Engagement with scholarly work as professional development

Why read books, book chapters, journal articles, and other scholarly work as part of your professional development? As a manager, why support and enable colleagues to do so? In this post I discuss some challenges for library managers and leaders in supporting deeper engagement with scholarly work, and some issues in the library profession more broadly with engagement with everything we term “theory”. To be clear, this is a personal reflection on experience not a systematic piece of research; and I am aware I speak from a position of privilege in various ways.

Note on terminology: by ‘scholarly work’ I mean to be inclusive of works of both research and scholarship; if you make no distinction between these terms, no problem. I am using ‘librarianship’ interchangeably with ‘library and information science’ (LIS).

“Pro-intellectualism ftw”

I’ve been thinking about this subject for a while and the vintage 140-character tweets quoted below were fresh libraryland discourse when I started drafting this post. This thread from Chris Bourg about reading and recommending scholarly work in the workplace as an everyday activity, a standard expectation, was the first time I had seen a library director make quite this statement:

The whole thread was inspiring and motivational. The discussion in replies made me think about what gives us permission to act in our workplaces beyond the expectations of our roles and job descriptions, and helped me overcome concerns about push-back and reactance that had limited my routinely recommending scholarly work in a work context.

https://twitter.com/winelibrarian/status/959248381288812551 [deleted tweet]

In these tweets and the exchange between Jessica and Michelle, I recognise both the practitioners’ enthusiasm and frustrations as well as the administrator’s sadness and concern. I am sure many of us can quote analogous examples from experience; I have heard similar thoughts from colleagues.

The reason I identify with these views is that connecting the literature—or theory—within and beyond librarianship to what we do in practice seems such an essential part of practice itself. We can generate knowledge from our practice by reflection and a reflexive stance, but theoretically-informed reflection and application of ideas to practice requires connections outside and beyond practice.

“Thinking is an action. For all aspiring intellectuals, thoughts are the laboratory where ones goes to pose questions and find answers, and the place where visions of theory and praxis come together.” (hooks, 2010 p.7)

bell hooks’s understanding to me shows the integrative relationship of theory and practice, in how reflective thought has a questioning or problem-posing nature. This idea of integrating “theoretical talk”, a term hooks uses to describe writing (1994, p. 70), into practice necessarily implies contextualising others’ knowledge at vital points within our own situation, and using it to improve that situation whether in a personal, interpersonal, or broader social contexts. This view is is rooted in critical theory, which implies a role of theory as liberatory: that is toward constructing an improved social totality (borrowing here Georg Lukács’s term). It necessarily implies reaching beyond our own understandings. On reading, Paulo Freire wrote that:

“Reading is one of the ways I can get the theoretical illumination of practice in a certain moment. […] Information can be got through reading a book, and it can be got through a conversation.” (Freire and Horton 1990, p.98-99)

I feel it is this illumination, a sense of theory shedding light on practice that is the valuable thing we get from directed reading. Despite Freire’s insight about the value of discourse or conversation, reading is a highly practical means of attaining knowledge to inform this illumination. Incidentally, and I digress, We make the road by walking quoted here (dual authorship with Myles Horton, but the quotes are Freire) is a beautiful book and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the purpose of education within a democratic polity.

“Reading, as study, is a difficult, even painful, process at times, but always a pleasant one as well. It implies the reader delve deep into the text, in order to learn its most profound meaning. The more we do this exercise, in a disciplined way, conquering any desire to flee the reading, the more we prepare ourselves for making future reading less difficult.” (Freire 1994, p. 65)

Freire’s position at times can be very uncompromising, with reading a painful but necessary confrontation with new ideas that over time prepared us better for future engagements. The key point I draw from this challenging view is that of learning as an aid to action in practice, that is in ‘actioning’ the theoretical and developing understanding by utilising the theory—or the established scholarly body of knowledge—of our discipline.

In engaging with texts critically we connect with ideas, but the literature also shows what practitioners think possible, shows how we define the limits of practice, and hints toward what is left open to new exploration and discovery. This creative engagement allows us to better think forward to changing circumstances, beyond the basic elements of our technique and immediate cause-and-effect of day-to-day experience. I tend to emphasise multidisciplinary breadth in general reading in comparison to the more focused in-depth research we may undertake for particular projects, however I do think this is a both/and situation. In my experience reading ‘locally’ within librarianship leads toward our local maximum, which may or may not also represent a global maximum. Multidisciplinary approaches help us toward the global maxima, or at least provides points of triangulation outside librarianship that help confirm the coherence of our positions.

For example, in developing understanding of reflective practice I found the literature deepest and most fully-theorised within teaching and health and social care literature. In the social work literature I found a developed concept of critical reflective practice which uses critical theory as a lens for “searching for the assumptions implicit in practice” (Fook and Gardner 2010, p.26) when we iteratively make and remake knowledge in practice. It is impossible for me to say I could have developed the same ideas without this broader exploration.

Mental state in terms of challenge level and skill level, according to Csikszentmihalyi's model flow is associated with high challenge and high skill level.
Mental state in terms of challenge level and skill level, according to Csikszentmihalyi’s flow model. (Words and image from Wikipedia, license CC-BY-SA.)

My experience is such learning is a stretch and brings with it discomforting feelings, if not always anxiety or worries. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s (2014, pp.227-238) theory of flow describes how tasks that balance challenge with skill level can achieve a state of optimum performance where our awareness of thoughts, feelings, and action merge.

In encountering and making sense of this theory I initially misunderstood it, as the explanation I heard was based on the idea of optimum performance of everyday workplace tasks. Digging into Csikszentmihalyi’s research and scholarship it became clearer that flow is not necessarily a pleasant experience, which I now recognise in many of my experiences of self-directed learning. The analogy I think best captures my sense of uprootedness or sudden removal from a comfortable place, and the dawning awareness of new knowledge is Sara Ahmed’s explanation of these “ordinary feelings”:

“Every experience I have had of pleasure and excitement about a world opening up has begun with … ordinary feelings of discomfort, of not quite fitting in a chair, of becoming unseated, of being left holding onto the ground.” (Ahmed 2006, p.154)

Time Trades

As well as stretch, I feel focus on areas to develop and improve has to be rooted in self-awareness and self-direction of our practice. I see this type of more directed reading as a purposeful use of our time rather than a chore to be slogged through; and ideally believe self-directed learning can become a habit to work into continual, ongoing practice. I am conscious of and hoping to avoid a sense of investing time for a particular return suggesting the type of neoliberal entrepreneurial approach to education that Sam Popowich (2018) problematises in a recent blog post. Above, a more positive reflection on the value of time is offered in Jeffrey Lewis’s Time Trades.

Practice is in any case more complicated than implied by the idea of theory straightforwardly informing action. In the complex, messy situations of the workplace I rarely perceive a straightforward path where, for example, a colleague has read an article and then implements something based on it. Although I am comfortable quoting from scholarly work to make or emphasise a point in a work context, the notion that we might lay out a 1:1 relationship to colleagues showing how each particular action is rooted in theory belies the mechanics of learning and development and its relationship with practice.

For library work, I perceive the skills needed for this type of focused reading and learning are a key workplace information literacy (IL) skill, understanding that our more academic digital and information literacy skills can be reflexively shaped and developed within libraries-as-workplace. By workplace information literacy, I mean the growing area of research and scholarship that explicitly focuses on IL in workplaces, compared with an academic taught or research study environment where IL is typically learned. A presentation at the 2018 LILAC conference by Marc Forster and Stéphane Goldstein provides an excellent recent summary.

How we can support each other

“Theorizing—even reflection—is seen as a frill in an environment where we are always crunched for time. […] Reading as a means for creating dialogue that develops ideas and affective connections between people does not happen as regularly as it should in neoliberal libraries.” (Coysh, Denton, and Sloniowski 2018, p.130; p.137)

In their book chapter about a reading group set up to read Michel Foucault’s The order of things, Sarah Coysh, William Denton, and Lisa Sloniowski get to the heart of how workplaces often fail to practically support the reflection and dialogue that many of us would agree theoretically is valuable. Being “crunched for time” and lacking a supportive environment are constraints and impediments. Unsurprisingly, the reading group mentioned above took place outside the authors’ workplace in their own time. Likewise, outside work I have always found library workers keen to share reading recommendations and discuss them at conferences and unconferences, in Twitter chats, in conversations one to one. Those situations are those with engaged, self-selected participants who are interested in the subject and want to take part, and as such can be extremely supportive and affirming experiences.

In a recent blog post Carrie Wade discusses the issue of resistance to theory itself:

“The deepest structural issue with library education and publication: theory is treated as something without gravity. Theory is relegated to blog posts by some of our profession’s most brilliant minds—but as a profession we actively denigrate such forms of publication as being of lesser importance.” (Wade, 2018)

I agree with Carrie’s points, and feel this critique should be extended to our ongoing self-directed learning. I believe there is value simply in managers and leadership teams being supportive of, and valuing theoretically-informed reflection and exchange of ideas. In the absence of support, or even hostility to theory, engaging with scholarly work is still highly practical and accessible in many ways: there is no need to ask anyone for permission; no need to wait for training to become available and secure funding to attend it; and is it possible to read widely and in-depth using materials available Open Access or free-to-read, or acquired by other means of legal scholarly sharing.

In senior management roles I have recruited and managed team members in posts that require a postgraduate qualification or equivalent experience. I feel it reasonable to expect these colleagues to be connected with the scholarly literature, keeping up to date, reflecting and relating theory and practice into a coherent praxis of academic librarianship. However, an assumption of needing no support with reading and reflection for professional development can reflect a privileged position. My experience of coming to librarianship via a non-traditional route was that it was a struggle to anticipate and grasp the theoretical approaches and assumptions, and foundational knowledge of the discipline. This wasn’t because the content was intellectually too difficult, but because of the time needed to explore and understand a new area, to learn its language and concepts, and become comfortable enough to engage with established practitioners was substantial alongside working full-time.

