Trapped between a Rock and a Hard Place: What Counts as Information Literacy in the Workplace and How Is It Conceptualized?

Information literacy has been proclaimed as a foundational literacy of the twenty-first century by many researchers, library practitioners, and international agencies. However, there is still disagreement about how information literacy is conceptualized and what key elements constitute the practice. This disagreement has led to the practice/skills debate that has emerged from workplace research into information literacy. It has also led to claims that research into information literacy lacks theoretical framing from which models can be grounded. While the library and higher education sector concentrate on information skills that are claimed to be generic and transferable, there is little evidence from workplace research to suggest that this is indeed the case. In fact, the opposite appears to be true: that information literacy is enacted as a situated, collective, and embodied practice that engages people with information and knowledge about domains of action that are authorized by the discourses of the setting. Consequently the information skills and competencies that are developed reflect the discursive practices of the setting. Without information literacy, other work-related practices and performances couldn’t be accomplished; however, the continued focus on skills limits our ability to understand information literacy as a socially enacted practice, one that is constructed through a range of social activities. The issue therefore is how to represent the social activities that underpin information literacy. This article conceptualizes information literacy from a workplace perspective and presents ongoing work toward a theoretical framework. It advances the view that information literacy appears to be trapped between “a rock and a hard place.” The rock is the current conception of information 278 library trends/fall 2011 literacy, which is unsatisfactory, because it is confined by the discursive practices of the education sector and does not account for the complex social processes that inform learning to work. The hard place is the translation of information literacy practice with an understanding of how this practice happens, that is, from the education sector into workplace performance. Drawing from empirical studies, this article will explore the current key issues related to workplace information literacy. Introduction Information literacy is concerned with knowing an information landscape through modalities of information, which are specifically sanctioned by a social site. Needless to say, the process of becoming information literate is not as simple as mastering a set of skills in order to access, disseminate, or present information. Becoming information literate requires developing an understanding of what constitutes information in a specific setting; understanding the discourses that influence activities related to the creation, dissemination, and operationalization of information; and understanding how information is nuanced, enabled, or constrained through the social activities inherent within the setting. Therefore, information literacy manifests as the product of implicit and explicit social activities that are situated and collective. Understanding how information literacy emerges in a particular setting requires that we not only attend to the development and operationalization of information skills, but that we focus our attention toward understanding how information literacy emerges as a situated practice that reflects the sayings (what is spoken about), doings (what is done), and the relatings (the teleoaffective dimensions) (Kemmis & Grootenboer, 2008). These concepts shape and underpin collective agreements about what counts as information and is agreed upon as knowledge, and the ways of knowing that are legitimized and sanctioned. Implicit in this approach is the need to represent the often hidden and everyday social activities that enable workers to become enacted in the performance and practices of work. These everyday activities afford opportunities for people to become stirred into the information landscape by connecting them to the implicit and explicit discourses that surround knowing about work. In several articles (Lloyd, 2003, 2005, 2007) reporting research into workplace information literacy, I have suggested that the analysis of information literacy should focus more toward understanding the social arrangements and activities of a setting that enable the development of information literacy, but may also act to constrain it. However, seven years on, while some researchers and fewer practitioners have taken up the challenge that this research has produced, there still seems to be little real “movement” in the development of librarians’ understanding of work279 between a rock and a hard place/lloyd place information literacy or in our ability to translate this knowledge into the language of workplace learning. This point is highlighted in a recent study by Aharony (2010) that focused on reviewing the publication destination for information literacy research over the ten-year period from 1999–2010. It was reported by Aharony that while there is evidence of a continuous increase in the publication of information literacy research over this period, this work was still predominately being undertaken by librarians and confined to library and information science publications. According to the study, a smaller portion of research was occurring within the health and medicine field. However, the dissemination of this research was also focused in library and information science publications, primarily because those undertaking this research were librarians working in the medicine and allied health fields (Aharony, 2010). While it is clear that interest in information literacy as a subject of research continues to grow, that growth is predominately within its parent domain of library and information science. This observation is not new; as Boon, Johnston, and Webber (2007, p. 205) noted, “to date it is librarians’ conceptions and experiences that have dominated the literature and their frameworks and models for information literacy that have been most visible.” The effect is that the language used by the LIS sector to define information literacy and to describe an information literate person does not resonate to those outside of it. To put it another way, once the term information literacy leaves its domain, it loses its power. As a consequence of the narrow locus for information literacy research, the majority of research reports on the application of information literacy programs in academic or school libraries. This research represents the “how we did it” genre of reporting. While this type of reporting can be instructive, it is often descriptive and atheoretical. The result is a lack of theoretical development that may be used to explain how information literacy happens (Lloyd, 2010). This is critical work because without it there can be little rigorous debate between researchers in order to test implicit assumptions and beliefs. Information literacy is trapped between a rock and a hard place. The rock is the current conceptions of information literacy that represent information literacy as a skill or competency that is confined to information access and use, and associated with tools such as text or technology. The hard place refers to attempts to translate this conception from the formal learning regimes of education and academic libraries to other sectors where learning is less structured or systematized, but is just as important