The phrase "Given the relatively weak power base of most Government librarians..." was contained in a report recently circulated to me. That the report was written by a librarian is an indicator of what many have suggested is a problem. It is only a problem if librarians allow it to be so.

Sigmund Wollmann, a survivor of Auschwitz, pointed out that we need to learn to develop the capacity to tell the difference between an inconvenience and a problem:

If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire - then you got a problem. Everything else is inconvenience [2]

What librarians generally perceive as a power problem is an inconvenience. Nevertheless there is a real problem. The real problem is not the power of others, and not that librarians do not have power, but that librarians believe librarians do not have power, that librarians do not fully use the power they have, and do not really believe they deserve to have it, anyway.

Something need not be true to control our lives. It is only necessary that we believe it to be true for it to have an effect upon our lives. For centuries, people believed the world was fla t and behaved as though that were true, limiting exploration and expansion. The world was never flat, is not flat but the belief that the world is flat made people behave as though it were.

Librarians often fail to recognise and use to the full the power sources they have. One of the things that women in the workplace are often denigrated for (and, co-incidentally, some eighty percent of librarians are women) is the so-called female obsession with relationships. But this interest and capacity is an asset because power is about relationships - your relationship with yourself (self-esteem or lack of it) and your relationships wi th others (status), and therefore it is the critical component of all negotiation. Librarians might think that what they do at work is manage or provide a service, but what they actually do is negotiate.

Control theory teaches that any relationship is really two relationships. My relationship with you is a picture in my head, and your relationship with me is a picture in your head. Your vie w of the relationship will usually be one-sided, and what you think the relationship is will almost invariably differ in some way from the actuality of the relationship. This will naturally affect your perception of your capacity to negotiate, the effecti veness of your negotiation, and indeed, whether you think there is any point in negotiating at all. Your perception of your power as an individual is critical. When Nellie Bly, a reporter for the New York World, set out from Hoboken New Jersey in 1886 to prove that she could outdo the record of Jules Verne's hero in Around the World in Eighty Days, to most ladies of the time it was not the journey that seemed unbelievable, but the fact that she was travelling without an umbrella, which was considered "not quite nice". That librarians don't claim and use their own power is as much because of a sense of what is "nice behaviour" as it is of misreading of our their power.

No human being is self-sufficient. Each of us needs things that others have to offer, and has things that other people need. All our dealings with other people are based on these needs. The re are only three basic ways in which we deal with other people.

• You can take what you need by force, threats, intimidation, or by outsmarting them. Although criminals naturally fall in this category, many respectable people employ this method too, som etimes not as subtly as they might.
• You can become a human relations beggar, and beg other people to give you the things you want. This submissive type of personality makes a deal with other people: "I won't assert mys elf in any way or cause you any trouble, and in return you be nice to me."
• Or you can operate on a basis of fair exchange, which means that you will get what you need as well, as rather than instead of, satisfying the needs of others.

I once had the experience of working directly to a manager who had a propensity for indulging in loud and threatening tantrums. All over the organisation people were intimidated by his behaviour. I never reacted. I just let him yell, thump the desk and make threats and then continued the discussion as if nothing had happened. This, his executive assistant told me, after the manager and the organisation had parted company, drove him crazy. H e just could not work it out but it was clear to me that his yelling was a symptom of his own feelings about himself, so I could lean back in my chair and let his screaming wash over me. I could tell myself, "Isn't that nice, he's getting it out of his system."

Most people, when under attack by hostile and bullying bosses, feel confused and maybe even frightened. They usually sit immobilised, looking down, and say nothing, and carry out whatever o rders they receive. Some react with speechless fury at being treated so insultingly. Either way, they are out of commission and the boss is fully in charge. Whether intimidated or emotionally distraught, they do what the boss tells them to do, without was ting any of the boss's precious time venturing their own opinions.

The psychological rewards of supervisory bullying are even greater. By demonstrating how weak or out of control others are, bullies buttress their own strength and power, a real plus for th ose who need to quiet their own secret self-doubts. Of course there are long-term costs to abrasive, hostile behaviour. Degraded employees are demotivated, afraid to show initiative, and likely to do little more than they have to, so that at best goals are not fully realised, or at worst the organisation becomes totally dysfunctional. But it is the short-term gain that fixes the behaviour pattern into the personality.[3]

Perceptions of powerlessness and powerless behaviour usually result from fear. Deming admonishes managers to "drive out fear" in order to achieve high levels of quality but there is no accepted approach to eradicating fear. While open communication and respect is touched on to a greater or lesser degree in a variety of management texts there is very little in the literature about fear and the workplace dynamics that surround it.

