The Australian Library Journal

Reading: defending a vital operation in a time of complex narrative forces

Bonna Jones

Manuscript received April 2003

This is a refereed article

Conversation and transformation deserve greater attention according to a recent paper by Kirk (2002), and a thoughtful response to this is imperative given that our own transformation can only be lived within the broader conversations that form the conditions in which new identities evolve. As professions must be defended, and to some extent identified, through the contested social spaces that make up the economy of symbolic exchanges (Bourdieu, 1998b), our statements about freedom to read must be alive to these dynamics.

In a different forum altogether, Australian philosopher Arran Gare (1996; 2002c) argues that if we are to transform our society to bring about the major social and economic changes necessary to meet the global ecological crisis, a new grand narrative must be devised to provide the foundation for an environmentally sustainable civilisation and the welfare of the earth as a whole. Reading not only plays a central part in our capacity to construct new narratives, it is also central to librarianship, thus making our profession a major contributor in processes of transformation.

But neither of these forums exists in isolation of other forces (Bourdieu, 1993). Beyond them are fields that must also be taken into account if we are to make any sense of these relationships. Of particular concern are the demands and claims of a third forum that aims to be dominant in our time. Advocates of neo-liberalism (or neoclassical economics), whom we know in Australia as promoters of economic rationalism (Pusey, 1991), tell us that the market must be free to operate without constraints. As part of this we are told that there is no reply to the all-encompassing nature of this claim about the market, and hence it has been difficult to find ground on which to stand and think about the effects of this position on our democracy (Stretton, 2001). Despite this assertion, as discussed in a previous Australian Library Journal article (Jones, 2001), we can respond to this claim because we are readers, and it is through the activity of reading that new narratives come into existence and existing narratives are contextualised.

In this article I shall consider how a particular stance is emerging as part of transformation at this broad level. This has the potential to give a broader view of these dynamics and to enable us to bring the arguments into a singular whole as a coherent narrative, and it is known as process thought. With a line of development that can be traced through the writings of Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854), Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) and more recently Arran Gare (1948-), it opens new possibilities in our thinking.

Readings in process thought not only help us to appreciate reading; they also enable us to contexualise these two other movements that are well known to us. In other words the assertion that markets must be free to operate without constraint and our own statement on the importance of free access to information (ALIA, 2002) can be brought into a synthesis and expressed as one account. To go a step further, we can consider that despite the ALIA statement's attempt to encourage, in the face of some complex forces, activism at professional levels and why, at this time in our history, this could be problematic given the argument by Gare (1996) that a new multi-voiced grand narrative should be emerging.

Before proceeding, it may be helpful to explain that the adoption of a different philosophy has implications; for example some expressions used in this article may seem unfamiliar even though they are very recognised in their usual contexts. This is because the language reflects this particular worldview or philosophy which emphasises action and the language of action (Rescher, 1996). Because our current worldview places great emphasis on materialism, we tend to choose language that takes us away from a focus on action. That is, we tend to emphasise 'things'; we even speak of processes as if they are material in nature and most of our research methods force processes into a state of stasis in order that analysis may be possible. Indeed, to create a new grand narrative about caring for the earth it has been argued that we must rethink this worldview and the kind of language espoused in it. As Gare (1996) demonstrates, the viability of such a narrative-making process is at risk when the nature of 'process', 'action' and 'agency' remain under-emphasised in Western traditions. In the spirit of such a stance an emphasis on the operation of reading is appropriate and opens up new possibilities, some of which are explored here.

Hence reading is defined as an operation that for my purpose is a contributor to a larger process, that of narrative making or storying. In this way reading is understood as a mediator that operates between ourselves and the world of the text. 'Text' broadly covers those achievements that have a quality of fixation akin to 'writing' (Ricoeur) and this is the case even though this fixation may only be a momentary event. We read monuments, faces, conversations, social minutiae, and landscapes, as well as screens and books. Furthermore we read these as they are in production; we could say that we learn to read the living dynamics at play in our world. And as we know, it is a matter of attestation that librarians have a long history supporting the operation of reading.

