Despite persistent marginalisation of the social responsibility movement during the 20^th century by the library profession in countries like the United States, progressive librarians continue to challenge the belief that libraries are inherently democratic institutions, highlighting the essentially political nature of the decisions that drive both collection building and service design and delivery in libraries and reflect power relations. Social responsibility acknowledges that librarianship has traditionally “disadvantaged significant groups in society – most notably, women, working people, children and ethnic groups” (Atton 1997: 103) and therefore socially responsible librarianship manifests itself in a series of initiatives with a common recognition that every aspect of our lives is infused with politics and power relations (Atton, 1997, 103).

Much of 20^th century socially responsible librarianship in English-speaking developed countries focused on issues aimed at shaming the library profession into actively implementing the intellectual freedom policies articulated by the relevant national library associations. But minor successes in socially responsible librarianship have been eroded by the effects on libraries and library management of neoliberal free market policies at the global level. This has happened despite forty years of active work in these areas, and notwithstanding Sack’s (1986) pronouncement that the traditional Ptolemaic view of the library world with the library at the centre and users at the periphery had been replaced by a Copernican view with the user at the centre supported by a variety of services and people.

To make libraries more socially relevant and to improve user access are the basic terms of reference of social responsibility in librarianship. These are also promulgated as the basic terms of reference for library services in an increasingly competitive environment. But minorities and the socially disadvantaged are not yet effectively engaged in the ‘information revolution’.¹ and outcomes for the disadvantaged differ markedly. Socially responsible librarians recognize that the widening digital divide has its origins both in social and economic differences.²

In order that the social outcomes envisioned by progressive librarianship of the 20^th century can be achieved fundamental changes in focus must occur. While the rights and needs of the under-served and the marginalized is a worthy goal and must remain central to the social responsibility movement in libraries, the library as an institution needs to be the primary focus in this third millennium. In particular, this requires ensuring that the library has the capability to be internationally competitive in order to have the capacity to be socially responsible, a goal which can only be achieved through strategic preparation, strategic focus, strategic action and strategic systemic change in the way libraries are managed.

Despite the influence of professional management practices on the operation of libraries, librarianship to a large degree remains “a curious profession in which we select materials we don’t know will be wanted, which we can only imperfectly assess, against criteria which cannot be precisely defined, for people we’ve usually never met and if anything important happens as a result we shall probably never know, often because the user doesn’t realize it himself” (Charlton quoted in Brophy, 2001, 72). This characteristic allows inconsistencies between actual practice and professed principles to escape critical analysis by those responsible for library management and governance.

In addition to significant improvement in library performance assessment practice, it is imperative that libraries develop multiple intelligences (Rational Intelligence, Emotional Intelligence and Spiritual Intelligence)³, using these to address the cognitive frameworks within which library governance is carried out in order to create libraries that are comfortable with triple bottom line reporting. In addition to reporting on profitability (return on the investment of the funding body in the library), such reinvented libraries would, as a matter of course, report on socially responsible and environmental policies.

From a postmodern perspective, knowledge is constructed and contextual. Thus it is necessary to describe my context (the Australian context) to detail the inter-relationship between stakeholder perspectives and current views of accountability, and to explore the question of the potential role of cognitive frameworks in transforming libraries.

It has been suggested that postmodernism invites us to engage in a “continual process of disillusionment with the grandiose fantasies that have brought us to the brink of annihilation” (Flax, 1992, 460). The Australian context highlights issues for socially responsible librarianship as seen from the viewpoint of a society coming to terms with the perceived insolubility of that society’s problems and political assertions that it is no longer possible to create a perfect social order. This comes at a time when technology is driving radical change in libraries, when there is a belief that the unregulated free market is the essential precondition for both political democracy and the fair distribution of wealth, and where corporate hegemony provides a platform for unchallenged dissemination of pro-market messages.

The Australia that entered the last years of the 20^th century was very different from the country that was created on January 1^st, 1901 when a number of British colonies joined together in a climate of shared values embodied in both legislation and public institutions. Then one in three workers were employed in primary industries or manufacturing. Today 85% of workers are in the service sector. It should also be noted that Australia entered the last decade of the 20^th century with one third of its finance and agricultural sectors and one half of its mining sector in foreign ownership.