Within our professional discourse it is disturbing to see disparaging, if low-level, comments about reading for professional development. This can come across as a lingering wish for gatekeeping and controlling access to knowledge. In opposition to these positions, I ask why can’t all library workers have access to this knowledge—why can’t we support and scaffold each others’ learning? In my experience, sometimes what we need most are supportive environments and inclusive communities as we discover a new “world opening up”.

References

Ahmed, S. (2006) Queer phenomenology. Durham, NC: Duke University.

Coysh, S.J., Denton, W., and Sloniowski, L. ‘Ordering things’, in Nicholson, K.P. and Seale, M. (eds.) The politics of theory and the practice of critical librarianship. Sacramento, CA: Library Juice, pp. 130-144 [Online]. Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10315/34415

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2014) Flow and the foundations of positive psychology. Reprint, London: Springer, 2014.

Fook, J. and Gardner, F. (2010) Practising critical reflection. Maidenhead: Open University.

Forster, M. and Goldstein, S. (2018) ‘Information literacy in the workplace’, LILAC (Librarians’ Annual Information Literacy Conference), Liverpool 4-6 April. Available at: https://repository.uwl.ac.uk/id/eprint/4801/

Freire, P. (1994) Pedagogy of hope. London: Bloomsbury.

hooks, b. (1994) Teaching to transgress. Abingdon: Routledge.

hooks, b. (2010) Teaching critical thinking. Abingdon: Routledge.

Horton, M. and Freire, P. (1990) We make the road by walking. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University.

Lukács, G. (1971) History and class consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT.

Popowich, S. (2018) ‘The value of degrees’, Sam Popowich, 4 July. Available at: https://redlibrarian.github.io/article/2018/04/07/the-value-of-degrees.html

Wade, C. (2018) ‘Inquiring the library’, Library Barbarian, 22 March. Available at: http://seadoubleyew.com/inquiring-the-library/

Wikipedia contributors (2018). ‘Flow (psychology)’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, [Online]. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Flow_(psychology)&oldid=836178438 (accessed April 13, 2018).

What’s your take on critical librarianship?

This blog post is modified from a talk I gave for #CityLIS at City, University of London on 19 March 2018.

This seminar explored the idea and the various meanings of critical librarianship as a concept, practice, and area of intellectual enquiry. Critical librarianship is multifaceted and includes a body of scholarly work that employs critical frames for theorising libraries and information; activist and social justice-oriented stances within library work; online communities and discussion spaces such as #critlib chat; and more. Its focus on scholarly thought and theory has been criticised as removed from the practical concerns that confront library workers and the communities they serve, whereas its more practical suggestions and ethical approaches are sometimes read as just good librarianship. Here I will give my view on what I think critical librarianship to be, and what I think it has to offer in practice.

A comment on terminology, below I am using ‘librarianship’ interchangeably with ‘library and information science’ (LIS), ‘critique’ interchangeably with ‘criticism’, and will prefer ‘library workers’ to ‘librarians’.

Context

At this point I discussed how our economic system tends to introduce market logics and measurement techniques into many or perhaps most areas of human activity. Rather than recount this, I will recommend the recent exploration and critique of this trend applied to education presented in Professor Roger Brown’s lecture Neoliberalism, Marketisation, and Higher Education – University of West London public professorial lecture.

In our context, libraries and library workers have struggled to maintain and demonstrate relevance and have repeatedly sought to emphasise the value of libraries primarily based on a market logic. This includes for example comparative usage statistics for library services, and a recent focus on the value added by our basic disciplinary expertise of information literacy.

You may know of Cilip’s campaign about information literacy related to fake news and political information. Facts Matter is rooted in an approach that values critical thinking and reading of political information so broadly I support it; the issues I raise today are more rooted in the question of what facts are. In my view, fake news, the concept of post-truth and the absurd notion of alternative facts don’t sit in the same dialogical space as facts or meaning-making do intrinsically. They are more about a constant steady drip of propaganda, influencing at scale, and the expression of a prefigurative practice for particular political causes—especially far-right or fascist politics.

Critique and the critical

I want to spend some time discussing what we actually mean by the critical, because this is a contested term with multiple meanings. I’ll present a particular view of this using a frame based on critique as method—a method to direct and inform action that carries social and ethical implications beyond the technical execution of library work. I also want to address how we can pay critical attention in practice, here we will focus on critical reflection. First let’s stop for a minute to inspect and problematise the word ‘critical’ and the basis of librarianship as discipline.

Historically, and regrettably in my view, librarianship has attempted to define itself and prove itself as a social science—based on positivist and post-positivist ideas and quantitative methods.

Critical…

Thinking
Reading
Literacy
Pedagogy
Reflection
Theory
Librarianship?

Readers will have heard of at least some of these concepts and certainly will be familiar with concepts like critical reading and thinking in more depth. I explained the to audience that as students, I am certain you read critically within the LIS literature; I am sure you think critically about theory and ideas; I am confident you reflect on practice.

A common position in our discourse is a focus on critical thinking and reading as the critical. Stereotyping, this means forming judgements as to what is true and correct, about what is factual in positivist terms following an objective and neutral process of evaluation. This can present broader ideas of criticism as similarly naive, as a negative dialectical approach or as something that is not much more than a practical tool for problem-solving. I will describe an approach based on a different concept: that critique is about the questioning of social norms and cultures that shape and constrain our day-to-day approaches and work.

“Critical thought and its theory…”
Horkheimer, 1972 p.210

This is rooted in critical theory (sometimes presented with a capital C and a capital T). As a school of thought critical theory maintains that ideology is a principal obstacle to human liberation and originally sought to radically critique both the fabric of society and traditional theoretical approaches that came before. Critical theory in the mode of Adorno, Horkheimer and other thinkers of the Frankfurt School sought to identify and lay bare these ideologies. Note that this school of thought is reasonably left-wing.

“Critical theory is like any language; you can learn it, and when you learn it, you begin to move around in it.”

Ahmed, 2017 p.9

I would like us to take a wider view than Frankfurt School critical theory applied to librarianship. Sara Ahmed’s use of metaphor here resonates with me in how she describes the slow process of discovery and understanding that allows us to explore new disciplinary areas and “move around in” them. My point in citing this is that critical theories and approaches are something we can all gain understanding  and knowledge of, whatever our educational groundings or backgrounds.

“Without a vision for tomorrow, hope is impossible.”

Freire, 1997 p.13

Before we move on, let’s spend a little time with Paulo Freire and critical hope. Freire is an inescapable influence within critical librarianship, in large part due to the influence of critical pedagogy on contemporary critical information literacy teaching practice. Freire championed a radical, anti-colonial ‘problem-posing’ method of education intended to consciously shape learners and lead them to develop critical consciousness with which to overcome oppression. For Freire, hope is a foundational requirement for education because it is hope that drives people to pursue completeness as human beings: to explore, interrogate, to question, and to learn. As library workers, we understand leaning as a lifelong process and this pursuit is not something that ends at school-leaving or graduation.

Where is the critical librarianship?

Examples of critical practice applied in the form of practical actions abound, and library workers enact critical practice even if it is not explicitly framed in the language of critical librarianship. I want to reiterate this practice element here, and give some examples of the importance of action.

https://twitter.com/edrabinski/status/717053814373793792 [deleted tweet]

Emily Drabinski’s point here is about the everyday ways in which we remake structures and systems by thinking about them and questioning them day by day. (The comment “Me too!” is agreement with the quoted tweet.) How about some more comments from practitioners?

“I use theory literally every day to inform the shape of the searches I perform, the summaries I produce, and the support I give to [social services] practitioners.”

Smith, 2018

Lauren Smith develops information services for social services practitioners across Scotland. She explains here this is a necessarily theoretically-informed practice at all levels, with theory utilised daily in practice in all aspects of work. In this way theory is applied in an integrative approach, there is no pause where the practitioner steps outside into a realm of theory to cogitate before returning back to the everyday world of practice.

“It is assumed that taking a critical perspective in a corporate information role is impossible because ones workplace goals are aligned with those of the organisation. However […] organisations hire information professionals to uphold standards of authoritative research, ethical resource use and high information literacy. Of course it can be difficult to challenge organisational hierarchies, and you may not get the support you need to do so, but this is actually true of all information work.”

Schopflin, 2018

Katharine Schopflin explains that the role of information professionals within organisations always implies that we maintain an ethical stance related to the standards of our profession—that is formally what we are hired to do, regardless of the sector or industry we are working in. Of course, we see how tensions can and do emerge in some work environments.

Practitioners coming from critical positions are often offering us a reading against the grain of dominant cultures in workplaces and professional contexts. This can be the case in public sector or publicly-funded environments as much as corporate information roles, which may be due to funding and resourcing pressure as much as an ideological position (funding choices are, of course, themselves ideological positions). As Alan Wylie points out here, many public library workers have enough to do just keeping libraries running and operating effectively in environments where critical approaches are not particularly valued by their leadership.

As an aside, I personally believe one of the most valuable things managers can give teams is the time and space as well as the supportive context to do such thinking alongside the day-to-day.

Critical librarianship, a developed theoretical frame

This quote refers to an analysis of one information literacy journal, Communications in Information Literacy, that showed the most common theoretical frame used was critical information literacy (Hollister, 2017). It’s surprising and exciting to see reports like this. However, this can overstate the extent to which library workers more widely adopt critical practices, as it is specific to one context: application of critical pedagogy to information literacy practice in North American academic libraries.

“Our work […] must be critically informed, dialogically inventive, and messily entrenched within the systems we are working to change.”