If we are to take narrative theory seriously, as we are being urged to do (Gare, 2001a), then narratives are syntheses that are achieved out of a narrative-making process and this process is fundamental to narratives that we produce in text form.

As the new coinage 'emplotted' suggests, creating a new narrative involves action and it has been demonstrated that a central operation in this process is that of reading (Carr, 1986; Ricoeur, 1984). While in librarianship we have tended to focus on what we are reading and on arguments over the future of the book, here I shall be less concerned with the material nature of what we are reading and more focussed on how we engage in reading.

Used in its broadest sense, reading enables us to set someone else's argument into a larger context. In other words we can engage with the assertion that markets must be free to operate without constraints, but in order to do so we read in such a way that we come to a new position ourselves. This is because reading is an activity that is transformative. In this sense we appreciate how reading is an overarching process consisting of an agent, the action, and that which is read. While it can be said that these dynamics do encompass what we read, I would argue that the material form of reading matter is not the only aspect that librarians should be concerned with.

In arguing that narrative is primary to the transactions of daily discourse, Ricoeur (1984) defines narrative through emphasis on the activity of making a synthesis or a 'grasping together' of the heterogeneous within language:

With narrative, the semantic innovation lies in the inventing of another work of synthesis - a plot. By means of the plot, goals, causes, and chance are brought together within the temporal unity of a whole and complete action (Ricoeur, 1984, p ix).

When narrative-making is defined in this manner as a process, we can better attend to the dynamic relationship between readers and narratives; the former enable the latter to have a life in the world. In this regard each act of reading is a new event and living narratives are therefore expressed as a product of the operation of reading; there is version after version and we are enabled to say 'Yes, this is the same story, but there is also change in the story'. As discussed previously (Jones, 2001), narratives that are accounts of identity capture this sameness/change dynamic over time. Carr (1986) takes up such ideas to show how individual and social actions are lived narratives, that life is organised as narratives and that people live their lives as inchoate narratives. We can therefore appreciate that it is through narratives that people become more than the mere conditions of their existence:

Individuals who utilise the inherent reflexivity of the narrative form to question the stories they have been socialised into, to consider alternative versions of these stories, to refigure their lives in accordance with their chosen versions of the stories of which they are a part, who thereby take responsibility for their lives, are the creative agents of culture, society and history. Such people are the authentic authors of their own becoming (Gare, 2002b).

On this basis neo-liberalism is a kind of story into which we have been socialised. In order to see ourselves as characters in this story, which has come close to being a defining story of our national identity (Stretton, 2001), we must be able to look at the claims made in the neo-liberal account and how they relate to the context in which these claims operate. We must then be able to make our own rich and diverse account in relation to such claims, because as shown by MacIntyre (1984), narrative making is the major way in which we make an adequate account of our stance in an ongoing debate or conversation. Making an adequate account of ourselves, whether as persons or professions, enables us to further our own identity project.

As noted above, in librarianship we have recently read the suggestion from Kirk (2002) that conversation and transformation deserve greater attention. Bourdieu (1998b) demonstrates how collectives, such as professions, must be defended, and to some extent identified, through social spaces that are sites of contest because of their ongoing arguments (these could also be construed as broader conversations/forums that have their own traditions). Our statements about our values must be alive to these dynamics, but also have the dual role of empowering action. This particularly applies to the kind of narrative-making that Gare speaks of above. We must be able to tell our story in the conversations of which Kirk (2002) speaks, but to make that account of identity we have to be able to read in a sophisticated way. It is vital, at this time in our history, that we not create self-limitations in relation to our engagement with neo-liberalism; we should be reading other narratives from those broader traditions because these enable us to put the arguments and account made by the neo-liberals into a context.

