admin/librarian conflicting work values in academic libraries?

Barbara Burd’s article “Work Values of Academic Librarians: exploring the relationships between values, job satisfaction, commitment and intent to leave” (ACRL Eleventh National Conference) is a very good reminder that higher education or academic libraries are not currently homogenous, nor are the librarians who staff them. And duplicating the methodologies used in her study would be extremely illuminating for academic librarians wanting to understand the dissonance in their respective workplaces and would provide ammunition to show how common (and evidence-based) the phenomenon is. There's nothing like a good research study admin would find hard to refute.

The author’s definition of work values provides the opportunity to identify the conflicts/context in academic libraries as one of competing values:  “Work values…are a reflection of our motivations, our preferred work setting, the way we interact with others, and our work style. Our work values determine what we expect to achieve from the work experience and, as such, determine our choice of vocation and our reaction to job situations (p. 1).” It provides a framework that helps us identify (some of?) the dissonance now occurring between academic library professionals, changes in both the LIS field and higher education, and in how our library administrations are managing this change.

The dissonance isn’t simply that we have a mismatch between librarians and their workplaces and that identifying what type of librarian you are and what type of library you are will allow you to aim for an organization that fits you. For one thing identifying a type of organization can be difficult at an individual level and secondly, I think the changes we are seeing in academic libraries are sweeping ones, a drive to more homogeneity as a result of a number of factors already touched on in previous blog postings. And I'm not even sure we can turn these trends around.

Then why is identifying these categories important? If anything is important re: the attack on professional identity, it would be the ability to note what currently is and isn’t working in the relationships between the entities (types of librarians/types of organizations) and which are currently perceived as more successful in the face of trends that are driving us to what the social scientists call rationalization(1) or “McDonaldization.” That, combined with a study that explicitly records, across multiple institutions the current levels of dissonance between librarian’s values and the new homogeneity in how academic libraries are managed may provide the impetus for a reconsideration of the implementation of some of these trends within our libraries…or not.

For those of you who are curious about the methods the author used I suggest you link to her freely available article (linked above). In a nutshell she uses Chatman’s “Organizational Culture Profile developed from Q methodology (p. 2)” and a Likert scale to measure job satisfaction, commitment and intent to leave.

    (1) “Rationalization is the application of the most efficient means to achieve given goals and the unintended, negative consequences of doing so.” Brym, Lie and Rytina (2010). Sociology: your compass for a new world. Toronto: Nelson Education, p. 89.