Almeida, 2018 p.254

I would like to make a case for more widely-embedded critical approaches in practice. This is Nora Almeida’s view from the recently-published The Politics of Theory and the Practice of Critical Librarianship (Nicholson and Seale, 2018). I agree with this as it feels like a solid justification for the critical rooted in the effectiveness of what we do in practice; and in how practice is “messily entrenched” (a wonderfully #critlib term) in our work and lives rather than something to do as an optional add-on to real work. This talk is not about practical tips for your CPD, especially given that I want to stay true to the theoretical basis of critical reflection discussed below, but I do want to explore the value of critique compared with the hundreds of other things you could spend time on.

“By critique I am referring to that praxis that refuses and thus disrupts a calcified and definitive way of understanding difference, subjects, and subjectivity.”

Dhamoon, 2011 p.239

In this article Rita Dhamoon introduces a idea of critique as a practice or praxis (with an x) of refusal: a disruptive, and, we can imagine, a necessarily confrontational approach that aims at creating change for a particular direction and purpose. In the talk I argued that critique can aid in development, in inculcating resistance, and in improving equity and equality. Here I am imagining critical thought supporting and aiding progress toward and the achievement of our goals, rather than as a tool we draw from our toolbox for day-to-day problem-solving. I argue critique offers a unique set of dialogical methods for approaching our work broadly—within and outside workplaces, and in practice more broadly.

Praxis‽

So, praxis ‘with an x’. In the talk I defined this as an integrative approach to critically thinking about and actively engaging with the world based on theoretically-informed reflection and action. In this I drew on Freire (1997) and Arendt (1998); for me a framing that includes both elements of critical thinking and reflection is key. I feel ‘reflection’ as a word does us disservice in the image it creates in our minds of contemplative mulling-over that does not necessarily go anywhere, hence I emphasise here action based on deepened insight.

At this point I asked the audience to consider, does anyone think they already take this approach in practice? My suspicion is that many of us do.

Critically reflective practice

I would like to relate this specifically to reflective practice, as that is one way we can embody a critical approach in what we do.

“The development of insight and practice through critical attention to practical values, theories, principles, assumptions and the relationship between theory and practice which inform everyday actions.”

Bolton, 2014 p. xxiii

This is a definition of reflection from Gillie Bolton. The critically reflective question to drive toward deeper meaning and understanding is to always ask why. The key point to pick out is about “critical attention to practical values”. What Bolton does here is a useful rhetorical reframing that may benefit you in practice. I find that often when I discuss theory in general terms I find that it is more relatable instead to talk about values. It is more alive, more rooted in experience, and is something we can all relate to no matter what we read.

“Critical reflection involves asking what questions, issues or ways of thinking have been privileged by whom and for what reasons? This type of reflection aims to address concerns about the influence of powerful groups by acknowledging and surfacing different interests and agendas.”

Smith, 2011 pp.217-218

Linking reflection to action is the enactment of critical practice, with a central element in critical attention to and examination of our underlying values, assumptions, and beliefs and linking these with our political, ethical, and social contexts. This may seem overly-introspective at first; but at this point I want to bring in Elizabeth Smith’s perspective relating power and privilege to the social in reflective practice. This is very much an outward-looking approach that situates our work within multiple, necessarily social, contexts of which we need awareness to form balanced judgements.

“When we only name the problem, when we state complaint without a constructive focus or resolution, we take hope away. In this way critique can become merely an expression of profound cynicism, which then works to sustain dominator culture.”

hooks, 2003 p.xiv

As good as this may sound, there are dangers here linked to the negative aspects of critical reflective practice. bell hooks cautions here about critique fermenting a world-weary cynicism that leaches hope, and rather than transformative change leads to an acceptance of “dominator culture,” which is to say the dominant or hegemonic practices that reinscribe inequality and oppression.

A fundamental here is the link with how we reflect on practice and shape it in action. In my view, the strategic critical moves to make are those that work at or work towards transforming rather than reforming. At this point I cited Archie Dick (1995) who describes a progressive, transformative, and explicitly Foucauldian current in librarianship that is noticeably well-aligned with contemporary critical librarianship. Here I paraphrase from Dick (p.229), this camp argues for:

  1. Critique of our own approaches and practices in stock selection, cataloguing and classification to highlight assumptions and biases. Brought up to date, we could add algorithmic bias in search and discovery.
  2. Raising the critical consciousness of library workers in understanding non-neutrality of libraries.
  3. Library educators to appreciate and critique power relations within LIS theory.
  4. Pushing back on “creeping marketisation” of libraries, especially that based on the notion of information as a commodity.

Power and questioning critically

I’d like to deal with some aspects of power, for this I will briefly drop into Foucault’s work. I realise that like Freire, this is a very #critlib citation. However, I have found Foucauldian methods of analysing power transformative, and wanted to provide a worked example as well as a caution.

“Power relations are rooted in the whole network of the social.”

Foucault, 2000 pp.345

One temptation, and risk, with Foucault is to get caught up in an idea that power is a fully installed and instituted force, and one that saturates or permeates all social relations. Confronted with such a force individuals can appear helpless or cast adrift, which isn’t what Foucault meant to do. In our chapter on critical systems librarianship, Simon Barron and I use a Foucauldian approach as a lens to ask questions about power applied to library information systems where one actor, the library, logs data concerning the online activity of another, such as a student or staff member (2018, pp.103-104).

Here I paraphrase from the analysis in this chapter; using Foucault’s method we ask:

  1. What are the relative positions of power, privilege, and technical knowledge of the actors involved, that permits one to act upon another?
  2. What are the objectives pursued by the actor in this power relation?
  3. How is power exercised? For example, surveillance and associated chilling effects, or the implication of disciplinary action based on institutional policies.
  4. What institutions are at play that determine the site of power? For example, legal structures or accepted institutional practices.
  5. To what degree are power relations rationalised and elaborated? For example, what technologies or technological refinements are brought to bear in exercising power and are they highly finessed and refined?

Such questions can do a lot of useful work when asked in different contexts about our practice, and to me feel much more approachable when reworked using everyday language and examples.

Ultimately, I feel a critical perspective is something we can all develop and understand by a combination of conversations and listening, experiential knowledge, and also reading texts. Personally I have found critical approaches most helpful when dealing with uncertainty and ambiguity in management and leadership situations, particularly when there is not an obviously correct answer or path. In such situations we rarely have an established playbook to work from, and almost never a handbook to guide us. This is where there is value in taking a critical and reflective approach that combines theoretical and practical knowledge from others’ experience with our own analytical judgement.

“If you are in the game of hegemony you have to be smarter than ‘them’.”

Hall, 1992 p.267

I will finish with a reading recommendation implied by this citation. This is out of context but was too tempting not to cite as my number one recommendation is to read widely within and beyond our discipline, but be smart and selective in how we focus our reading. Stuart Hall here is talking about several competing traditions in intellectual theoretical work in marxism (I will follow Hall’s lowercase usage here), however, I think it works for other spaces where we contest power and confront hegemonic forces.

Acknowledgements

My grateful thanks to the community of #critlib and librarians informed by other critical traditions for ‘the discourse’, and their ongoing helpful suggestions and recommendations.

References

Ahmed, S. (2017) Living a feminist life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Almeida, N. (2018) ‘Interrogating the collective: #critlib and the problem of community’, in Nicholson, K.P. and Seale, M. (eds.) The politics of theory and the practice of critical librarianship. Sacramento, CA: Library Juice, pp. 238-254 [Online]. Available at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/ny_pubs/233/

Arendt, H. (1998) The human condition. 2nd edn. London: University of Chicago Press.

Barron, S. and Preater, A. (2018) ‘Critical systems librarianship’, in Nicholson, K.P. and Seale, M. (eds.) The politics of theory and the practice of critical librarianship. Sacramento, CA: Library Juice, pp. 87-113 [Online]. Available at: https://repository.uwl.ac.uk/id/eprint/4512/

Bolton, G. (2014) Reflective practice. 4th edn. London: Sage.

Dhamoon, R.K. (2011) ‘Considerations on mainstreaming intersectionality’, Political Research Quarterly, 64(1), pp. 230-243 [Online]. doi:10.1177/1065912910379227

Dick, A.L. (1995) ‘Library and information science as a social science: neutral and normative conceptions’, The Library Quarterly, 65(2), pp. 216-235 [Online]. doi:10.1086/602777

Foucault, M. (1981) ‘The subject and power’, in Faubion, J.D. (ed.) Power: the essential works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984. New York, NY: New Press, pp.326-348.

Freire, P. (1997) Pedagogy of the heart. London: Bloomsbury.

Hall, S. (1992) ‘Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies’, in Grossberg, L., Nelson, C. and Treichler, P.A. (eds.) Cultural studies. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 277-286.

Hollister, C. (2017) ‘Ten years of expanding the information literacy landscape’, WILU 2017, Edmonton, AB, May 23-25. doi:10.7939/R3X63BJ8M

Horkheimer, M. (1972) Critical theory. New York, NY: Continuum.

hooks, b. (1994) Teaching to transgress. New York, NY: Routledge.

hooks, b. (2003) Teaching community. New York, NY: Routledge.

Nicholson, K.P. and Seale, M. (Eds.) The politics of theory and the practice of critical librarianship. Sacramento, CA: Library Juice

Schopflin, K. (2018) Twitter direct message to Andrew Preater, 18 March.

Smith, E. (2011) ‘Teaching critical reflection’, Teaching in Higher Education, 16(2), pp.211-223 [Online]. doi:10.1080/13562517.2010.515022

Smith, L. (2018) Twitter direct message to Andrew Preater, 3 March.

Neoliberalism, Marketisation, and Higher Education – University of West London public professorial lecture

I attended this talk as part of my employer University of West London’s public lecture series, to which all are invited and welcome.