Despite all the EEO policies, harassment, bullying, and appropriation of intellectual resources continues. I see reliance on EEO policies as a manifestation of unwillingness to claim and use personal power, and of preferring to wait some hero to recognise our worth and rescue us. When we perceive we have a problem, if we believe it can be solved we believe it can be solved by the rules we learned in the cinemas of our childhood where every Saturday afternoon a lone cowboy rode into town and dispatched the villain. We look for a leader to rescue us instead of behaving like adults and getting on with it.

This mythic view of leaders as heroes who appear in times of crisis, reinforces a focus on short-term events and charismatic heroes rather than on systemic forces and collective learning. I t is deeply rooted in an individualistic and nonsystemic world view and is based on assumptions of people's powerlessness, their lack of personal vision and inability to master the forces of change.[4]

Harassment, bullying, and appropriation of intellectual resources will continue until we undergo a paradigm shift and let go the shackles of "nice" behaviour. What is considered t o be 'not quite nice' includes virtually all the best tools for dealing with harassment, bullying, and appropriation of intellectual resources ourselves.

The esteem in which we are held, our level of self-esteem, the resources we command, and the image we project by the way we behave are inextricably linked with the power we command and the way we use, misuse, or fail to use that power.

Power in the workplace is part of an eternal triangle made up of power, politics and competition.

Power is simply the capacity to accomplish things through others. The things that are accomplished with power can be either good or bad, but power in and of itself is neutral, it just helps you get things done.

Politics are the techniques used to gain power. Some of these techniques are overwhelmingly negative - such as sabotage, backbiting, credit mongering. Power, we learned in the cinemas of our childhood, comes from violence.[5]

Ancient myths support the view that violence, wealth, and knowledge are the ultimate sources of social power. Japanese legend tells of sanshu no jingi - the three sacred objects given to the great sun goddess, Amaterasu-omi-kami - which to this day are still the symbols of imperial power. These are the sword, the jewel, and the mirror. The power implications of sword and jewel are obvious. The mirror, in which Amaterasu-omi-kami saw her own reflection - or gained knowledge of herself - also reflects power, the power that comes from knowledge. Furthermore, the sword or muscle, the jewel or money, and the mirror or mind together form a single interactive system, which is something we fail to see. Under certain conditions each can be converted into the other.[6]

In many westerns a crusading newspaper editor, a teacher, a minister, or an educated woman from the "East" represented both Good in combat with Evil, and the power of culture and sophisticated knowledge about the outside world. While this person often won a victory. It was usually because of an alliance with the gun-toting hero or because of a sudden lucky strike. The special implications this early cinematic conditioning are part icularly poignant for a profession which trades on knowledge.

Competition is what happens when many people want the same few resources. No matter whom you work for, you compete (as well as cooperate) with colleagues every day because the re are limited rewards to go around. Sometimes competition comes from unexpected directions. This kind of competition can be extremely frustrating because it usually doesn't look like direct competition. You may not be able, at first glance, to determine what the person gains by competing with you. Because there aren't enough rewards to go around to satisfy everyone's needs, people will compete for the few that exist. Power determines who gets or distributes rewards, and politics influences who has the power.[7]

Bullying and harassment are a particularly invidious sort of competition because they designed to induce stress. As you become more stressed, your attention to cues becomes more selective and this editing is especially detrimental to performance of difficult tasks. [8] At relatively high levels of stress, coping responses become more primitive in at least three ways

• people who try to cope with problems often revert to more dominant, first learned actions;
• patterns of responding that have been learned recently are the first ones to disappear, which means that those responses that are most finely tuned to the current environment are the firs t ones to go; and
• people treat novel stimuli as if they are more similar to older stimuli than in fact they are, so that clues indicating change are missed. [9]

To invert this list, stressed people find it difficult:

• to learn a novel response;
• to brainstorm;
• to concentrate;
• to resist old categories;
• to perform complex responses;
• to delegate; and
• to resist information that supports positions they have taken. [10]

In the best of all possible worlds our ability to achieve our goals would depend solely on how well we fulfil the requirements outlined in our job definitions. We imagine that all our organ isational processes are designed to assess our performance objectively. But in practice, even apparently objective performance appraisals more commonly represent bosses' subjective assessment of an employee's ability to help them meet the goals and object ives that have been established for them.

