| This dissertation is about changes and continuities in professional labour in an established cultural institution, the contemporary university library in Canada. Within a political economic framework, it details a historically-specific situation in which intellectual work is affected by an expanding knowledge base, economic strictures, new information technologies, and the globalization and commodification of information resources and services.; The problem is grounded in the lived experiences of Canadian academic librarians, and their insights about forces that enable or inhibit change in their workplace. Although motivated by the range of possibilities for information organization and dissemination in service to their institution, these librarians express concerns about the rapidity and pervasiveness of technologically driven change in their work, and the constraints of economic, institutional, and larger social forces that impinge on it. Inherent in these structural concerns are central issues about the value of the work done by academic librarians, and the extent of power they exercise in the professional workplace. While the popular claim is that in the new “information age” the expertise of librarians is more valuable than ever, the evidence suggests a diminution of authority over their work due to forces outside their control. This contradiction invokes a critical examination within the social totality.; The dissertation investigates these concerns by examining the nature of their expertise and workplace relations over the past three decades that represent the post-industrial workplace. It analyzes changes in expertise and control of professional labour within academic libraries by looking at qualitative interview data, and statistics about work and labour process. It determines little evidence from indicators such as salary and relative rate of attrition that suggests greater proletarianization than has existed over that period. It establishes that responsibility for major changes to library work are shifting to forces outside the institution. Changes in professional expertise are interrogated in an analysis of qualitative information on graduate education for information studies over the last three decades from university calendars, with findings about the value of work and re-professionalization. The impact of the external labour market is examined through ads for academic library positions. The most significant shift of control in many aspects of labour in libraries is attributed, through data on ownership, monopolization, and cooperative library retaliation, to increasing corporate control of publishers and electronics vendors. |