Roger Brown is emeritus Professor of Higher Education Policy at Liverpool Hope University, and was previously Vice Chancellor of Southampton Solent University. His work focuses on higher education, public policy, and inequality. An audio recording of the lecture is linked above; Brown spoke without using slides so audio-only works OK.

My university has a focus on widening participation, which I believe benefits society in many ways including raising aspiration and attainment, and social mobility. My interest in this talk as an education worker was to understand better how marketisation has affected those aspects of education that promote equality, social mobility, and the development of informed and democratically-engaged citizens.

The analytical parts of the talk concentrated on links between education policy and political economy, with a foundational argument that marketisation of education is how politicians and policy-makers have employed neoliberal praxes to reshape higher education provision—alongside almost all social relations. Brown dated the commencement of marketisation of English higher education from 1979 to the present day, starting with the reforms of Margaret Thatcher’s government and continued through successive Conservative and Labour administrations: those of market deregulation, privatisation, and undermining of the power of organised labour. This will be a familiar story to many of us; policy-wise the basic idea is that education policy is formed from an assumption that the primary purpose of education is economic, and that it should be both valued and measured in those terms.

Briefly, Brown went far beyond what I had expected and provided us a scathing critique of neoliberal economic praxis. He based his argument on the inconsistent delivery of promised economic benefits under neoliberal governance; the contradictions in the dependence on government to introduce and reinforce neoliberal policies; and the incoherence of neoliberal economic theory itself. However, the effect of marketisation goes beyond simple competition for students, staff, and funding and the uncertainty this creates for universities. Brown argues there has been an increase in ‘distance’ in prestige and a corresponding ‘social distance’ between different universities as a result of neoliberalism, with a direct negative impact on both the creativity of education provision and on widening participation. Counter to expectation, rather than encouraging more diverse and creative ways of delivering higher education we see the opposite emerging: selective universities tend to play it safe and converge on a very similar offer as each other, with elite universities marketing very traditional university experiences to prospective customers.

Considering academic libraries directly we see, for example, how the instability of competition can generate uncertainty for libraries reliant on multi-year subscription deals for information resources and software, and the effect that gold Open Access as a preferred model has had on scholarly communication support and infrastructure. Alongside the effect of introducing real or ersatz markets to education, as Davies argues neoliberalism brings in a tendency to see and understand everything in marketised terms, “expanding the reach of market-based principles and techniques of evaluation” (2017, p. 22). The problems and effects of treating information as a commodity, particularly for scholarly communication, is addressed in detail by Lawson, Sanders, and Smith (2015).

More fundamentally to society, Brown asked us to consider the effect of how universities “being treated as plcs” may lead to them losing public trust in their knowledge creation role, here drawing on Giroux:

“The notion of the university as a center of critique and a vital democratic public sphere that cultivates the knowledge, skills and values necessary for the production of a democratic polity is giving way to a view of the university as a marketing machine essential to the production of neoliberal subjects.” (2014, p.56)

As to what education workers and higher education as a whole can do about this the scale of the challenge seems huge, as Brown said, “We need to aim at rebuilding civil society.” No pressure. Brown argued specifically for increased solidarity between universities and leadership within the sector, particularly for Vice-Chancellors to be visible and willing to speak on issues affecting society rather than narrowly concentrating on issues such as funding of research and teaching.

Afterwards in conversation, I asked Brown how to maintain hope if one loves higher education and wants to work within it for say the next 25-30 years; he said the best thing would be to leave higher education as things probably won’t get better for a generation. I don’t plan to take this advice, but Brown’s refreshing honesty in his talk and generosity with his time to unpack issues raised has provided me with me a huge amount to reflect on and thereby inform practice.

Acknowledgement

With thanks to Kevin Sanders for a suggested addition to the text.

References

Davies, W. (2017) The limits of neoliberalism: authority, sovereignty, and the logic of competition. London: Sage.

Giroux, H. (2014) Neoliberalism’s war on higher education. Chicago, IL: Haymarket.

Lawson, S., Sanders, K., and Smith, L. (2015) ‘Commodification of the information profession: a critique of higher education under neoliberalism’, Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 3(1). doi:10.7710/2162-3309.1182

Opportunities in new management and leadership roles

Last June I started in a new library director role. I’ve not shared any reflective writing recently due to various reasons, but as the end of the calendar year coincided with my first six months in this new role I thought I would do so.

I’ve recently changed how I approach reflective thought and its relationship with practice. In a previous #critlib chat on critical reflection I said that I try to build in reflection in focused bursts as and when I can do it; In my new role this is no longer exactly true. What I have started doing is to use my cycle commute as protected time to think about the issues of the day, using a Stoic approach to reflective self-aware focus and questioning.

The basic idea of this type of Stoic ‘inner work’ is to dissect and get to the bottom of why I am thinking about an issue in a particular way, and to overcome resistance. I rarely find this process leads to straightforward answers or light-bulb moments—rather it leads me to forming and shaping better critical questions about problems. These guide enquiry in a structured way, and provide space to dispassionately work through understanding others’ thoughts and feelings on shared challenges.

Starting in a new role

Coincidentally, Jessica Olin started a new role at almost exactly the same time as me and in Letter From a New Job describes many of the feelings that come with a new administration role, especially the need to pace oneself. I rate Jessica’s writing on leadership and used the same book, Michael Watkins’s The first 90 days, when transitioning into my current role. I’ve recommended it to others several times since re-reading it.

A priority for me on starting was to meet everyone in the library, a solid piece of advice from my professional mentor some years ago which is repeated in Watkins’s book. Doing this alongside initial meetings with heads of department and other senior staff, involvement in various university committees, understanding and absorbing institutional culture and process, and training and other induction activities means this is not speedy.

Meeting everyone helps develop early understanding of the expectations and wishes of the team, and allowed me to ask directly what they think I should focus on. It’s also an opportunity to ensure everyone has heard a few key messages unfiltered from me as the new director, such as my perspectives on educational and library practice and labour. By this I don’t mean bringing the bells hooks and Pierre Bourdieu citations to the first meeting with a new colleague, tempting as this might be; rather I mean that where you place emphasis and and how you link personal standards and professional ethics to the work helps in building credibility.

Additionally I am line-managing a new team in my direct reports, who with me comprise the library senior management team. Inheriting an established team that already is performing well provided a wonderful opportunity to thoughtfully consider approaches to existing processes and our decision-making, and design some ‘norms’ for team-working with input from everyone. On a surface level I’ve found these conversations help align expectations about how team members prefer to work, but more deeply they have helped my understanding of the interplay of social structure and human agency (informed here by Anthony Giddens’s theory of structuration) in the social life of the leadership team.

I’ve found it important to be clear and explicit in how I value or weight different aspects of colleagues’ work as managers and leaders. For example, we can consciously place importance on emotional labour in line-management and peer relationships, acknowledging and recognizing it as core to the role and rewarding it as such. We can pay mindful attention to difference in how colleagues work when confronted with uncertainty and other stressors, and how different approaches to making meaning can be combined to provide more insightful pictures than the view of a few individuals.

In working with the additional ambiguity and uncertainty a more senior role brings, I will share some excellent advice from a previous line manager about the need to quickly and accurately discern the “signal from the noise” in strategic situations. Reading Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, fast and slow I understand this idea as an expression of skill that must be developed in senior roles:

The acquisition of skills requires a regular environment, and adequate opportunity to practice, and rapid and unequivocal feedback about the correctness of thoughts and actions. When these conditions are fulfilled, skill eventually develops, and the intuitive judgments and choices that quickly come to mind will mostly be accurate. […] A marker of skilled performance is the ability to deal with vast amounts of information swiftly and efficiently. (Kahneman, 2012. p. 416)

Reflectively though, I would add to this a need to understand what is “noise” is always subjective and relative, perhaps personal, and certainly can be contested. Daniel Kahneman’s work is replete with insight into the psychology of judgment and cognitive bias, and I read it after completing workplace unconscious bias training run for us by an Equality Challenge Unit trainer which cemented that learning. It is one of just a few books I would recommend all higher education workers to read (another is bell hooks’s Teaching to transgress).

A note on the performative in management

I wrote a little about performativity in management in Professional identity, impostor syndrome, and performativity:

Management is fundamentally performative: expressing power by a mode of authoritative speech, a case of actions embodied in “Doing things with words” (Learmonth, 2005).

Since starting in my current role have thought a lot about the relationship between performative speech and power in management roles and leadership situations. The concept of ‘performativity’ used here goes back to J.L. Austin’s notion of performative utterances (or performatives), but importantly for our purposes Jean-François Lyotard’s understanding of the role of performativity in governing the legitimation of knowledge in postmodernity and the implications this has when inspecting power structures and relationships.

In management and leadership, this legitimating role can both aid the creation and development of shared or common understandings, and also in my view is central to how managers exercise power in speech-acts. The view that “words are deeds” runs contrary to the tendency to privilege action as something concrete, practical, and more authentically meaningful than words are, particularly when there is a clear need for transformative action such as political activism. I feel though this is a false comparison, as in management roles and leadership situations there are many highly practical choices made where we act to translate words as deeds. For example, what and who we focus attention on, centre, and prioritize; how we explain our views and beliefs; as well as how we employ words to build support for and set in motion actions.

In my view a key task for managers is balancing the pragmatic such as compromise and coalition-building, with the need to retain—and be seen to retain—an authentic position which is congruent with one’s values. It may be tempting to think of words as tools to create messages for different audiences, only loosely connected with those values. On considering the use of words as performatives I will end on a cautionary insight I have found particularly valuable from Sara Ahmed’s analysis of how words are employed by diversity workers in higher education, from On being included:

A political question becomes the extent to which we can separate ourselves from the words we use. […] If we do things with words, then words can also do things to us. We don’t always know what they will do. (Ahmed, 2012. p.75)

References

Austin, J.L. (1975) How to do things with words. 2nd edn. Reprint, Oxford: Oxford University, 2011.