Neo-liberalism

Neo-liberalism is described as a set of economic policies with links to liberalism. The latter advocated the abolition of government intervention in economic matters, by which was intended no restrictions on manufacturing, no barriers on commerce, and no tariffs (hence free trade). Such ideas were liberal in the sense that there were to be no controls. In earlier times, following the Great Depression of the 1930s, intervention by governments and central banks was promoted in order to increase employment, and the belief that governments should advance the common good became more widely accepted. However Martinez and Garcia (1996) argue:

But the capitalist crisis over the last 25 years, with its shrinking profit rates, inspired the corporate elite to revive economic liberalism. That's what makes it 'neo' or new. Now, with the rapid globalization of the capitalist economy, we are seeing neo-liberalism on a global scale (p 1).

This move to free up markets can be seen to be influential on the kinds of changes introduced into the public service in Australia over the last two decades, changes that we can read about in summary form in a recent Yearbook of Australia (Australia. Commonwealth Government, 2002):

Over the last two decades, the Australian Public Service has undergone substantial change, both in its internal management processes and in its methods of service delivery. Examples of management changes include ... an emphasis on reaching performance targets, the costing of government 'outputs', the imposition of capital use charges, the devolution of responsibility to departments and more flexible employment practices... Traditionally, this process has been known as public administration. Increasingly it is known as public management, reflecting the growing expectation that public sector managers will take responsibility for achieving results, as well as the increasing emphasis on efficiency (p30).

Bourdieu (1998a) has written against the influence of neo-liberalism, and Pusey (1991) in Australia researched the rise of the more localised version that we know as 'economic rationalism'. A recent work by Stretton (2001) reminds us that in Australia 'Most business and both sides of politics do now support our rising inequalities, as the best they claim they can do for us in our new global conditions' (p18), and also offers us a short list of contemporary readings of special relevance to the Australian experience. Gare (2002a) argues in a recent article that:

...economics is so fundamentally flawed and ... so completely dominates the culture of late modern capitalism (or postmodernity) that a new master human science is required to .... totally reorient public policy from a domain for power elites to a domain for genuinely democratic societies to define and control their destinies (p131).

Ricoeur's (1984) project shows that when we read such texts with the knowledge gained from a detour through traditions that are broader than neo-liberalism, the act of reading becomes productive. That is, we read neo-liberal arguments from a new position that sets these arguments into a context. Arrival at this point opens other possibilities because of this transformative process; for example it is possible to ask about freedom to read in another tradition. More importantly we can ask whether librarians value this capacity to read broadly. But before continuing I need to say a little about 'tradition', as it is important to understand that neo-liberalism is not an entity separated off from its context. Rather it is a living tradition among other living traditions, some of which can be demonstrated to be broader in scope, with broader and more encompassing values.

As we can see in the above description of neo-liberalism there are both proponents of this stance and opponents to it. Arising from the narrative-making that contributes to this conversation there are the accounts produced in support of the various positions that can be read. Because conversations occur in time, have duration and are played out in social spaces (Bourdieu, 1998), the notion of 'tradition' serves to describe these dynamics. The danger of not attending to these dynamics is seen in our current interpretation of 'tradition', which undervalues the extent to which traditions are enabling, and overvalues a distinction forged between tradition and change in our current thinking. By belonging to traditions we are enabled to take action.1

Through the emphasis that tradition is an ongoing activity, described as the activity of 'handing down' (Williams, 1988), we can more readily account for the process whereby ideas are advanced and defended. Described more technically, we can say that new stances or arguments are enabled to emerge because there are forces that mediate their creation within living traditions.

By taking up the argument being made in librarianship by Kirk (2002), and extending it, we would have to say that there is a conversation in train at the heart of which is the stance of neo-liberalism. There are also broader debates that encompass this conversation. By attending to broad levels that are characterised by the term 'philosophical', we could ask about the nature of this larger conversation and whether it provides any openings for us to value the operation of reading.

