Transformational Discourse: Idealogies of Organizational Change in the Academic Library and Information Science Literature

THISARTtcLE EXAMINES DISC:OURSES IN THE academic and information science literature that attempt to justify and promote, to criticize and resist, or to explain and interpret transformational social change. These discussions represent one face of a much larger wave of popular and technical discourse that has arisen in response to pressures put on currently dominant institutions by the processes of post-industrialization. The nature of these institutions and the pressures they face is explicated in terms of Western civilization’s modernization project, whose internal cultural contradictions and conflicting foundational metaphors have generated a variety of unanticipated social consequences. The resulting cultural disjunctions provide an invitation to rhetoric. Modern organizations, with their complex division of labor designed to accomplish unified corporate purposes, have become primary sites for the application of managerial ideologies aimed at creating identity among divisions. Modern academic libraries, as organizations devoted to the preservation and production of cultural knowledge through the efficient collection and processing of information, stand directly astride the cultural fissures that generate transformational discourse. This article surveys the resulting corpus of library and information science (LIS) literature about organizational change in academic libraries and uses multiple methods to build a syncretic interpretation that may be able to overcome some of the traditional problems of qualitative research. To accomplish this, multiple interpretative frameworks were applied by means of an especially flexible and powerful qualitative analysis software Mark Tyler Day, Middle Eastern Studies, Indiana University Libraries, 1320 E. 10th Street, Bloomington, IN 47405-1801 LIBRARY TRENDS, Vol. 46, No. 4, Spring 1998, pp. 635-667 01998 The Board of Trustees, University of Illinois 636 IJBRARY TRENDS/SPRING 1998 program to identify overlapping discourse features and to begin generating theories that can be used to explain these features. The unique contribution of this research derives from its attempt to identify basic formal linguistic patterns in a representative corpus of discourse that can be linked to larger discourse systems and whose organization, in turn, can be interpreted in terms of broader social theories. Patterns discovered so far suggest that current LIS rhetorical strategies continue to operate within a modern grammar of organizational motives that reproduces existing forms of organizational life rather than radically transforming them. INTRODUCTION All civilizations exhibit fissures in their cultural foundation. These breaches are caused by contradictions in the structural principles upon which they were founded (Giddens, 1979, pp. 131-64). The social tensions that build along these fault lines usually are controlled or dissipated in ways that prevent major dislocations from occurring. Sometimes, however, a major realignment occurs and triggers the release of tremendous cultural energy which transforms the social landscape. Academic libraries currently are caught up in a cultural tsunami caused by just such a realignment in the principles upon which modern Western civilization was founded. The resulting waves of rhetoric inundate us daily with proclamations about the transformational changes occurring in this turbulent environment and about the need for individuals and their organizations to adapt by transforming themselves. This flood of what can be called “transformational discourse” began around 1970 with the publication of Alvin Toffler’s (1970) best-selling Future Shock and has by now overflowed into nearly every field of endeavor. Library and Information Science has both helped to create this form of discourse with its visions of electronic libraries and scholarly workstations and has been heavily influenced in turn because the application of information technology is everywhere assumed to have a transformational effect on modern organizations, especially organizations such as academic libraries that specialize in “knowledge work.” The question then becomes, how do we know it will have a transformational effect, and what do we really mean by that? To pursue these questions, we first need to understand how modern organizations came into being as social institutions designed to promote and maintain the foundational principles of modern industrial society. FOUNDING OF MODERN LIFE THE INSTITUTIONS ORGANIZATIONAL These principles were developed by Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers and doers whose aim was to reconstruct medieval society on a more humanistic and rational basis. Their labors have resulted in the four great institutional edifices of modernity: (1)cultural institutions committed DAY/TRANSFORMATIONAL DISCOURSE 637 to the unfettered creation and accumulation of knowledge; (2) governmental