Ahmed, S. (2012) On being included. Durham, NC: Duke University.

Giddens, A. (1984) The constitution of society. Cambridge: Polity.

hooks, b. (1994) Teaching to transgress. London: Routledge.

Kahneman, D. (2012) Thinking, fast and slow. London: Penguin.

Learmonth, M. (2005) ‘Doing things with words: the case of “management” and “administration”’, Public Administration 83(3), pp. 617–637. doi:10.1111/j.0033-3298.2005.00465.x

Lyotard, J.F.  (1984) The postmodern condition. Manchester: Manchester University.

Watkins, M.D. (2003) The first 90 days. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School.

Why don’t libraries share the results of UX work?

While conferencing at ELAG 2016, Simon made this suggestion for improving collaboration among libraries doing user experience (UX) work on their systems:

I’ve been thinking on-and-off about the question implied in Simon’s second tweet – the reasons libraries do not generally share results of user experience testing of their systems. Below I discuss some of these, which are drawn from examples from people with first-hand knowledge from academic libraries.

“Not all libraries…”

I know many libraries do share their results and analyses, whether more formally in articles, books or book chapters and conference presentations, or more informally in blog posts, conversations, and social media. I am extremely grateful for any and all sharing of this type.

What about libraries that are doing such work but not reporting it? When I know about such work, though it requires extra effort I have had good success asking colleagues about their findings. People are usually generous with sharing – sometimes surprised in the interest, but delighted to be asked about their work. In my experience the trick to doing this effectively is:

  • Knowing that others have been doing something in the first place, for which an active stance towards professional networking helps enormously.
  • Finding the best way to engage colleagues on their terms, and making it easy for them to help you. If you’re nearby offer to visit, or set up a video chat; ask for an hour of conversation rather than anything in writing or a presentation. Manage the time and conversation effectively: focus on what you are asking about; be explicit about asking for honest opinions; always ask about lessons learned.

Why we don’t share

Time and money

By this I primarily mean a lack of time and money to refine the work into something publishable by traditional routes, such as a peer-reviewed journal or presenting results at conferences. I think this is a huge barrier, and I have no simple answers. There is an huge qualitative difference between libraries that invest time and money in this way and those that do not, which is only really apparent with experience.

There are alternative routes. For me the actuality of dissemination and sharing always trumps the esteem in which a particular route of communication is held. Some of the most effective project communications I have seen are blog posts that summarize progress and demonstrate the momentum and trajectory of the work simply with clear and engaging text. This is the kind of work I or a team member would expect to do as part of internal project communication, so text can be reused with reworking for an outside audience.

For events, workarounds such as unconferences and similar events are a lower-cost approach, but these aren’t without issues. Events with no registration fee still favour those privileged in various ways. Even if one can attend unconferences these don’t always attract an audience with enough specialist knowledge, or are not promoted in a way that will attract such an audience. This may sound contrary to the Open Space Technology principle that “Whoever comes [are] the right people” (Owen, 2008), but in practice OST principles depend on a lot of work behind the scenes and careful management on the day to be effective.

Culture

By this I mean the overall stance of the library towards engagement with their sector and understanding of the value of sharing, as a cultural factor. Having a budget for conference attendance and other development activity is not enough if your workplace does not value this type of professional engagement in and of itself, or does not have confidence in staff ability or value the work. In practice this may manifest more subtly in general discouragement and ‘lack of permission’ from managers in the organization, or not sending staff operationally involved in project work to events to speak and network with peers.

Competitive edge

I have heard an argument that we should not give away findings that could help competitors elsewhere in our sector, sometimes scaffolded by belief that as contemporary universities exist in a competitive market they should behave more like private companies. I disagree with the ideological foundation of this argument, but it is logical in acknowledging the reality of a market that has been deliberately created and fostered by government. At Library Camp in 2012, Liz Jolly and I argued that:

Universities have a culture of sharing both internally and externally, and also between those working in the same disciplines across institutions. Furthermore, both within and without higher education, librarianship is a particularly collaborative profession.

(Preater, 2012)

We could remove some of the ideological focus, and simply ask if the investment of time and effort to communicate our work might be less worthwhile than the other things we could spend it on. Above I argue that communication strategies in projects or otherwise should provide you with reusable material, but looking at this strategically I think skipping communication is ultimately detrimental to your library.

To be sure, there are benefits to individual staff in building their professional profile and to the library in being seen as a place ‘where things happen’ and viewed as forward-thinking, including in recruiting and retaining staff. Additionally though, I see an advantage in shaping the speed and direction of thinking as a form of technological leadership in the sector, creating the ‘discursive formation’ (in the sense Foucault describes, for example in part II of The archaeology of knowledge, 1972) of user experience rather than waiting for others to do so.

In communicating our work and engaging our community in discourse we define the content of the discursive formation, of the body of knowledge, in what is still a relatively new and not yet fully-established area. Communication has power in and of itself in bringing in to existence this body of knowledge, and while the practice of user experience is contested, early movers are able to establish how the ‘truth’ of this practice is created and sustained, in our particular context.

For me this idea explains some of the meaning behind practitioners such as Andy Priestner stating, two years ago, that “UX in libraries is a thing now” (2014, emphasis mine), and from experience I would gauge this kind of engagement as putting you between two to three years ahead of libraries that are not doing so.

External validity or being ‘too special’

In this I include disbelief in the external validity of the work, or belief in the necessity of such validity as a precursor to sharing. ‘External validity’ means the extent to which the findings from particular research can be generalized beyond the specific context of the work. I first heard this argument when I was a participant in a library usability study, and naively asked the librarians how they were going to share their results – turns out they weren’t. Some libraries are indeed unusual in themselves, or attract an unusual user base, or both, but there is also a cultural aspect to this problem. Without deliberately maintaining wider awareness, we can lose perspective and end up believing it ourselves: thinking our service is ‘very complex’ or our situation ‘highly unusual’ when it is not particularly so.

My counter-argument is the commonalities between library services and membership mean ideas and concepts are often very transferable. Include some caveats or ‘health warnings’ on your results by all means, but let us weigh things up. Let us include you in our ongoing analysis. This is one reason I value making the theoretical underpinning of the approaches we use in our work explicit when describing what we are doing.

Fear of criticism, lack of confidence in the work

In this reason I include anything in the general space of a wish not to have one’s work critiqued, research methods problematized, or particular choices judged by others in the community. Perfectionism on our part can also play into and amplify this. All engagement in professional discourse includes some measure of risk-taking as there is implicit openness to criticism: speaking at a conference or using a platform or network where replying is easy invites replies. Criticism is tempting as it can be relatively easy for a clever person to say something high-impact. You could do as Ian suggests and start a blog and turn off the comments, but people can (and do) comment on your work elsewhere…

I experienced this recently (with my manager and her manager in the room) when a recording of a user from a piece of UX research was shown that could be interpreted as strongly critical of my project team’s work. This was extremely difficult to accept at the time, but on considered reflection seeing an interpreted piece of feedback was valuable, as it spurred ongoing development and provoked questioning of design choices that had seemed well-founded based on our research.

My recommendation is to trust your judgement if you are on top of your professional development, spend adequate time reflecting-on-action, and test your ideas by taking a critical stance toward your methods and work – including opinions and perspectives from peers. On this subject I recommend Elly’s post on ‘professional confidence’ (O’Brien, 2015). This is a great post that really bears re-reading as part of reflective practice in judging our own expertise and focusing where best to develop skills.

Concluding thoughts

Simon is right in that there is no central location for sharing results of our user experience work. I would love to see something like this created, with low or no barrier to entry so all practitioners could contribute. I think for academic libraries a space on the helibtech wiki could be a good starting point for collaboration. This is a slightly selfish request as in my workplace we maintain a list (a wiki page) of reports, presentations, industry white papers and so on about systems user experience, and used these in developing and shaping ideas for our ongoing research and development.

Absent such a location, I want to encourage practitioners to share their work. We want to hear what you have to say – share your methods, results, and conclusions where you can, as doing so contributes to and shapes discovery user experience as a professional practice.

References

Foucault, M. (1972) The archaeology of knowledge. New York, NY: Vintage.

O’Brien, E. (2015) ‘Professional confidence and “imposter syndrome”‘, Elly O’Brien, June 29. Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20160921152614/https://ellyob.wordpress.com/2015/06/29/professional-confidence/

Owen, H. (2008) Open space technology: a user’s guide. 3rd edn. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler.

Preater, A. (2012) ‘Free and Open Source software and cultural change, at Library Camp 2012’, Ginformation Systems, 15 October. Available at: https://www.preater.com/2012/10/15/free-software-and-cultural-change-at-libcampuk12/

Priestner, A. (2014) ‘Why UX in libraries is a thing now’, Business Librarians Association conference, Leicester, 11 July. Available at: http://www.slideshare.net/AndyPriestner1/why-ux-in-libraries-is-a-thing-now-36899649

Feelings on critical systems praxis, for #critlib

I wrote this to reply to the ‘recommended writing’ suggestion by Kevin Seeber for the December 15 2015 #critlib chat on #feelings. I very likely won’t be at the chat itself, so I haven’t quite addressed the questions as posed.

Why practice critical librarianship?

I understand #critlib to mean critical theory approaches to library work as a whole so will say something about why I find this interesting, and why I think it is important and useful in the undertheorized area of library systems. In this piece I understand #critlib, the idea of critical librarianship, and other critically-informed stances within librarianship as similar approaches.