Process thought

The overarching philosophical tradition that is influential in our time is usually described as the rise of modernism and its counter-response, described as postmodernism.2 That is, we can argue that this debate forms those very conditions in which ideas are defended, and furthermore we can appreciate how one can take a position or stance with reference to this dynamic. This takes practical form when the contribution of a profession is defended or a person makes an account of their own identity (Ricoeur, 1991); we could say that certain conditions or prevailing forces enable action of this nature to be taken. Furthermore, such an account is likely to take a narrative form (MacIntyre, 1984). Hence we can say that there is no vacuum for a new stance to come into being; a position is taken in relation to other positions already achieved.

Process thought, which is concerned with both processes (or activities) and the achievements (or products) that processes give rise to, is a philosophy that has a central concern with theories of action. Transformation is generally understood as the action of changing in form, shape or appearance and the appropriateness of this can already be seen in what we read above. Hence process philosophy is important because this emphasis brings with it openings for new possibilities; for example there is the possibility to think about how a profession acts as a living contributor to these larger conversations, and is 'lived in' by professionals, but as well, why a profession could be a valued agent in regard to the health of living processes such as reading and narrative making.

Process thought has its own tradition within this broader tradition of philosophy, having emerged as a constructive postmodern stance acting as a counter tradition to modernist thinking. But it is also not reducible to deconstructive postmodern stances, because of the central importance that is given to action as well as the products of action. As we shall see below, by drawing on process thinking we can engage with the neo-liberal argument and gain a broader understanding of what is being argued. Furthermore we could make our own account of ourselves in relation to this larger context.

What we read above suggests that a conversation about values has a context in which it operates as a living dynamic. We can say that a narrative about putting the earth first is unlikely to emerge from the neo-liberal forum, primarily because we are told that the market must be allowed to operate without constraints and that includes environmental constraints. We might also conclude that those in public service positions in Australia are placed into a position of passivity by the neo-liberal position and could not support the emergence of a new grand narrative about caring for the earth. The description of 'passive character' in the neo-liberal narrative suggests itself in the context of these conditions.

While we know that librarians do make a difference in relation to reading, that there is both reading and support of the reading activity of others, nevertheless we must ask if our account of ourselves does give prominence to this activity in a time when there may be little support for a more activist stance beyond the conversation in the field itself. Having come this far, it is possible to consider how there are ideas in process thinking that extend these issues. In particular this notion of 'constraint' seems to deserve more attention as it is a key part of the neo-liberal argument.

Facilitating action

According to Schelling (1800/1978), what is real, and what we should take to be real, are processes themselves. A position that products are real to the exclusion of all else, which we see in a modernist stance such as scientific materialism (cf Gare, 1996), is unsustainable when we adopt the broader stance being advocated in process thought. While we will no doubt continue to value science as an activity, and to acknowledge that products could be important as achievements, we must also understand how these products are achievements of processes and the forces at work in processes.

One of the difficulties with a stance that emphasises only products is the tendency to make distinctions, and then rely on this activity at the expense of others. Some philosophers and social scientists are now suggesting we have gone altogether too far, and that a gestalt shift is necessary in our thinking. In order to think beyond such taken-for-granted dualisms as organic/non-organic, subjective/objective, fact/fiction, and conscious/unconscious, process thought suggests that we give more emphasis to levels of activity as living processes. For example to say that a person moves from subjective to objective and back again, is to describe a process at this level; reading is the kind of operation that enables this movement (Ricoeur, 1984). This approach was shown to be viable by Schelling (1800/1978) at the end of the eighteenth century, and Gare (1996) reminds us that the central contributor to twentieth century process thought, Alfred North Whitehead, was similarly engaged. So, for example, persons, organisations, fields of action, narratives, and social positions are all interrelated processes of becoming that contribute to the complex conditions in which new achievements emerge.

Some thinkers suggest that there could be dynamics which can only enter our consideration if we shift our thinking in this way. In particular, rather than just rest at the idea that action can be 'enabled' or 'constrained', we may be able to account for the operation of 'facilitative constraints', and this could be an important move when responding to the argument that markets must be allowed to operate without constraints.