With a population of only 20 million, a small tax base, a small domestic market, limited water-supplies, and the United States as the accepted model of economic prosperity, Australia is especially vulnerable to the global economic pressures and ideas that motivate dismantling of egalitarian structures. Rapid economic and social changes have created stark divisions in a society that seems to have rather disengaged from its sense of social responsibility. Yet Australia does not have an identifiable social responsibility movement within its library profession, nor am I aware of any formal study on the issue. I would suggest that there has been no formal movement because of the universally accepted myth of egalitarianism in Australian society, even in the face of curtailment of social welfare programs which reduced the social cost of unemployment, a growing underclass, and the emerging of a political party which espouses racist and exclusionist policies pandering to a sector of the population which is hell-bent on the politics of revenge.

For most of the 20^th century Australian attitudes and institutions operated within a framework that acknowledged social values and egalitarian manners. The flavour of these is generally conveyed through two images: Australians treat tradesmen who come to the house as equals and ride in the front seat of taxis. While the taxi image may have begun with the opening pages of D. H. Lawrence’s novel Kangaroo, talking respectfully with each other across class differences stems from the ruling of Justice Higgins in the first decade of the 20^th century that Australian workers were to be paid a fair and reasonable wage based on a family’s normal needs. This, together with the subsequent establishment of a system of arbitration in industrial courts where employees and employers were treated as equal parties to a dispute, set the stage for a conservative, bureaucratic society that encouraged confrontation (through the industrial courts), but did not have a working poor. This system started to unravel in the last two decades of the 20^th century when competition came to be regarded to be a civic virtue and the rhetoric of globalisation was used to justify the scale and depth of recent social and economic marginalisation. Despite the changes, and regardless of the fact that Australian egalitarianism has always related only to class and has always been an egalitarianism of manners rather than genuine equality, the sentiment of egalitarianism remains dominant in society. However, this is not necessarily true in libraries.

In the early 90s, alteration of the Australian Library and Information Freedom to Read statement, and similar changes in formal statements of the Australian Council of Libraries and Information Services, to include imprimatur for ‘user pays’ was instigated by the profession. The prevailing psychological climate of the profession at the time appeared to be one of vorauseilende Gehorsamkeit, an obedience that hastens to anticipate the will of the boss (and which is commonly observed in the behaviour of victims of abusive relationships, and therefore goes directly to a professional perception of powerlessness), and for which there is no equivalent English term. This change had potential to reduce access by lower income citizens in Australian libraries. Vorauseliende Gehorsamkeit appeared also to be a factor in competitive tendering for provision library services, rampant in the state of Victoria, but thankfully largely contained within that state, where generally the “in-house” team won the tender, but at the cost of reduction in staff and focusing of services on those where there was higher demand or a more vocal customer base.

The threat of competitive tendering increased acceptance within Australian libraries of Quality Assurance processes. With a view to ensuring that they were seen to be competitive, some libraries went forward to achieve certification under ISO 9001, and at least gave lip service to the Deeming principles, which include an active requirement that library staff take on a “critical friend” role and openly question underlying assumptions and practices, thus providing some element of assurance that library staff may discuss library professional issues without fear of reprisal. In the service environment, quality assurance tends not to assure quality, but rather consistency. However, precisely because it is intended to achieve consistency, Quality Assurance requires careful documentation of, for example, cataloguing practice and collection development policy. This requirement gives progressive librarians a tool to ensure that the library’s policies and practices are explicit and therefore anomalies, inconsistencies and discrimination more easily targeted. It does not preclude vorauseliende Gehorsamkeit, but it does make such behaviours harder to justify where they impact negatively on stakeholders.