institutions dedicated to the equitable organization and use of power; (3) religious institutions consecrated to the universal pursuit and defense of human dignity; and (4) economic institutions devoted to the efficient accumulation and distribution of wealth (Wallace, 1994, p. 63). This impressive institutional monument to humanistic enlightenment values is maintained by numerous individual organizations-business corporations, churches, state agencies, academic libraries, and so on-that embody these values in practice. Internally, organizations support these values through a combination of cognitive, normative, and regulative structures (Scott, 1995a, 1995b; Tolbert & Zucker, 1996; Zucker, 1977). Among organizations, common institutional values are constrained by social environments in which each organization is expected to play by the rules (Meyer & Rowan, 1977). Thus, one useful way of studying interaction among organizations is to consider them as players whose strategic behavior follows the regulations and fashions of their particular institutional “field” (Stearns & Allan, 1996;.Thornton, 1995). The modern conception of an organization as a legally incorporated virtual person originated during the Late Middle Ages, as natural persons strove to break the power monopoly of the Church and State [and] created juristic, legal or “corporate”persons.. . . In the U.S. . . . an 1886 Supreme Court ruling explicitly recognizes the rights and obligations of the corporation-as-person. (Cheney & McMillan, 1990, p. 96) Using this metaphor, organizations are often talked about as if they were human actors who have missions and needs, who have rights and responsibilities, who can plan strategies, who can learn, and whose behavior can become dysfunctional. At the same time, organizations are treated as agents-the organs (from the Latin “organum”; tool, instrument) of society-designed to achieve the goals of society in the most efficient and effective manner possible. Organizations thus serve as a powerful manifestation of the instrumental rationality that characterizes modern Western civilization. Their ability to produce a high level of social power has been a major factor leading to the rise of the West (McNeill, 1963). Modern theorists and practitioners have always treated organizations primarily as rational agents of society. Variations on the theme of designing more effective organizations continue to fill the literature. Working together in an organized manner, people can accomplish much more than they can working alone or in an uncoordinated fashion. This is particularly true when it comes to making large physical changes in the world (Wallace, 1994, p. 26). Thus, before the industrial revolution, most large social projects used organizations that were similar in many ways to modern ones. The traditional religious values that such organizations institutionalized, however, differed from the secular rational values 638 LIBRARY TRENDS/SPIUNG 1998 that characterize modern organizations. These values in many ways create one of the important fault lines in modern culture-what may be called the paradox of “creative destruction.” This image is very important to understanding modernity precisely because it derived from the practical dilemmas that faced the implementation of the modernist project. How could a ncw world be created, after all, without destroying much that had gone before? You simply cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs, as a whole line of modernist thinkers from Goethe to Mao have noted. (Harvey, 1989,p. 16) The process of creative destruction leads to the constant replacement of stable social structures and their institutionalized values by supposedly new and better ones. Modern organizations look forward, hardly ever backward-except to borrow items from the past that may be useful in the future. Although this paradoxical dynamic arose early in the history of modernism, it was only after the growth of industrial capitalism that it reached into every citizen’s life and became the defining feature of modernity. That growth occurred as capitalist entrepreneurs applied technology to organize production. The entrepreneur, in Schumpeter’s view a heroic figure, was the c r e ative destroyer par excrllence because the entrepreneur was prepared to push the consequences of technical and social innovation to vital extremes. And it was only through such crcative heroism that human progress could be assured (Harvey, 1989,p. 17). Entrepreneurial capitalism itself developed earlier in sixteenth-century Europe when the rationalizing and humanizing motives of the Enlightenment and the Renaissance combined with the moral asceticism of the Protestant Reformation to produce the Protestant ethic (Weber, 1930). When the steam engine was invented, entrepreneurs quickly saw the possibility of increasing their profits by applying this new technology and had accumulated the investment capital needed to do so. Earlier societies also used technology to help