If you are stressed out, however inherently competent you might be, your performance will be compromised. You will not present the threat that you have been perceived to be, but your job an d your career will be on the line, effectively removing you from the equation entirely.

To be a thinking and sensitive librarian is to notice the frequency with, and degree to which, much that is supposedly positive acceptance is in fact, aversive librarianism. This is a conce pt I have adapted from aversive racism, a subtle form of bias characteristic of many who possess strong egalitarian values and believe that they are not prejudiced. [11] But many also possess negative racial feelings and beliefs that they don't recognise, or try to dissociate from their image of themselves as non-prejudiced people.

The difficulty is that these negative feelings and beliefs are rooted in three types of normal, often adaptive, psychological processes.

• The first is a cognitive process called social categorisation. We all categorise others into groups, typically in terms that delineate our group from others, which automatically initiates bias.
• The second is the motivational process of satisfying basic needs for power and control for ourselves and our group. In a world of limited resources, one way to maintain control or power is to keep competing groups down.
• The third relates to sociocultural influences. Many of the values of contemporary society still reflect racist and sexist traditions and subtle messages about power persist.

To pursue the racism analogy further, most people have convictions of fairness, justice, and racial equality, along with almost unavoidable biases, so the ambivalence involving the positive and negative feelings that aversive racists experience creates psychological tension that leads to behavioural instability. Thus aversive racists sometimes discriminate (manifesting their negative feelings) and sometimes do not (reflecting their positive feelings). When interracial interaction is unavoidable, aversive racists experience anxiety and discomfort, rather than hostility or hatred. Negative feelings are expressed in subtle ways that can be rationalised but which ultimately create a disadvantag e for minorities and an advantage for the majority.

Because the behaviour is apparently unpredictable, it appears random and therefore not understandable, and it is critical that we understand exactly what is going on at all times, if we are to be effective advocates for ourselves. Most librarians have experienced similar situations in relation to how librarians are treated. Unfortunately, many librarians deal with the phenomenon in ways which do little to solve the problem.

Early in his first term, Abraham Lincoln was constantly pressured by key advisers to capitulate to the South's demands. On one occasion, he was advised by a Virginian to surrender all forts and property in the Southern states. Lincoln responded by quoting Aesop:

A lion was very much in love with a woodsman's daughter. The fair maid referred him to her father and the lion applied for the girl. The father replied: "Your teeth are too long." ; So the lion went to a dentist and had them extracted. Returning, he asked for his bride. "No," said the woodsman, "your claws are too long." Going back to the dentist he had them drawn. Then he returned to claim his bride, and the wo odsman, seeing that he was unarmed, beat out his brains.

"May it not be so with me," Lincoln concluded, "if I give up all that is asked?" [12]

We all realise that appeasement doesn't work, but how often have you had your claws drawn by your sense of what is nice?

The great neurologist of a century ago, John Hughlings Jackson, said: "We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think." [13] If we keep on reinforcing to ourselves and others the contention that we are in a position of disadvantage, we will continue to suffer from unnecessary subordination for no more pressing reason than we have stopped short of requiring an end to it. Every interaction in the workplace is part of the ongoing negotiation we are involved in all day, every day. There seems to be an entrenched belief that negotiation is difficult, that you have to do courses to understand the rules, that you have to negotiate from a recognised position of power and that, therefore, we have very limited capacity to negotiate for anything important. This is not true. Children are superb negotiators even though adults logically have power over and control everything they need and want and childre n ostensibly have nothing that we want or need. Yet try to get a child to eat dinner, or clean his teeth, or go to bed, and you will find yourself negotiating. Who wins? The child, because he instinctively knows there are no rules in negotiations, only options.

Terry Lambrose [14] recounts an excellent example of negotiating among a group of boys playing cricket on a vacant lot. First, they negotiated the "rules", over the fence was a six, etc. Then they started to play. One of the boys, David, was older and much taller than the others, but was bowled out first ball.

He refused to leave the crease. "You have to get me out three times before I'm out because I have brain damage", he said. After some discussion among themselves, the other boys ag reed to his demands. They were the many and he was the few. What had caused them to change the rules?