In the 20^th century, there is an emphasis on demographics which values users of media as consumers⁴ and competition for global domination of the media through vertical integration and synergy between competing media has been fierce. Consequent changes in publishing and distribution have shown us the potential for negative impact on access, on affordability and on collection comprehensiveness (including both print and digital media) in libraries. The commodification of information, particularly where information has been transformed into a saleable good, changes the goal of information access from an egalitarian to a privileged condition. This creates difficulties for progressive librarians because of widespread advocacy for an entrepreneurial model of librarianship which promotes and supports such commodification and seeks affiliation with big business, which in turn leads to more and more focus on the mainstream in collection building.

In the 21^st century, competition external to libraries is a reality. Libraries are generally part of larger public sector entities, so they are directly threatened by attempts to try to minimize government involvement in the economy, attempts which ignore the fact that governments comprise around 35% of all developed economies through the provision of physical infrastructure, services, legal systems, regulation and funding for research.

Services are particularly vulnerable to competition. With the decline of the manufacturing sector due to international competition, large corporations are looking to services as an alternative source of profit. In particular, they wish to benefit from the funds that governments currently spend on services. For this aim to be achieved the traditional mechanisms used by governments to voluntarily protect their services must be overturned. The mechanism by which this will be achieved is limitation of the powers of government to impose restrictions of commercialisation on their services. Domestic regulation protective of public services is the target for the current round of GATS (General Agreement on Trade and Services) negotiations. The Corporate lobby is attempting to make the GATS Articles so robust that they will apply across all public sectors and services, requiring governments to prove that their policies are pro-competitive and least restrictive of trade. Already, even without robust trade agreements, service exports account for more than a third of the economic growth of the United States, but should the changes go through they will be tantamount to a Bill of Rights for the corporate sector, enforced by a World Trade Organisation that has acquired judicial, legislative and executive powers of global governance without the imposition of conflict of interest rules. While it is the health and education sectors that are the current target, it is logical that library and information services will also be impacted.

Strategic preparation to deal with competition must include benchmarking library services for international competitiveness, development of a capability statement, and rigorous ongoing performance measurement with a focus on ensuring that libraries do not lose the capacity to provide socially responsible services. These are the tasks of Rational Intelligence.

The tasks of Emotional Intelligence align much more closely with the traditional focus and advocacy of progressive librarians. A useful construct is the stakeholder framework. Identification of stakeholders and their needs is commonly used in strategic planning exercises. However, it is not uncommon for such identification to constitute nothing more than a listing exercise.

While libraries in Australia have adopted stakeholder perspective to some degree, there is no widespread acknowledgement that, when it is focused on survival of the library, the stakeholder perspective tends to militate against a user perspective.

In particular, the traditional public sector hierarchical view of accountability to official superiors is designed to serve only the party who delegates responsibility (Desautels, 1997). Those who know the expectations of those to whom they are accountable tend to conform to those expectations (London et al., 1997).⁵ Therefore, unless the library adopts a moral notion of accountability, rather than a conventional organisational one, any view of the user as central to the library’s operations and decision-making will remain a convention, rather than an actuality.

Changes in Australia’s social class structure, have a potential to further distance library management from the view of the library as a deliverer of benefits, of an intervener in the social and/or economic well being of individuals, groups and the community, rather than merely a deliverer of services. Previously a two-class society Australia has now become a four-class society with an identifiable overclass and an identifiable underclass. The material gaps and gaps in shared political interest between the classes are exaggerated by increasingly geographic concentration, driven largely by the housing market and the private/public school division (Probert 2001).

Probert (2001) suggests that, because of changes in remuneration packages and investment habits, the middle classes (including the growing number of tertiary-educated ‘symbolic analysts’, a group that includes professional librarians), do not have to be ill-intentioned to find themselves increasingly aligned with the overclass, employers and individuals who earn very large salaries or fees and invest in shares as a major source of long-term security, and therefore objectively detached from the interests of the underclass, the working poor and long-term unemployed.

Methodologies that force some cognitive rigour are needed to ensure progressive librarians guard against such objective detachment. One such methodology is use of a framework within which broad stakeholder groups are categorised by their role in relation to the library. This is useful in a number of ways. It forces acknowledgement of prioritisation of the interests of different groups, and provides a structure within which conflicting interests can be more easily identified.