In everyday language we have both 'limit' and 'constrain', but the dictionary definitions suggest there are nuances of meaning here that are open to interpretation (as of course there must be in language if we are to be creative). Whereas 'limit' is described in terms of a boundary or terminal point that is considered confining or restricting, 'constrain' is described in terms of coercion or compulsion, and under 'constraint' we also find reference to something that constricts freedom of action or of motion (New shorter Oxford English dictionary, 1993).

Hierarchy theory, which offers ideas compatible with process thought, suggests that constraints can operate across levels of activity and be a property of the system itself as a larger whole or achievement. An example of this could be the operation of ethical constraints espoused within a profession; society as a whole benefits, but members also gain credibility through a professional affiliation. It is this credibility that then enables a professional to act. Some readings are of interest in regard to these ideas; Allen and Starr (1982) for example argue that it may be advantageous to view 'organisation' not positively as a series of connections, but rather negatively as a series of constraints:

Ordered systems are so, not because of what the components do, but rather because of what they are not allowed to do. The emergent properties of nerves are so full of positive achievement that it is hard to remember that they work only because of restrictions placed on the position and movement of sodium and potassium ions. It is what sodium and potassium in the nerve cannot do that supports the emergent property of nerve reaction (p11).

We could apply these ideas to the understanding of living traditions, as these have already been considered above. As argued, a stance defending a position within a particular tradition is itself a process of becoming, one that is both enabled and constrained to evolve. And we also know that MacIntyre (1984) shows that one cannot make a case for a particular stance in an ongoing argument unless one uses narrative as a form of discourse; in effect one must tell a story3. That is, an agent is enabled to contribute because there are larger living narratives in operation that act as a context, or facilitative constraint, for the stance that is taken. We can read this in the living narrative known as neo-liberalism (and its Australian version, economic rationalism), where smaller narratives that emphasise financial economies of operation in the public sector are obtainable largely because neo-liberalism has narrative openings that facilitate this kind of achievement. We can also read about it in philosophy where the tradition of process thought has emerged in response to some larger conversations that include modernist and postmodernist traditions (Gare, 2000, 2001b; Griffin, 1993; Rescher, 1996). By this very act of reading we come to appreciate how the process is real, and can be seen to transcend any particular position that claims dominance over tradition itself and allows for no constraint over its own activity through the living argument.

It follows that those who foster the health of the process of reading contribute at a complex level in these dynamics; something that librarians have known for a long time in their tradition. As Stretton (2001) describes this, the stance 'is not about what we should do. It's about ways of arguing about what to do'. That is, the living argument itself must be healthy as well as the processes that enable creativity to occur within it.

Now we can ask how process thinking is helpful in regard to these complex forces; for example we may be able to contextualise our own values statement from a position that is knowledgeable about these larger conversations. In effect we make a kind of cultural detour that is guided by some reading choices, and then we come back, but to a new position. How we make the account of our position is important, because there are some complex and perhaps conflicting narratives in the process of being achieved at these larger levels of conversation. These may close down or open up possibilities according to the argument being made.

The free flow of information and ideas

We can contextualise the assertion that markets must be free to operate without constraint, and we see above how our reading enables this to happen. In effect we come to a new position and perhaps a greater understanding, and when we read the achievements of our own profession, such as the ALIA Statement on core values (2002), we appreciate how a similar process is operating. Our reading does not occur in isolation of these dynamics, rather it is part of them.

In this article so far we have seen an emplotment with the potential to evolve into a full and rich account. The task then, is to develop this further. We know from our reading that the ALIA core values statement argues that 'A thriving culture, economy, and democracy requires the free flow of information and ideas' (2002), and that library and information services are fundamental to this free flow. Following this broad view the first value upheld is that of 'Promotion of the free flow of information and ideas through open access to recorded knowledge, information, and creative works' (ALIA, 2002). That is, the statement of values not only presupposes, but also calls into being, professionals who in their daily work can read this statement, enrich it, expand it, apply it and defend it, in a manner that is sustaining of their own individual lives and the profession as a whole. In process terms we could say that there is the activity of making meaning, and that this achieves an interpretation which itself then calls for further interpretation (Ricoeur, 1976). In narrative terms the interpretation may be translated into the form of a text, which would then be available for reading. Such a narrative immediately generates questions about 'Who?', as in 'who acts?'.