I found out about #critlib chats when I was already aware of #critLIS, a critical theory reading group at the University of Sheffield iSchool. The students involved in #critLIS tweeted some of their discussions and I read the things they talked about. I could only join in minimally but what I saw of their discussion seemed thrilling in how they brought social critique to information work, but also intimidatingly erudite in the works referenced.

Later I attended a discussion on critical theory in LIS at an RLC event in London. On reflection, at the event I think the whole critical theory ball of wax was explained in problem-posing terms, which was both more useful, more challenging, and achieved more than a lecture on the same subject would have. At that session Kevin and Lauren didn’t offer grand solutions, but instead many new lenses with which to interpret and inspect practice and some practical ideas too (Smith, 2014). I realized I had some reading to do; fortunately, critical librarians (by all means imagine the ‘smiling cat face with heart-shaped eyes’ emoji here) are inevitably generous with suggestions.

Reading a text is learning the relationships among the words in the composition of the discourse. It is the task of a critical, humble, determined “subject” or agent of learning, the reader.

Reading, as study, is a difficult, even painful, process at times, but always a pleasant one as well. It implies the reader delve deep into the text, in order to learn its most profound meaning. The more we do this exercise, in a disciplined way, conquering any desire to flee the reading, the more we prepare ourselves for making future reading less difficult.

Freire (1994, p. 65)

I quote Freire’s view from Pedagogy of Hope on the challenges of engaging with reading, as though I disagree with his presentation of study as an “always […] pleasant” struggle the last part chimes with how I feel on trying to be “an agent of learning” in understanding social critique and develop a #critlib approach with no background in theory. To be clear this is a personal reflection: I’m not telling anyone to do this, and I’m aware I speak from a position of privilege.

In discovering new these areas there is joy in exploring new contours of practice, and opening new discursive spaces. Given new tools for sensemaking, the materials of practice feel new themselves. I value #critlib most in providing a space to create and shape professional discourse, to disagree from a position of inclusivity and respect, and fundamentally to help us develop a reflexive praxis: that is, critically-informed action.

Well, how about it? I found Freire’s explanation of the simultaneous nature and equivalence of reflection and action particularly formative in doing this:

“[M]y defence of praxis implies no dichotomy by which this praxis could be divided into a prior stage of reflection and a subsequent stage of action. Action and reflection occur simultaneously. A critical analysis of reflection may, however, reveal that a particular form of action is impossible or inappropriate at the present time. Those who through reflection perceive the infeasibility or inappropriateness of one or another form of action […] cannot thereby be accused of inaction. Critical reflection is also action.

Freire (1996, p. 109)

Working through the implications of this allowed me to reframe reflection not as an introspective after-the-event mulling over, perhaps somewhat time-wasting given there is “real work” to getting on with, but something central to action itself and part of an overall method of praxis.

https://twitter.com/preater/status/616271562409410560

So, this is why I participate in #critlib and RLC. I want to see the loop between theory and practice closed in ways that appreciate it is not just the job of LIS academics to develop theory and practitioners to employ it, but that theorizing from our practice and experience should be an accessible process for all of us.

Theory in an undertheorized field

One of Kevin’s questions for the chat asks if we think #critlib is “worth it,” that is, does talk about theory make any difference to your own professional practice, and more broadly? I argue yes, but…

I think #critlib starts with a set of challenging positions to work from rather than a set of agreed ideological fixed ideas or ‘how to’ guides for library work, management, and leadership. Even if someone wrote such a thing, the texts we read and discuss are steeped in and reproduce ideologies and this would remain a problem to grapple with.

#critlib offers multidisciplinary ways of seeing and interpreting our practice that are necessarily critically informed and framed in terms of inclusivity and diversity, but that might not be applicable to practice in straightforward ways. This bears analysis of our situation, and for me, giving up the idea of applying #critlib with a particular framing ‘context’ as this term obscures a great deal. I’m indebted to Clarke’s work on grounded theory (2005, pp. 71-72) in understanding this last point.

In my view systems librarianship is relatively undertheorized and ahistorical in its understanding of thought and practice; not obviously fertile ground to develop #critlib. As the head of a systems team I see systems as occupying an important nexus in two areas often claimed neutral in various ways: libraries and technology. Of course neither are neutral, when put like this it’s laughable to suggest they are, but it’s easy to slip into such positions by default if we don’t interrogate our practices and how we utilize technology.

It can be easy for systems workers to think if we are satisfying the requirements of library staff as clients and library users as customers that’s enough, and we needn’t over-think the technology we employ beyond compliance with law (such as data protection legislation), our professional ethics (such as CILIP’s Code of Professional Practice), the standards of our employers, and so on. I’ve heard very reasonable positions voiced in the profession that this is “just good librarianship”.

I argue that this is not enough and our response should be non-neutral as our technology and information management is non-neutral. But to exaggerate for hyperbolic effect, critically-informed ethical approaches are more complicated than lazily rejecting every new idea as “problematic” while maintaining our own comfortable, compartmentalized silos. A systems approach to #critlib (#critsyslib?) means delving into our underlying assumptions by using reflective practice as a technique, taking critically reflective and reflexive approaches in our implementations of new systems and technologies.

For me developing a critical systems praxis means reject instrumental or mechanistic approaches to information, its storage and indexing, its use and understanding by our users, and the stack of technologies that underpin all of these things. A #critlib perspective would mean taking critical approaches throughout systems work including in selection, procurement, and implementation of new technologies and systems, and using critically-informed methods in researching them and in directing their development. For managers and leaders in systems it means role-modelling positive behaviours, and taking an authentically #critlib stance in what we do in our work, including for example line management and hiring practices.

I struggle with these things and cannot claim to do all of them or that my team do all of them, yet, but referring to the Freirean equivalence of reflection and action, taking on #critlib viewpoints and approaches begins the necessary perspectival shift to move towards a critical turn in systems praxis hence, why I #critlib.

References

Clarke, A.E. (2005) Situational analysis: grounded theory after the postmodern turn. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Freire, P. (1996) Pedagogy of the oppressed. 2nd edn. London: Penguin.

Freire, P. (1994) Pedagogy of hope. Reprint, London: Bloomsbury, 2014.

Smith, L. (2014) ‘Radical Librarians Collective (part three): critical theory’, Lauren Smith, 16 May. Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20160911091351/https://laurensmith.wordpress.com/2014/05/16/radical-librarians-collective-part-three/

Reflective practice and critical reflection recommended reading

I was recently asked by colleagues for some recommended reading on reflective practice in general and critical reflection in particular, and as several people asked me to share this I thought I would do so here.

Reflective practice in general

Schön, D.A. (1983) The reflective practitioner. New York, NY: Basic Books.

A classic text, and one that should be seen in Schön’s context of time, place, and employment. Heavily critiqued and interpreted in the last 30+ years; I’d argue understanding reflection-in-action vs. reflection-on-action remains core to effective reflective practice and that this is still a challenging work when considering professional technical skills for practitioners.

Finlay, L., (2008) Reflecting on reflective practice. Available at: http://oro.open.ac.uk/68945/1/Finlay-%282008%29-Reflecting-on-reflective-practice-PBPL-paper-52.pdf

For me Finlay is the best starting point for a review article on reflective practice. Written for the Open University PBPL CETL (which dates it if you remember CETLs…) but presenting, effectively, a wide-ranging literature review on reflective practice useful to anyone. Very helpful for an overview of different approaches or ways of doing reflective practice.

Bolton, G. (2014) Reflective practice : writing and professional development. 3rd edn. London: Sage.

A useful overview of reflective writing. Its utility to you may depend on your view of the importance of narrative, but worthwhile if you have any intention of writing reflective pieces on your experience.

Brookfield, S. (1994) ‘Tales from the dark side: a phenomenology of adult critical reflection’, International Journal of Lifelong Education, 13 (3) pp.203-216. doi:10.1080/0260137940130303

An interesting exploration of negative aspects (the ‘dark side’) of critical reflection for adult learners. Recommended reading for how to avoid or overcome these issues in practice. Sadly not available OA or free-to-read.

Argyris, C. (1991) ‘Teaching smart people how to learn’, Harvard Business Review, (May/June). Available at: https://hbr.org/1991/05/teaching-smart-people-how-to-learn

On challenges of applying Argyris and Schön’s single-loop vs. double-loop learning to professional practice.

Drucker, P.F. (1999) ‘Managing oneself’, Harvard Business Review, (January). Available at: https://hbr.org/2005/01/managing-oneself

Not pitched as about reflection, but contains useful nuggets on ways of thinking about development. Warning: contains some problematic ideas and sweeping statements.

Critical reflection or critical reflective practice

I take critical reflective practice to mean particularly the ‘two stage’ approach of analysis and deconstruction followed by reconstruction and change developed and articulated in the 2000s by Jan Fook, Fiona Gardner, and Sue White, alongside contributions from many other researchers. Their particular combination of theoretical underpinning and practical method is the one I prefer because it chimes with in with my own values and preferred approach to thinking about professional practice.

These researchers scaffold their approach with four theories, this list is paraphrased in part from Gardner (2014) and Fook and Gardner (2007):

  • Reflective practice itself, including an idea of experience or practice knowledge that I would describe as praxis, eg. articulated in Fook and Gardner (2007 p.24), “[R]eflective practice can be seen as a process of researching practice theory, by developing it directly from concrete practice”
  • Reflexivity, emphasizing a consciousness of how users perceive themselves and us, and how we perceive ourselves and each other in context as practitioners and researchers
  • Postmodernism and deconstruction, in this case particularly emphasizing concerns with attitudes to and influences of power
  • Critical social theory, including an emphasis on social justice as a concern

One challenge for us is taking these ideas out of their original context of health and social care and making them applicable to library and information professional practice. Personally, I think this is entirely possible as the idea of praxis implies:

  • Applying theory to practice deductively
  • Creating theory from practice via inductive formation of knowledge and new theories of practice

My point, is we needn’t wait for someone to write the ‘Critical reflection in library and information science’ textbook but can work on these ideas immediately. 😉

Gardner, F. (2014) Being critically reflective. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Gardner’s is my favoured introduction to critical reflection concepts and methods. It’s written to work for students and both new and experienced practitioners, providing practical examples while referencing more complex texts for underpinning theory, some of which are below.

