| An ethnographic study of a public library in Quebec was undertaken to understand the role of this institution in Quebec in relation to three types of social ambiguities that have affected its development and are related to its function control and support. This study was designed to provide an analysis of the systems of meanings or ideologies that service providers bring to their interaction with users because in the library literature the meaning of service has been overlooked. An alternative conceptualization of service was proposed that is based on assumptions stressing the processes of production, distribution/protection, consumption of material and symbolic resources which underlie the provision of service, and suggesting that organizational ambiguities are linked to social issues. The design of the ethnographic research, conducted as a case study, implied qualitative methods for data collection such as the analysis of documents, various types of interviews, and participant observation. The selected case setting comprised 43 employees in addition to the library director. The duration of the fieldwork was 14 weeks, including 200 hours of observation and 46 hours or interviews within which 6 municipal representatives and 28 library employees participated. Two service ideologies were identified, education and popularization, which reveal two basic library functions. These ideologies were analyzed as linked to past and current social issues in Quebec, namely nationalistic ideologies and neo-liberalism which stressed varying degrees of state intervention in cultural affairs and support and investment in culture and libraries. Given the tension between these functions, service providers experienced in addition to ideological ambiguities, several structural and operational ambiguities which have various implications on the delivery of services. Processes underlying service provision were described as an economy of symbolic exchanges, within which four types of knowledge are used by service providers: institutional, cultural, operational and practical. The findings suggest that the legitimization of the popularization ideology by the municipal administration implies that the public library, as an institution having a very broad mission, participates in the maintenance of social inequality in access to cultural products because the educational function is not fully addressed. |
