither education nor information provision was seen in any but an exceptionally utilitarian and finite form. Print was the only format of value, and even then was usually confined to those works considered ‘uplifting’. Current social and economic conditions regulated both education and information provision quite rigidly and the end product of both was predictable, safe and universally recognisable. The process towards that end was inflexible.

Dickens was writing from the perspective of the Industrial Age – the age of machines. Humanity was in many respects just another set of machines that needed correct programming. Poor programming would lead to poverty and revolution; correct programming would lead to wealth and prosperity. As Giovenco reminds us, the present world has very different expectations and considerations.

The issue being presented today is not one of relevance or capacity of libraries to service or survive but is one of leadership and considered, service-based, and people-focused management.

In the current age, whatever it might be called, the application of information to the client’s needs must result in increasingly flexible and capable decision-making. Outcomes for libraries now need to reflect social and ethical responsibility as well as the more traditional economic outcomes. There is a clear indication, for example, that environmental issues can no longer be ignored. Future library management appears to involve even more than what has sometimes been called the ‘triple bottom line’ (Elkington 2004) and certainly a heightened appreciation for the global environment.

Collectively the outcomes of new learning and new information provisioning require a unifying goal – what Michael Fullan has named a moral purpose. This concept encompasses a clearly stated and outcome-related understanding of the principle driving force of the organisation. It is more than a goal and more than a mission statement although both of those would reflect it. Moral purpose is about both ends and means (Fullan 2001a, p. 13). It is a clear statement of intent that shapes what an organisation does as well as what it intends to produce. In the ecology of information provision, moral purpose provides a statement of how a given organisation intends to make a distinct difference by its intentions, processes and products. As the general product is one of improved learning or a more ‘informed’ client, moral purpose often involved a value statement relating to the ways the organisation will ‘improve life’ – will make people better.

While it may appear to be simply a replacement for the Industrial Age expectation of factory clones, in fact the contemporary goal must produce a far more complex and flexible worker – one for whom the only constant is change, not repetition. There does need to be serious thought given by all managers and intending managers as to what their moral purpose is as well as the moral purpose that guides their organisation.

To succeed in the task of better managing information for our clients we need a plan, preferably a plan that is based on some sound principles and tested theories. Organisational theory has been discussed for many years. Fullan, in particular, has done much to offer insights into this area. If we are to ensure libraries exist in the future we do need to avoid the smaller and perhaps transitory issues like technologies or formats and set out to provide ourselves with a firm basis for operation, one that will be flexible and effective, just as we wish our ‘product’ to be. We need a basis for operation that will nurture change and reject repetition. Our ‘products’ must be able to change freely, just as we do. They need to do this on the basis of quality information and considered decisions, so do we. Far too often though, we are attempting to build flexibility based on a selection of very out-of- date past management folklore. We need to ask ourselves, what process do we set up, what theoretical framework do we accept as a basis for action that will build the future that Shelby and Miles (our clients of the future, see chapter 3), will inhabit?

Some years ago, David Raitt wrote of the need for a sound organisational framework if libraries were to survive in this ‘brave new world’.

Many people …. have attempted to define the electronic library and written about what it might be like – but it is evident that there is much more to be considered than the library itself. There is the whole organisational framework, the policies and the strategies, the technologies available, the staff and users and the social and economic milieu in which the library will operate (Raitt 1997, p.8).

Nothing has changed since then, except that the whole context for information provision has become more chaotic and complex (Fullan 2001b, pp. 13–4). Those managing or intending to manage libraries, now, more than ever before, need to have a firm idea of where they are going and what they need to set in place in order to achieve it. In the scenario presented by Johnson in chapter 3, Miles quotes his grandfather as saying:

the tools librarians use change, the importance of certain tasks that librarians perform changes, and even the services libraries offer to support their schools and communities change. But some things, like the librarian’s mission and values, remain constant.

Management and organisational theory

In essence, what is management?

Johnson drops the comment ‘Good thing I’m in management where I don’t need many technology skills’, into his scenario. This might be a tongue in cheek comment but it does raise a few questions. Do managers, in order to be respected and influential, have to exhibit all the skills of their workplace? Do they need to be that ‘one step ahead’? What is a manager?

The Industrial Age manager was a controller. Control and imposition were the general themes with fear, scarcity and self-interest being used to get people to work (Wheatley 2009). Power was hierarchical with a carefully structured chain of command that was made clear to everyone involved. Success in management was measured most usually in terms of profits. If profits were made then management was deemed to be successful. In 1985 Heller made the comment:

A manager is good and a company efficient only because others consider the results of their work good: their so-called goodness endures only as long as this good opinion holds (Heller, p. 18).

I will return to this comment on a few occasions in chapter 4 as it constitutes something of a wake-up call to information professionals across the world and to school librarians in particular. Meanwhile, it is important to note that Heller at least offers a very fluid idea of what management is all about – whatever it is, it is measured by success. Profit was the usual measure of organisation performance and consequently of management performance.

Shirky points out the high levels of accountability that a networked population expects. His 2002 example of public scrutiny highlights new pressures on leaders and managers everywhere as their activities are more open to public comment, and that public scrutiny can be far-reaching (Shirky, p,143ff). Wheatley observes:

The world has changed … Chaos and global connectedness are part of our daily lives … No matter what we do, stability and lasting solutions elude us (Wheatley 2006, p.ix).

The work of being a manager is changing with the changes in the way organisations are functioning. As the world becomes more complex, so also do organisations and their internal functions. Management is not what it used to be, and old methods are no longer working as they once did.

Too often the practicing information professional and manager tends to assume a traditional role and bases activity on past practice with little question, building practices and policies on that basis. The result of this is clearly seen in our past and even in much of the present. All round the world information managers whether they be in school libraries, academic libraries, public libraries or in private enterprise, frequently work according to a series of unquestioned traditions. This happens in many walks of life, but it is particularly unhelpful in the hugely changing and challenging world of information. The changes that Wheatley, Shirky, Auletta and others have identified are often ignored. Rather like one or two of the characters in a story by Spencer Johnson, instead of going in search of their cheese they wait at the old cheese station for the cheese they are used to but which will never come (Johnson 1999, p.25ff).

Two very obvious examples of this may be seen in the concern in many libraries over the decline in print usage and the stress on quietness (a lovely old Victorian notion). All too often these are ‘rules’ that are not questioned – they go with the territory. But why?

There does need to be a new questioning of old practices, practices that are all too easy for the media to identify and ridicule, as well as practices that far too often do not suit the current and future client. This questioning though needs to be directed in a very positive way and organisational theory holds one key to this.

To help counter this background of what might be described as a collection of almost arbitrary and isolated management decisions over many years and to facilitate a shift into the modern, unpredictable and changing world, there needs to be some consideration of information fundamentals as well as of the organisational context for them. We all participate in organisations – schools, corporations, government, hospitals, and so on. Each of us wants to make a...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Introducing the author and contributors
• A note about the terminology
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Towards an organisational theory for information professionals
• Chapter 2: Manager or leader?
• Chapter 3: The scenarios
• Chapter 4: Identifying the issues
• Chapter 5: Conclusions
• Index