overcome natural human limits, but only in modern times has technological innovation in and of itself become a primary motive for change. This has dramatically increased society’s ability to generate wealth. It also has speeded up the process of creative destruction and thereby created new cultural fissures. During the nineteenth-century, as capital came to be tied down in large “power-driven industries, profit [began] to depend on [how Fast] one moved these investments past one’s fixed capital” (Beniger, 1986, p. 169). Various arrangements were devised to increase profits by speeding up production. Ways to increase the speed of distribution were then required to handle increased production. In both cases, increases in operational speed and complexity quickly became a strain on informally organized enterprises and challenged the unaided natural intellectual capacity of the individuals who ran them. The problem was how to process DAY/TRANSFORMATIONAL DISCOURSE 639 information more quickly, more accurately, and over greater distances so that it could be used to control the quality and quantity of production. One solution was to enhance the information processing capabilities of the unaided human brain by embodying those capabilities in the rules and activities of organized groups of people. An analogy can then be made between the human brain, with its ability to coordinate and control individual behavior, and bureaucratic management, with its ability to coordinate and control the behavior of “corporate persons.” From this point of view, the development of bureaucracies and computers can both be seen as a historical development arising from the need to perform the ever more complicated cybernetic or “steering” functions required by industrial capitalism (Beniger, 1990). Thus, the history of organizational expansion over the last century can largely be told in terms of the increasing rationalization of information processing techniques (Beniger, 1986). In the late nineteenth century, this process brought about the paperbased office in which people had assigned positions, followed formal procedures, filled out standardized forms, and filed them using standardized equipment. Melvil Dewey and the new profession of librarianship were at the forefront of this movement (Dewey, 1912; Frohmann, 1994, pp. 121-31). The resulting “paper explosion” placed additional burdens on the expanding system of bureaucratic organizations and led to the invention ofvarious mechanical devices designed to automate processes of calculating, sorting, and retrieving data. Eventually, spurred on by the demands of World War I1 and the Cold War, this process culminated in the birth of the modern computer and telecommunications industries (Bowker, 1993; Burke, 1992, 1994; Edwards, 1996; Leslie, 1993; Lowen, 1997; Wiener, 1967). However, the application of contemporary information technology has created productivity problems of its own and generated a new round of attempts to overcome them (Beniger, 1990; Dordick & Wang, 1993; Harris, 1994; Landauer, 1995; Shenk, 1997). No one can predict how these problems will be resolved, but it remains true that the crises faced by modern organizations tend to be defined in terms of the structural principles of modern capitalism. These principles focus on instrumental rationality and establish a hierarchy of values with organizational efficiency and success at the apex. Thus, the difficulties that people have in adapting to the introduction of computer control systems is defined as a “productivity problem,’’ and the solution to this problem involves making employees “change ready” (Kriegel & Brandt, 1996). The increasingly dominant global influence of these principles seems likely to continue well into the twenty-first century (Berger, 1986; Heilbroner, 1985, 1987,1993). ORGANIZATIONAL AS AN IWITATION DISJUNCTIONS TO RHETORIC Kenneth Burke (1969b) has noted that when you “put identification and division ambiguously together, so that you cannot know for certain just where one ends and the other begins, you have the characteristic invitation to rhetoric (p. 25). Modern organizations, with their complex division of labor designed to accomplish unified corporate purposes, thus become primary sites for the application of managerial rhetorics aimed at creating identity among divisions: Organizations, by their very nature, are persnasive enterprises [that] must. . . (1) maintain a system of communication, (2) communicate a comnion purpose, and ( 3 ) secure the essential contribution of members. These key elements of organization can easily be translated in terms of communication networks, shared “visions,” and individual motivation, respectively, . . , The central concern of organizations is control . . . [which] manifests itself primarily through symbolic means; . . . the “system” is in fact a set of symbols (rules, policies,.job descriptions, etc.). (Cheney & Mchlillan, 1990, p. 98) Anyone who has ever read a Dilbert cartoon understands the fundamental paradox of