The broad groups are:

• Normative groups, those that provide the authority for the library to function and set general rules and regulations. These include the Government, the Funding Authority, the Parent Body, Professional and Industry Associations, Standards Authorities and Senior Management. The reality of performance measurement in all entities is that goals are mandated for senior management, and the goals of those further down the hierarchy become the measures for senior management goals. Such goals may have little to do with actual service provision, but will drive reporting and operations.

• Functional groups, those that affect many of the day-to-day activities of the library and facilitate operations and serving customers. These include  Staff, Unions, Suppliers and Service Providers.

• Diffused groups, those that take an interest when concerned about protecting the rights of others (a grouping almost universally ignored when libraries list stakeholders as part of a strategic planning process). These include special interest and lobby groups, the media and community members.

• Customer groups, defined into sub-groups by their needs. Customer perspective is generally modeled by the service provider, so it tends to reflect what the library values, and is focused on customer satisfaction (an industrial economy model of success which in Australia is regarded to be synonymous with quality, but which in an Internet economy is the bare minimum, something which must be delivered in order for the library to survive). The obvious omission is that if groups or sub-groups are marginalized and ill-served, they do not present as customers. Close examination of customer groups, and comparison of these groups with the demographic makeup of the potential user community should therefore be an integral part of any stakeholder analysis. A feedback loop between this information and the staffing profile of the library can also be helpful.⁶

Libraries are extremely vertical institutions. Library management must be able to trust the staff members who interact with library users in order to ensure that consistent and high quality service is delivered. Ironically, one of the reasons why the advocacy of progressive librarians may not be well received by library management is the perception that they have aligned themselves with pressure groups and have thus displayed a lack of loyalty, even where the activities of those staff are aimed at ensuring service improvements.

Meeting needs of stakeholders, particularly the needs of Normative stakeholders, is necessary for the library to survive. This will include, but not exclusively comprise, meeting the needs of Customers. There is a growing school of thought that regards libraries as neutral mediators in the information marketplace. Progressive librarianship has long refuted the idea that the library is by definition a neutral facilitator of a value-neutral information society. But you cannot be neutral if you are to develop profitable customer relationships. One benefit of the Internet economy, and one which libraries with highly-developed Rational and Emotional Intelligence are well-placed to exploit, is a shift in focus from transaction-based customer interactions to relationship-based customer interactions. This business model requires that entities get to know their customers better and understand those customers’ life cycle, that is what individual customers are likely to want over time, not just in the context of a single transaction. This model precludes categorizing customers into omnibus customer groups. Decisions – even when made by default – to exclude or under-serve specific groups will thus be less easy to obscure and more open to challenge.

One of the primary roles for libraries is now regarded to be life-long learning. This is a worthy purpose which fits well with a relationship based business model and legitimates services which support constructive pedagogies, learner-centred education, whether formal or self-directed. Life-long learning services of libraries can be developed and marketed to decision-makers as critical planks in government initiatives such as the Queensland’s Smart State or Australia’s Clever Country, and thereby support inclusiveness. But to actively participate, librarians need to become expert educators.

One of the most famous acts of Australian sportsmanship took place at the 1956 Australian Mile Championships. John Landy, now Governor of Victoria, performed what was described in newspapers at the time as ‘a senseless piece of chivalry’, when he turned back from leading the field to assist Ron Clarke after Clarke fell. Despite having fallen quite a distance behind the field, Landy went on to win the race to a standing ovation. While Landy behaved instinctively, this sort of instinct is learned rather than inherent. It is an expression of character, of Spiritual Intelligence.

Libraries in the 21^st century need to be organisations that have learned character and ethics in addition to having developed the capacity to perform well in competitive terms. It is a major role for progressive librarianship to insure that libraries develop capacity to act instinctively for good while delivering high-level performance. Such capacity is only possible if the library develops Rational, Emotional and Spiritual Intelligence and integrates all three in every aspect of its operations.

