Doing neoliberal things with words in libraries. Toward emending a discourse fashion in LIS
| Date | 10 July 2017 |
| Published date | 10 July 2017 |
| Pages | 595-617 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-11-2016-0134 |
| Author | John Buschman |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management,Classification & cataloguing,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Scholarly communications/publishing,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
Doing neoliberal things with
words in libraries
Toward emending a discourse fashion in LIS
John Buschman
Department of University Libraries, Seton Hall University,
South Orange, New Jersey, USA
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to flesh out a truncated line of analysis in library and information
science (LIS) of language analyses of power in the field.
Design/methodology/approach –Literature-based conceptual analysis of the problems engendered by
neoliberalism in LIS and the productive approach of language analysis of Austin, Habermas, and Smith that
allows us to account for neoliberalism’s effects in language and practices –doing things with words.
Findings –LIS has engaged a productive postmodern analysis of power relations that reflects social and
economic progress, but Austin, Habermas, and Smith offer a sensible, practical explanation for the operation
of neoliberal hegemony on the practices of librarianship.
Originality/value –Postmodern analyses are now being deployed in portions of LIS, but they fail to account
for the full implications of the dominant public language (and policy and practices) of neoliberalism for
librarianship. This is productive exploration of those implications to correct and round out those analyses.
Keywords Neoliberalism, Higher education, Theory, Librarianship, Academic librarianship,
Dorothy Smith, Educational neoliberalism, J.L. Austin, Jürgen Habermas
Paper type Conceptual paper
Introduction
In the midst of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, the academic language of
power in library and information science (LIS) is frequently personalized. For instance, the
call-for-papers (CFP: Language, 2016) for an edited volume on “Language, Modes of
Communication, and the Contemporary Academic Library”notes the particular and
personal privileges –“unconscious or unnoticed”–of race, class, gender, profession,
professional status, and education in areas such as “digital messaging,”the “shift from
silencetonoiseinthe[…]library,”“emotion in workplace language,”“rhetoric as
activism,”and “messages in management modeling and mentorship.”AnotherCFPfora
symposium on “Money and Power”–seemingly more hard-edged than the first
(“Power and money determine who and what is included or excluded, affect […]agendas,
and can be used to further or hinder changes”)–echoed very similar themes: “signifiers of
professionalism,”“the power to name,”“power within discourse,”“questions of prestige,”
and “the social const ruction of author ity”(CFP Symposium, 2016). Though relatively
recent to LIS, the “linguistic turn”has been around for decades now via postmodern
analyses representing positive social, intellectual, and political progress (Connolly, 1990;
Patton, 2006; Phillips, 2001). But the LIS linguistic turn represents a very partial picture.
The suggestion here is that this perspective has become what LIS analyst Day (2002)
called a “discourse fashion”–that is, a fashionable rhetorical deployment of concepts.
A fashion represents collective “decisions to embrace new ideas […] often informed by
collective beliefs about […] progressive practices […] shaped by idea providers”
(Perkmann and Spicer, 2008, p. 812). Indeed a very recent bibliometric study of two “works
traditionally seen as central and foundational to discourse analysis appear relatively little
in discussions of discourse […] and when they are used, such use is often only vague,
brief, or in passing”(Dewey, 2016, p. 454). It is not necessarily that the theories are misread
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 73 No. 4, 2017
pp. 595-617
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-11-2016-0134
Received 8 November 2016
Revised 19 December 2016
Accepted 20 December 2016
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0022-0418.htm
595
Toward
emending a
discourse
fashion in LIS
or misused, but that “Foucault […] has become something of a discursive formation within
LIS”(Dewey, 2016, p. 476) –or, a discourse fashion in Day’s phrasing.
As Apple (1986, p. 403) noted some time ago, “it is not to fall back into the trap of
reductionism to recognize that […] there exist general priorities and interests that provide
[a] center of gravity. [Neoliberal] capitalism [doesn’t] explain everything of social importance
[…] but to ignore [it] is to cut oneself off”from interests, forces, and language that now
deeply influence our social, political, and educational institutions. Neoliberalism’s[1]
influence on libraries happens in a multitude of ways, some considerably upstream in the
form of frameworks that affect and influence administrative language and practices. This
can be seen through the example of higher education and the operation of credit markets:
the place where neoliberal values are clearly and obviously articulated and activated, and
the strictures, evaluations, and expectations to which libraries (through their governing and
sponsoring structures) are increasingly subjected. The results filter through administrations
which then (with their concomitant expectations and demands) show up in the language
that librarians and leaders deploy in justifying their libraries and in discussions of library
space. To adapt a phrase from neoliberal economics, the social and educational effects
trickle down –and language has a role in this particular hegemon. The goal here is to emend
the discourse fashion and its truncated construction of LIS’linguistic turn.
Beginning with a brief excursus on educational neoliberalism, the paper will explore
work that will move toward a progressively more critical and library-specific framework by
describing the operation of neoliberal language in an institutional context: Austin’s speech
act theory is situated by Habermas within the more critical analysis of systematically
distorted communication and the colonization of the lifeworld, and then Smith’s sociology
takes us to the point where effects are played out in texts and their institutionally situated
language and discourse. This approach will blend theoretical perspectives since “each
method has strengths and weaknesses and each can be used to address particular
questions”(Budd, 2006, p. 75), and each represents helpful “technical aids to clear thinking
about [the] subject”at hand (Barry in Galston, 1993, p. 32). Utilizing this framework, the
paper will turn to an analysis that traces the language of the credit markets, their operation
on higher education administrations, and how this is further enacted through library
language and discourse. The power of neoliberalism is not always expressed in who it
rewards linguistically or otherwise (the wealthy, the white, the educated, the technologically
proficient, or the technocratic), but in the logic it imposes systematically on non-market
areas of culture. Countering this form of power begins with understanding its often
non-personal nature and operations, and the language-operations of neoliberalism are core
to that understanding. In conclusion, the chapter will cycle back through our theoretical
framework to explain and connect (again) neoliberalism’s language power to libraries and
this corrective to LIS’current discourse fashion.
Educational neoliberalism: the market, the global economy, the university,
and the library
However, one wants to put it –as a hegemon, as priorities and interests, as the center of
gravity, or as the dominant language and discourse –neoliberalism is and has been
ascendant for almost 40 years (Buschman, 2012a). Essentially global corporations were
the beneficiaries of liberal ideas about individual freedom pursued through markets that
were applied to global entities through ideological and political deployment of a “composite
representation of the economy that is projected through […] media and texts [of] individual
entrepreneurs and households […] as a touchstone. [This] media-generated abstract
economy has become an essential reference point [and] an iconic centerpiece on the high
altar of capitalis[m]”(Smart, 2008, p. 110), now quite naturalized and reified. Neoliberalism
has become the model for a wide range of non-market practices: educational neoliberalism is
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