If we treat the ALIA statement as a kind of text with an author and readers, we would say that the statement, with each new reading, generates possibilities for readers. Because there is authorship, and also a text that has become semi-autonomous of the process of authorship, as well as readers who come with their own powers (Ricoeur, 1984), there is no way that this activity of reading can be completely constrained. There are openings: for example there may be ambiguity in meaning that generates further interpretation. But more importantly there is the power that a reader brings. This includes a capacity to participate in an identity-making process, at whichever level of activity that process is being played out.

We would have to say that individual librarians would be reading these ALIA values as knowledgeable readers. This can be likened to what Bourdieu (1993) calls 'cultural capital'. One develops into being a professional, one learns about the history of one's profession and how that profession contributes to society, and one becomes a skilled operator in the culture in which that profession is practised. In this sense we again affirm how life is a process, but taking this a step further we could say that one can become knowledgeable about the forces at work, especially those forces that shape one's capacity to act. For example we know that most librarians in Australia are public servants, and we know that even those who do not characterise themselves this way still rely heavily on the work of public servants.

However neo-liberalism does not emphasise that public servants have agency - quite the contrary. When they are not being portrayed as market members themselves, public servants tend to be characterised in neo-liberal narratives as passive and subject, rather than active. A scenario in which public servants could contradict these conditions, for example by constraining the market in order to protect the environment, seems a difficult challenge, given the current forces. Another unlikely emplotment is that public servants should be reading, and promoting others to read, in those traditions that enable a more encompassing view of neo-liberalism to be achieved. Under neo-liberalism the cultural capital one has gained does not make one a more mature reader, rather it makes one a less gullible consumer or a soft target for a marketer. These are identity-making moves, moves of transformation.

A stance to take

When we read one of the quieter voices in philosophy as above, we engage with a conversation that could contextualise the influence of the argument that markets must be free to operate on our profession without constraint. Because process thinking opens new possibilities in relation to how we understand 'constraint', this in turn enables us to enrich our ideas about professionals who act as living contributors, and value living processes. Reading is clearly an important activity that enables a broader view of these dynamics, especially when we read across levels of activity. We can see that certain conditions or prevailing forces enable action of this nature to be taken.

One can argue that freedom of access to information is an important goal which librarians seek, but in order to act in support of this, and say 'It's me here', one reads. Ricoeur (1984) reminds us that this is productive to the extent that a stand is taken in an ongoing conversation or argument to 'profess' or 'declare' a purpose, and the return path leads back to a more mature account, a new version of 'It's me here'. That is, a living form can act back on the conditions of its own formation, and we can ask whether those conditions offer a facilitative constraint on this process. Are there openings to defend a profession as one worthy of its contribution? Is action enabled to ensure that a profession remains living and vital? Is there a place in our world for living forces which operate to overly constrain other life forms? Is the freedom of the market gained at the expense of other forms of life? Perhaps we need to affirm that professions, and the traditions that support professional activity and activist professionals, are healthy because of their support for living processes. And this brings me full circle to the statement. On the one hand it would seem that neo-liberalism makes no allowance for a healthy stance of modifying the conditions it enforces, and on the other hand as librarians we have created a text that fails to give an account of our own actions in a full and dynamic way. This begs the question whether we can rise above the conditions determined by this dynamic (Gare, 2002b).

In our urge to recreate our own identity freedom to read has been blindsided by 'a commitment to literacy' and 'access to information'. But in this regard access is only a part of the process. While it is an important part as seen from the references cited here, why limit ourselves to an account that is so reduced as to leave out the rich possibilities that reading brings? Reading is central to a project of narrative identity (Jones, 2001) and crucial to this is to gain new levels of maturity through reading at one level of complexity in order to put another in context.