modern organizational life. Managers continually attempt to irnprove corporate productivity by exploiting their employees as just another, albeit human, resource. Using the latest managerial fad, they also present each new effort to increase productivity as a humane program designed to empower their employees. Employees, well aware of the underlying contradiction, treat their bosses as sincere, but clueless, or as insincere and manipulative. The resulting comic understanding (Gusfield, 1989, p. 26) offers insight and solace if‘ not a guaranteed program for organizational improvement. This incongruity between individual human freedom and corporate economic rationality is not new to our age but developed as an integral feature of industrialization: Constitutional guarantees of personal rights and a heightened interest in individual emotions and personal growth developed in Western Europe and in the United States a short hundred and fifty years ago. This emergence of modern individualism coincided with the development of modern industry in the course of which an ever increasing number of individuals became subject to the strict and impersonal discipline of factory or business office. The subordination of the many had not been a central issue of intellectual controversy as long as custom or traditional authority pervaded more or less unchallenged. But the humane aspirations of the Enlightenment tended to challenge the new subordination to an industrial wa~7of life, and the human problems of an industrial civilization became a matter of controversy froin its inception. (Rendix, 1963,p. vii) Is Transformational Discourse Ideolog-ical, Utopian, or Social Scientific? Ideological, utopian, and social scientific writings all arose as intellectual attempts to explain-and to justify or to challenge-the social forces that generated this controversy over the human problems of industrialization. A plethora of competing discourse communities and interpretative paradigms grew from these attempts (Alvesson, 1987b;Bell, 1962;Bendix, DAY/TRANSFORMATIONAL DISCOURSE 641 1951,1963,1988,1993; Berger & Kellner, 1981; Berger & Luckmann, 1967; Burrell, 1996; Burrell & Morgan, 1979; Collins, 1994; Giddens, 1979; Mumby, 1988; Reed, 1992, 1996). These different ways of talking about societywill appear incommensurable if one interprets ideological discourse as the self-interested distortion of social reality, utopian discourse as the self-deceptive invention of social reality, and social scientific discourse as the unbiased explanation of social reality. This incommensurability arises because the modern ideologue, utopian, and social scientist alike have inherited two paradoxical traditions that developed out of the Enlightenment: a materialist tradition which assumes the existence of an “autonomous, objective world that exists independently of individuals and that determines what they think; and a scientific tradition which assumes that those very same individuals have the ability to “someday write the objective laws of this social determination of ideas” (Collins, 1994, p. 3). These traditions have helped to create what C. P. Snow (1959) called the two cultures of the humanities and the sciences and the accompanying division of research into qualitative and quantitative varieties. In general, humanistic qualitative research is thought to deal with the artistic expression of subjective emotions and opinions, while scientific quantitative research deals with the precise description of objective facts and conditions (Booth, 1974; McCloskey, 1994). One way in which to reconcile these various paradoxes involves the introduction of technology as a deus ex machina, by means of which social conflicts are resolved, the organizational protagonist is saved, and humanity is finally liberated. Transformational discourse of this persuasion represents only the latest in a long line of attempts to reinvent the corporation and transform organizations into harmonious societies in which “The Dilbertean Dilemma” has been overcome and “sincere efforts to improve the quality of work life . . .yield high productivity” (Lubans, 1998, pp. 7-8). As will be documented, this type of transformational discourse in fact represents the dominant ideology among those currently involved in the management and computerization of organizations, including academic research libraries. It depends heavily for its credibility on the ideas of utopian social scientists like Daniel Bell. UTOPIAN OF TRANSFORMATIONAL ACCOUNTS CHANGE The nioral and economic failure of ideologically inspired attempts to “set down ‘blueprints’ and through ‘social engineering’ bring about a new utopia of social harmony” (Bell, 1962, p. 402) led directly to the “exhaustion of political ideas in the fifties” that Bell believed heralded the end of ideology (p. 402). In that failure, he also recognized a gap, which a decade later he attempted to fill with his evocative concept of the coming post-industrial society (1973). Concerning such ventures, he wrote back