Fronek, P. (2012) Jan Fook: critical reflection. [Podcast]. Available at: http://www.podsocs.com/podcast/critical-reflection/

Fook, J. (2006) ‘Beyond reflective practice: reworking the “critical” in critical reflection’, Professional Lifelong Learning: beyond reflective practice, Leeds, UK, 3 July. Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20170424140821/http://medhealth.leeds.ac.uk/download/1404/keynote_janis_fook

This conference keynote and podcast can be combined with Gardner’s book on critical reflection as an overview for ‘core’ reading. Jan Fook’s keynote for a medical education conference includes both the ‘what it is’ explanation and a retheorizing of critical reflection. I really like her summary on p. 14 for the focus on the political aspects:

“In reworking a theory of critical reflection, I would now articulate critical reflection as involving the ability to understand the social dimensions and political functions of experience and meaning making, and the ability to apply this understanding in working in social contexts” (emphasis in original)

The podcast interview is meant as an overview – Jan Fook’s style and enthusiasm are compelling, start here if you are unsure about where to dive in.

White, S., Fook, J., and Gardner, F. (eds.) (2006) Critical reflection in health and social care. Maidenhead: Open University.

Lehmann’s chapter 14 particularly interesting as this links a reflective writing approach to critical reflective practice; the ‘five questions’ she poses are also very useful for unpicking underlying assumptions.

Fook, J. and Gardner, F. (2007) Practicing critical reflection: a resource handbook. Maidenhead: Open University.

Other than Gardner (2014) I think this is the best introduction containing a more detailed explanation of the theory plus a plan for how to carry out practical reflective conversations as a group.

Vince, R. and Reynolds, M. (2002) ‘Organizing reflective practice’, Organization Learning, Knowledge and Capabilities, Copenhagen, Denmark, 28-30 April. Available at: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/wbs/conf/olkc/archive/olkc3/papers/contribution115.pdf

I include this here as Vince and Reynolds link reflective practice to critical management studies as a way of developing a model moving beyond Schön. Their overall view of ‘collective reflection’ is a useful expansion of, and critique of some limits in Schön’s work.

Ghaye, T. (2005) Developing the reflective healthcare team. Oxford: Blackwell.

Does what it says: the focus is on team-based reflection in healthcare, from a UK context. Much of what is here is generalizable and I think this is a particularly good starting point for managers or leaders looking at ways of developing reflective teamwork.

Critical theory and praxis

A major attraction for me to critical reflection was how Fook, Gardner, and White combine ‘traditional’ reflective practices with critical theory. With that in mind I wanted to include a few suggestions for starting points I think are useful in this area that may help in understanding the above. Lauren’s recommended reading list below includes these and much, much more: everything from critical theory ‘big names’ to specific library and inform recommendations.

Generally I’d also recommend Foucault, but struggle to pick one particular work. If pressed I’d include Discipline and Punish due to the focus on power and how disciplinary mechanisms were extended to the 20th century (Taylorist, Fordist) workplace, and the classic chapter on panopticism. It’s what I’ve recommended to my team as a starting point.

Leckie, G.J., Given, L.M., and Buschman, J. (eds.) (2010) Critical theory for library and information science. Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited.

In my opinion the best general introduction to how critical theory can be applied to library and information work.

Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the oppressed. London: Penguin.

A foundational work on praxis and critical pedagogy, quotable and inspiring. Of its time and place (citations include Lenin and Mao) so should be taken as a starting point for developing ideas.

Day, R.E., (2000) ‘Tropes, history, and ethics in professional discourse and information science’, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 51 (5), pp.469–475. doi:10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(2000)51:5<469::AID-ASI7>3.0.CO;2-B

Free-to-read preprint available at: https://roday.pages.iu.edu/articles/tropes.pdf

Reading lists from our community

Smith, L. (2014) ‘Radical Librarians Collective (Part Three): Critical Theory’, Lauren Smith, May 16. Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20160911091351/https://laurensmith.wordpress.com/2014/05/16/radical-librarians-collective-part-three/

This blog post links to Lauren’s critical theory in LIS reading list (Google Doc) but is worth reading for additional background and the wonderful top ‘All-Time Must-Read Critical Theory in LIS texts’ list.

Professional identity, impostor syndrome, and performativity: thoughts on #radlib15

Last weekend I attended the #radlib15 event organised by Radical Librarians Collective (RLC) in Huddersfield. I wanted to draw some threads between sessions I attended, and follow up on a few things left unsaid on the day. RLC has come a long way in a few years and is evolving, but importantly it has maintained a safe space for discussions in LIS that are not happening elsewhere. My thanks to the organizers at RLC for their work.

Professional confidence and professional identity

During the day, I felt two discussions on impostor syndrome and team working were linked by points made about professional confidence and identity, questions about radical perspectives on management, and ideas about the presentation of an authentic self.

Elly O’Brien recently wrote a compelling article problematizing impostor syndrome and professional confidence which helped inform the impostor syndrome session, with Elly’s article referenced at the beginning. I agree with Elly’s points about the unhelpful librarian tendency towards self-deprecation, and I think Kevin nailed it when he called out this “syndrome” as a political creation exerting power on the subject:

About lacking confidence, a point was raised in discussion about whether there is a psychological disconnect between our presentation of identity online, and our true or authentic selves:

I think Simon’s point on the marketized self is good, and I would expand on it and generalize from it. From a Marxian viewpoint anyone who is worker is compelled to sell labour as a commodity, representing a market relationship between the self’s potential for labour (labour power, Marx’s Arbeitskraft) formed from our own living bodies, and capital. In a sense under capital that marketized self is no more or less than one’s real self as it is reflected and understood by capital. This situation is deeply problematic.

Performativity in online identity

On Twitter, Chris followed this with a point and a question about authenticity in our online selves:

I’ve been thinking about a similar question about online identity since I read Ned’s blog post about creating online identity last year, especially his points about “consistent voice” and advice on not “adjusting who you are for other people”. Here I draw a line to the session on teams and teamwork and library managers as a potentially radical subject, relating them using Judith Butler’s concept of performativity.

Butler originally applied her Foucauldian reading of performativity in developing an analysis of gender, arguing that identity can be brought to life or made real by repeated and consistent use of authoritative speech, as:

There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; […] identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results.
(Butler, 1999 p.33)

There is a subtle point here. Butler is not simply suggesting that if we talk as if we have identity x, we will have identity x, as in the “fake it till you make it” suggestion that was raised in the impostor syndrome session, but that performativity is:

[T]hat reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains
(Butler, 2014 p.2)

I argue online identities of LIS workers are performative in the way that our use of language itself reifies, by repetition of authoritative speech, those identities that we create online rather than being something authentically constructed or a mere result of “being oneself”. For example, the identity of “an efficient, competent subject librarian”, or “a grounded, authentic manager”, created exactly by the discourse of those individuals on social media platforms like Twitter. I would expand this to include identities we create as managers, in that management is fundamentally performative: expressing power by a mode of authoritative speech, a case of actions embodied in “Doing things with words” (Learmonth, 2005).

On the broader question raised of library management as potentially radical, I have written before about authenticity in management and leadership at Radical Library Camp (the original RLC unconference in 2013) where I facilitated a discussion. In hindsight I’m not satisfied with that perspective, because I don’t see much difference between what I described and straightforward good management.

Instead I think we need to approach management and leadership from a critical perspective, and that there is space for a critical management studies (CMS) view of library management as Kenny Garcia suggested on the #radlib15 hashtag. CMS is something like a critique of management informed by Frankfurt School critical theory; to provide LIS focus I’d add in critical perspectives on information management and information literacy, and perhaps a Marxian lens to analyze information as a commodity in a marketized society. For much more development of the latter, I recommend Lawson, Sanders, and Smith (2015).

This is something I’m very interested in developing in future, so if you are interested in a CMS plus LIS mashup let me know.

References

Butler, J. (1999) Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. Reprint, Abingdon: Routledge.

Butler, J. (2014) Bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of “sex”. Reprint, Abingdon: Routledge.

Lawson, S., Sanders, K, and Smith, L. (2015) ‘Commodification of the information profession: a critique of higher education under neoliberalism’, Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 3(1), eP1182. doi:10.7710/2162-3309.1182

Learmonth, M. (2005) ‘Doing things with words: the case of “management” and “administration”’, Public Administration 83(3), pp. 617–637. doi:10.1111/j.0033-3298.2005.00465.x

Photo credit

‘Sunset Flowers. Huddersfield‘ header image by Flickr user Michael Podger. License CC BY.

“UX for the win!” at #CityMash: open and focused coding of qualitative research data for discovery user experience

In Library Services at Imperial College London, between January and April 2015 the systems team completed two iterations of user experience testing of our Ex Libris Primo discovery system with a view to redeveloping the user interface to provide improved an user experience.

For the #CityMash Mashed Library unconference, Karine Larose and I are running a workshop on the methods we used in our second iteration of testing. Rather than run a ‘show and tell’ about our approach, the workshop will provide experience using our methods with some of our data in a similar way to how we conducted the research ourselves. We will provide hands-on experience of these methods, attempt to demystify the approaches used, and hope to demonstrate how exciting we find the professional praxis of systems librarianship.

This blog post explains the background and provides a practical overview and some theoretical scaffolding ahead of #CityMash. What we present is just one approach and all methods are flawed; we are extremely interested in hearing comments on or objections to our methodology around discovery user experience.