Progressive librarians in Australia and elsewhere will have to understand and work within a globally competitive environment. In this environment access to and distribution of information is increasingly controlled by the for-profit sector and there is a growing divide between the materially and information rich, and the materially and information poor, a divide which is seen by that sector as perfectly justified. In addition, the welfare state, which in Australia was an expression of a particular kind of class compromise, is described as a burden on the economy. Instead of the route to a prosperous society being perceived to be through sharing through redistributive policies based on egalitarian values, we are exhorted to invest in shares.

To remain progressive in this sort of environment will require both personal and organisational insight, the adoption of a moral notion of accountability, and a great deal of courage.

ENDNOTES

1. Holderness (1998, 40) provides information about the lack of capacity of developing nations to enter the Internet environment. A new computer with a modem costs about one year’s unemployment benefit in Britain; or about the annual income of three schoolteachers in Calcutta; or about fifty times development economists’ estimate of the bare subsistence income in Calcutta. In the same year an Australian study (Andrews, 1998) of Internet access among people who identified as indigenous Australians, revealed that less than one percent owned a modem.

2. Early adopters of Internet shopping have tended to be the urban affluent, those who least need to overcome problems of location and distance, just as early adopters of online information access have tended to be those in the academic environment with easy access to large libraries.

3. Rational Intelligence is rational thinking or reasoning, the expert systems in the brain. In an organizational sense Rational Intelligence would comprise organizational structure, operations and service design, management and monitoring, and financial management. Emotional Intelligence, identified by Daniel Goleman, is awareness of one’s own feelings and the feelings of others, the capacity to read human situations and interact with others. In an organizational sense Emotional Intelligence would encompass Customer Relationship Management. Spiritual Intelligence goes to the question of purpose and raises questions such as are we good people? What is our purpose? Social Responsibility is a manifestation of Spiritual Intelligence.

4.This is not a new phenomenon. Participation of newspapers in the late nineteenth century the democratic process conditional when emphasis on demographics, which valued readers as consumers, excluded the poor, and advocacy for publishers’ own interests or for the interests of the advertisers' interests elevated private commercial gain over broad public services (Baldasty 1992: 143).

5. Officially, traditional bureaucratic notions of a single line of accountability have given way in many structures to multiple lines of accountability such as independent “watchdog” agencies, specialised tribunals, and also to consumer and interest-group forums.

6. Durrani (1999: 274) has used evidence of imbalance between community and library staffing profile to suggest that it is the existence of institutionalised racism in British public libraries that has prevented the full delivery of basic information services to Black communities. In Australia library staffing also does not reflect the Australian multicultural reality, and in particular, there are very few professional indigenous library staff.

REFERENCES

Atton, Chris. 1997.  Against Blaise Cronin’s ‘strategic pragmatism’ and in defense of social responsibility in librarianship. Libri 47 (June): 101-106

Andrews, Peter. 1998. Personal communication.

Baldasty, J. 1992. The commercialisation of news in the nineteenth century. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Brophy, Peter. 2001. The library in the twenty-first century: new services for the information age. London. Library Association.

Desautels, L.D. 1997. Value for money in modern government. Canberra Bulletin of Public Administration. 84: 65-71.

Durrani, S. 1999. Black communities and information workers in search of social justice. New Library World. 100(1151):.265-278.

Flax, Jane 1992. The end of innocence. In J. Butler and J. Scott (eds) Feminists Theorize the Political. Toronto: Routledge.

Holderness, M. (1998). Who are the world’s information-poor? In Loader, B.D. (ed.) Cyberspace Divide: equality, agency and policy in the information society. London, Routledge: pp.35-56.

London, M.; Smither, J.W.; and Adsit, D.J. 1997. Accountability: the Achilles’ heel of  multisource feedback. Group and Organization Management. 22(2): 162-184. As transcribed in Business Source Plus Item No 9706046056.

Probert, Belinda. 2001. Holding together: class in the Year 2001. The Barton Lectures, Part 6, Radio National, 18 March 2001 transcript at: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/sunspec/stories/s261974.htm

Sack, J. R. 1986. Open systems for open minds: building the library without walls. College & Research Libraries. 47(6) (November): 538