So we can ask this about the challenges to our identity-making: how do we read the reduction offered as a statement of values, and expand it in our own lives to achieve a rich and full account; how are we to know that it is not just about products (literate person, information, knowledge) but also about processes and modes of thinking that value these; and how to open the way to overcome the passivity to which we are assigned by the authors of neo-liberalism. In other words the distance between this statement and the daily action of librarians must be productive; reading is an important activity that takes us across this distance and opens up possibilities for an expanded and more mature view, expressed as a rich and full account when we profess our values. Conversation is important, and so is transformation, but without a reading of these dynamics we may not make an adequate cultural detour such that future statements of core values are achieved and future identities are fashioned to sustain and call into being professional lives and professional activism.

As Gare (2002b) argues:

At this stage in history, one of the most important tasks is to defend the narrative. This is being undertaken not only by literary critics, but also by psychologists such as Donald Polkinghorne and Jerome Bruner, philosophers Ricoeur, MacIntyre and Carr, and literary theorists such as Ross Chambers and Gary Saul Morson. Rather than reducing people to objects, narratologists tackle social problems by studying the narratives dominating people's lives, and showing how they can become authentic agents by reflecting on their narratives, gaining access to new ones and by participating in creation of their own (p99).

Having outlined a synthesis that brings together process thought, neo-liberalism and freedom to read, we can affirm that librarians have an important contribution to make. While it would be a bold step to try to shape the identities of others by limiting their activities, we must nevertheless actively pursue the creation of our own. Maybe we have a vital role in transformation to the extent that a new narrative about the importance of the environment is needed, and understanding where writers such as Arran Gare are coming from is a move that creates new openings for further plots in this regard. By reading in process philosophy we bring life back into a continuum that we are clearly engaged in even if we are not giving it prominence in our values.

References

Allen, TFH & Starr, TB (1982). Hierarchy: perspectives for ecological complexity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Australia. Commonwealth Government (2002). 2002 Yearbook of Australia. Canberra: Bureau of Statistics.

ALIA (2002). ALIA core values statement. Retrieved 12 November 2002 from http://mondediplo.com/1998/12/08bourdieu).

Bourdieu, P (1998b) Practical reason. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Carr, D (1986) Time, narrative, and history. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Gare, A (1996) Nihilism Inc.: environmental destruction and the metaphysics of sustainability. Como, NSW: Eco-logical.

Gare, A (2000). 'Systems theory and complexity' Democracy & Nature: the international journal of inclusive democracy, 6 (3), 327-340.

Gare, A (2001a). 'Narratives and the ethics and politics of environmentalism: the transformative power of stories'. Theory & Science, 2 (1). Retrieved 12 November 2002 from http://theoryandscience.icaap.org/volume2issue1.htm.

Gare, A (2001b). 'Postmodernism as the decadence of the social democratic state'. Democracy & Nature: the international journal of inclusive democracy, 7 (1), pp77-100.

Gare, A (2002a). 'Human ecology and public policy: overcoming the hegemony of economics'. Democracy & Nature: the international journal of inclusive democracy, 8 (1), pp131-142.

Gare, A (2002b). Narratives and culture: the role of stories in self-creation. Telos, (122), pp80-100. Retrieved 30 November 2002 from EBSCOhost Academic Search Elite http://search.epnet.com.

Gare, A (2002c). 'The roots of postmodernism: Schelling, process philosophy and poststructuralism.' Process and difference: between cosmological and poststructuralist postmodernisms. C Keller & A Daniell eds. New York: State University of New York.

Griffin, DR (1993). 'Introduction to the SUNY series in constructive postmodern thought'. In DR Griffin, JB Cobb, MP Ford, PAY Gunter, & P Ochs Founders of constructive postmodern philosophy: Pierce, James, Bergson, Whitehead, and Hartshorne (pp vii-x). Albany, NY: State University of New York.