• He believed his case was special and therefore exempt from the rules.
• He waited until he was in control of the bat before he made his demands. In negotiation, timing is everything.
• He made his initial demands high. There is a saying in negotiation that "If you are not prepared to ask for more, then you must be prepared to settle for less". The settlement w ill always be something less than your original demand.
• He justified his demand and used an emotional appeal (brain damage) at the same time. The rationale strengthens, protects and justifies the demand.
• He remained at the crease with the bat in hand while they debated the issue among themselves. The tactic of forbearance paid off.
• He held the bat at the crease, so from the other players' perspective he controlled half of the resources. In negotiation, power is a matter of perception.

These principles apply equally to negotiating with those we perceive to be more powerful than we are. The thing to remember about power is if I have power and you don't think that I have, then you will act as if my power doesn't exist. If, on the other hand, I don't have any real power but you think I do, then you will act as if I do. In negotiations we almost always attribute more power to the other party and discount our own power.

For librarians to acquire power involves, in essence, beating the system. To beat any system involves overcoming self- imposed constraints. Trying to beat a system requires exercise of all the mental functions: thinking, sensing, feeling, and intuition. It contrasts with passive acceptance of what is. It occupies our mind with what might be, imagining a future that would be better than the present.[15] Significant personal and cultural develo pment is not possible without beating systems. In some cases, systems are beaten, even destroyed, by use of force. However, it is much better to beat them by the use of ideas. Force is directed at getting rid of what we don't want; ideas are directed at g etting what we do want. They are not equivalent: getting rid of what we don't want does not assure us of getting what we want.

Beating a system not only removes constraints imposed on us by the system, but also removes constraints imposed on the system by itself. This extends its range of choices and enables it to develop.[16]

On the wall of my office I keep a poster of Ganesha, the Hindu elephant headed god who is both patron god of literature and the remover of obstacles. When I sense an imperceptible raising o f eyebrows of first time visitors, I comment "What better Library god could one have". However, the real reason I keep it is to remind me to strive to remove obstacles rather than concentrate on accommodating them.

During his 1992 presidential campaign Bill Clinton responded to a reporter's questions about his feelings about being called a draft dodger. Clinton replied: "As my grandma said, It ain't what they call you that matters, it's what you answer to.

When librarians behave like victims, when they appease those whom they assume to be all-powerful, they sacrifice something of the spirit of librarianship. The things they sacrifice will pul l them down like ravenous ghosts. But worse, they may also pull down other librarians.

References

1.  PPC is an abbreviation for  Power, Politics and Competition
     
2.   Robert Fulghum,  Uh-Oh. London, Grafton, 1991, p 146
     
3.   Robert  M.  Bramson,   Coping With Difficult  Bosses.  St
     Leonards, NSW, Allen & Unwin, 1992, pp 7-8
     
4.   Peter  Senge, The Fifth Discipline. New York:  Doubleday,
     1990, p 340
     
5.   Alvin   Toffler.  Powershift:  Knowledge,   Wealth,   and
     Violence  at  the  Edge of the 21st  Century,  New  York,
     Bantam Books, 1990, p 12
     
6.   ibid p 13
     
7.   Christine A Leatz, Career Success/Personal Stress: How to
     stay  healthy in a high-stress environment. N.Y..  McGraw-
     Hill, 1993 p 51-52
     
8.   J A Easterbrook 'The effect of emotion on cue utilisation
     and the organization of behaviour', Psychological Review,
     vol 66, 1959 pp 183-201
     
9.   B  M  Staw, L E Sandelands & J E Dutton, 'Threat-rigidity
     effects   in   organizational  behavior:  A   multi-level
     analysis.'  Administrative  Science  Quarterly,  vol  26,
     1981, pp 501-524
     
10.   O. R. Holsti, 'Limitations of cognitive abilities in the
     face  of  crisis' in C. F. Smart & W. T.  Stanbury  (eds)
     Studies in Crisis Management. Toronto, Butterworth, 1978,
     pp 35-55
     
11.    John  Dovidio,  'The Subtlety of Racism'  Training  and
     Development, April 1993, pp 51-57
     
12.    Emmanuel Hertz, Lincoln Talks: A Biography in Anecdote.
     New York, Halcyon House, 1939, p 262
     
13.   William Calvin. The Ascent of Mind: Ice Age Climates and
     the Evolution of Intelligence. NY Bantam 1991 p. 24
     
14.     Lambrose,   Terry..   "Reflections  on   negotiations."
     Management Update no 126 February/March 1993. p 12
     
15.     Russell   L.   Ackoff,  Ackoff's  Fables:   irreverent
     reflections on business and bureaucracy. New  York:  John
     Wiley, 1991 p 41
     
16.   ibid, p 42