Acknowledgement

We’d like to acknowledge the work of George Bray, Master’s student at UCL Department of Information Studies, during a work placement with our team. George designed and undertook much of this testing during his work placement, based on our overall guidance, and we would not have been able to produce what we did without him with us.

Why we use constructivist grounded theory

The methods we chose for our user experience research were qualitative and post-positivist. They are based ideas developed by Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss (1967) in their classic (and arguably classical, read on…) The discovery of grounded theory. Grounded theory includes:

  • Data collection and analysis as a simultaneous process
  • Analytically constructing “codes” and categories from data itself
  • The “constant comparative method” of comparing existing and new data in an ongoing process
  • Developing theory during each stage of data collection and analysis
  • Sampling to aid building theory, rather than being representative of the population
  • In pure grounded theory, the literature review comes after the analysis

This list is paraphrased from Charmaz (2012; 2014 p. 7).

The above may sound unusual to those with experience of more quantitative methods, and the idea of the literature review coming last may sound unusual to everyone. Bear with me. If you are interested in reading more I don’t necessarily recommend Glaser & Strauss as a first step. For an introduction to grounded theory at LIS Masters’s level, there is a chapter in the second edition of Alison Pickard’s Research methods in information (2013) which provides a detailed and readable outline.

Our touchstone work has been Kathy Charmaz’s Constructing grounded theory (2014) where she explains a constructivist approach to grounded theory. Core to her ideas are the acknowledgement of subjectivity and relativity in the research process, and a drive towards abstract understanding of observed phenomena within the specific circumstances of the research (Charmaz, 2008) which particularly resonated with us doing discovery research.

Charmaz is no ideologue, for her different traditions in grounded theory represent a “Constellation of methods” (2014 p. 14) rather than binary opposition. We have drawn on elements from both the empirical interpretivist grounded theory tradition, constructivist grounded theory, and the critical theory approaches that inform my thinking elsewhere in LIS. These are the differences we understand:

Objectivist grounded theory Constructivist grounded theory
Theory ’emerges’ from the data Researchers construct categories from the data
Researchers develop generalizations and explanations out of context Researchers aim to create an interpretive understanding accounting for context
The researcher’s voice has priority The participant’s voice is integral to analysis and presentation

What does this mean for user experience work?

You can see how a constructivist approach will focus on the voice of the user as an integral feature in understanding and presenting data. In my team (and I hope in your team) user experience work has never been informed by the “Librarian knowing best”, but this approach provides a particular emphasis. My experience is the voice of the user, seeing her context and affective responses, is a powerful way of making the case for making changes to our systems. This presentation can be extremely eye-opening even for those who work day-to-day in user-facing roles and know our users well.

We definitely did want to inductively develop theory from our data, but we wanted to be mindful of the user’s context and be interpretive, as we know our discovery system is just one part of a complex and shifting information landscape our users inhabit. We use the iterative and analytical approach of coding, and codes necessarily result from the researcher and data interacting (Charmaz, 2012). However our focus is wherever possible on trying to analyse the data rather than describe it. Ideally this should happen from the first moments of coding; more on this below.

Fundamental to constructivist grounded theory, the resulting ideas we develop are based on our interpretation of data and as researchers we cannot stand ‘outside’ that interpretation. What we create from the data is based on conceptualizing what we have studied and observed in user behaviours: we must stand inside and ‘own’ our analyses which will be affected by our biases, our preconceptions, and the emotional investment in the work we do.

This is not unprofessional, but an acknowledgement of the shared humanity of the researcher and the participant, and of the value of our work experience as practitioners that allows us to critically reflect on and develop theories of practice. To balance our subjectivity as researchers, a key part of the constructivist process has been to critically reflect on our preconceptions about discovery, information literacy, and users’ behaviour and expectations of doing their research using the tools we provide.

Working with qualitative data for user experience research

We are doing analysis of qualitative data collected during interviews to investigate Primo user experience. Ahead of interviewing proper, we held planning meetings with Library Services staff drawn from all sections of the library to work through starting points: primarily, what we wanted to get from the interviewing process, and what we wanted to know by the end of this round of investigation.

Extensive notes of these workshops were taken, and used by George to provide an initial focus for our interviewing. These are not quite research questions, but areas to focus on. These were:

  • The purpose, construction, and use of search and resources
  • Presentation of information in search: what matters to the user when selecting the right result?

Following this the team developed an interview script for use by facilitators. This included general questions about information seeking as well as some specific tasks to carry out on Primo. This interview is structured and in grounded theory ideally would be based around open questions, helping us as researchers unpick meaning and move towards answering “why” questions in our analysis. We used a mixture of questions and posing specific tasks for users to complete. Our interview script is available: Primo UX Interview questions June 2015 (PDF).

In practice interviewers have different styles, and some facilitators stuck more closely to the script than others. This is not necessarily a problem, remember as an observer you are free to suggest places where we need to run another iteration and gather more data.

Our research data comprises the audiovisual recordings and the facilitator’s notes. The notes help understand the facilitator’s perspective on the interview and provide useful observations.

For #CityMash, we are providing a recording of the first part of an interview. In the full interviews at Imperial we did longer interviews making use of other methods drawn from web usability testing. The #CityMash data does not contain these. We gained informed consent for participant interview recordings and our written notes to be used for presentation and data analysis at #CityMash.

#CityMash technical requirements

  • You will need at least a tablet, ideally a laptop, to watch and listen to the audiovisual recordings. A smartphone screen will likely not be big enough to see what’s going on. Headphones are ideal but are not entirely necessary.
  • Sharing a device with another delegate is possible. Coding together and sharing your observations and thoughts as you go in a negotiated process would provide an interesting alternative to doing this on your own.
  • You will need a way of recording your coding and writing memos and any other notes. Any text editor, word processor, or pen and paper will work fine. (At Imperial College to facilitate collaborative coding, sharing, and to save time, we just write directly in our staff wiki.)

Beginning the process of open coding

Charmaz’s (2014, p. 116) guidance is that during initial or open coding, we ask:

  • What is this data a study of?
  • What do the data suggest? [What do they p]ronounce? [What do they l]eave unsaid?
  • From whose point of view?
  • What theoretical category does this specific [data] indicate?

Grounded theory textbooks often give examples of coding based on narrative such as diaries or written accounts and show example codes side-by-side with this. We are using audiovisual recordings instead, but the process is similar: listen to each statement and sentence spoken and the user’s behaviour as you go through the video and code piece-by-piece. Try to “sweep” through the data fairly quickly rather than spending too much time on each code. You will get better and faster at this as you go.

For codes themselves, try starting by writing down short analytic observations about the data as you experience it. Codes should “result from what strikes you in the data” (Charmaz, 2012) and should be “short, simple, active, and analytic” (Charmaz, 2014 p. 120 ). Remember you’re trying to be analytical about what you see, not just record what is happening.

Charmaz’s (2014 p. 120) ‘code for coding’ is:

  • Remain open
  • Stay close to the data
  • Keep your codes simple and precise
  • Construct short codes
  • Preserve actions
  • Compare data with data
  • Move quickly through the data

Keep the facilitator’s notes alongside you and try to understand how these relate to what she saw and understood in the interview.

Don’t worry about being perfect the first time. Coding is iterative and you are allowed to go back and rework things, and make new connections between data. Initial codes are provisional, and working quickly both forces you be to spontaneous and gives more time to go back and iterate over the data again.

It is very difficult, but try to put your favourite theoretical “lens” to one side during initial coding. It’s perfectly fine to bring in these ideas later, but for open coding you are trying to spark thoughts and bring out new ideas from the data rather than apply someone else’s grand theory.

Focused coding: refining data to begin to develop theory

Our #CityMash workshop is limited in time so we will do an initial round of open coding followed by small group discussion exploring focused coding.

Focused coding is the process of analyzing and assessing your first round of codes, and as a guide it should be a reasonably fast process. You are looking for connections and relationships between codes, and comparing them with the data and with each other. Looking at particular pairs of codes, which work better as overall analytical categories? Which give a better direction in developing an overall theory from the data?

Think about how you might create a theoretical framework later about discovery user experience to help inform changes to the system. Which codes better fit the data in allowing you to do this?

Charmaz (2014, pp. 140-151.) poses the following questions to help make choices about focused coding:

  • What do you find when you compare your initial codes with data?
  • In which ways might your initial codes reveal patterns?
  • Which of these codes best account for the data?
  • Have you raised these codes to focused codes?
  • What do you comparisons between codes indicate?
  • Do your focused codes reveal gaps in the data?

The results of George’s analysis of our focused coding was written up into a summary report of the things we needed to concentrate on in redeveloping our Primo interface. The systems team is currently working on Primo back-end configuration and front-end design to fulfill this, and these findings will be the subject of an upcoming blog post.

#CityMash slides

Our slides from our #CityMash talk are also available.

References

Charmaz, K. (2008) ‘Constructionism and the grounded theory method’, in Holstein, J.A. & Gubrium, J.F. (eds.), Handbook of constructionist research. New York, NY: Guilford Press, pp. 397-412.

Charmaz, K. (2012) ‘The power and potential of grounded theory’, Medical Sociology Online, 6(3), pp. 2-15. Available at: http://www.medicalsociologyonline.org/resources/Vol6Iss3/MSo-600x_The-Power-and-Potential-Grounded-Theory_Charmaz.pdf (Accessed: 11 June 2015).

Charmaz, K. (2014) Constructing grounded theory. 2nd edn. London: Sage

Glaser, B.G. & Strauss, A.L. (1967) The discovery of grounded theory. Chicago, IL: de Gruyter

Pickard, A.J. (2013) Research methods in information. 2nd edn. London: Facet.