Jones, BM (2001) 'Narrative identity as a central theme in an ethics of librarianship'. Australian Library Journal, 50 (2), p121-131.

Kirk, J (2002) 'A watershed conference' inCite, September 2002. Retrieved 12 November 2002 from http://www.assa.edu.au/News/newsletter/NLDec01.PDF.

Williams, R (1988) Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society. London: Fontana.

Endnotes

1. As Williams (1988) shows, 'tradition' is a word with a difficult history. While it has its origins in the Latin for 'to hand over or deliver' as in handing down of knowledge or passing on of doctrine, he also notes that in English there is a very strong and often predominant sense of this entailing respect or duty. The idea that there can be living and ongoing traditions is prominent in process thought. Traditions are characterised as 'processes of becoming' (Gare, 1996, 2001b; MacIntyre, 1984) by authors who argue for a more encompassing stance than one which construes 'tradition' and 'change' as being in opposition to each other. By enlarging our thinking in this manner we are better able to argue that it is through living processes, such as traditions, that people are both enabled and constrained in regard to the taking of action. In language, for example, it is this very process of 'handing down' that enables us to acknowledge several possible meanings for words such as 'reading' and 'tradition', meanings that contribute to a process of interpretation and reinterpretation of words (Ricoeur, 1976).

2. According to Gare (2001b) modernity is the cultural era that began in Europe with the Renaissance, and developed through the period of the Reformation, the triumph of a market economy over feudal relations, the rise of science and the birth of liberal democracy. Later on these developments came to be celebrated as the triumph of reason. Mainstream modernity has generated massive technological developments, enabling humans to dominate nature in ways never previously available. This culture is integrated with the notion of progress. 'The future portrayed by the dominant image of progress is one in which the entire world will eventually embrace liberal democracy upholding the sovereignty of the individual in the marketplace' (Gare, 2001b, p78). For radical modernists there is an urgent reform required of social and political institutions and an even greater commitment to progress. From this position: 'What is needed is more rationality, a creative rationality that will put an end to the exploitation of the Third World and of the working class and the alienation of people from their creative powers, from each other and from the rest of nature' (Gare, 2001, p78). Unlike earlier modernism, it is not past achievement that is celebrated in radical modernism, but the future triumph of the same project offered as an answer for the future. For example, from such a position one might argue that freedom of access to information is achievable through technological solutions.

Postmodernism is also both unified and diverse; there is unity to the extent that there is opposition to modernist thinking, but more than one approach has also emerged within postmodernism. Whereas modernism seeks to show that what is manifested to us in the world is the result of objective underlying structures that operate according to universal laws, deconstructive postmodernists (and some of those that refer to themselves as 'postructuralists') tend to argue that where we seek to find a meaning and pin it down, all we find are unstable meanings within language. They contend that methods of deconstruction can demonstrate that a text has multiple meanings rather than the one meaning that the author intended, and this can be used to emphasise how texts are internally inconsistent. Notwithstanding this emphasis, development in the debate as a whole has moved to acknowledge the centrality of language, and this is now widely thought to be an important move; there is the allowance that to be human is to operate within the context of language. Within a postmodern stance, thinkers who favour 'constructive postmodernism' (cf Griffin, 1993) also place importance on language.

3. In this work I am mindful of how MacIntyre (1984) shows that it is only through narrative that we can make an adequate account of ourselves. In other words one can only account for one's stance in a conversation, or what Bourdieu (1998b) calls an ongoing argument, if one uses and is competent in narrative as a language form (Carr, 1986; MacIntyre, 1984; Ricoeur, 1984).

Biographical information

Bonna Jones is the manager, Client Services at the Information Commons, Holmesglen Institute of TAFE. The ideas in this article apply some work from a recently completed PhD involving research on local government reform. She concentrated on major organisational change, in particular how individual employees acted to recreate their identity in response to this change.