Transformational Discourse: Ideologies of Organizational Change in the Academic Library and Information Science Literature
Year: 1998
Type: article
Abstract: THIS ARTtcLE EXAMINES DISC:OURSES IN THE academic and information scienceliterature that attempt to justify and promote, to criticize and resist, or to explain and interpret transformational social change.These discussions represent one face of a much larger wave of popular and technical discourse that has arisen in response to pressures put on currently dominant institutions by the processes of post-industrialization.The nature of these institutions and the pressures they face is explicated in terms of Western civilization's modernization project, whose internal cultural contradictions and conflicting foundational metaphors have generated a variety of unanticipated social consequences.The resulting cultural disjunctions provide an invitation to rhetoric.Modern organizations, with their complex division of labor designed to accomplish unified corporate purposes, have become primary sites for the application of managerial ideologies aimed at creating identity among divisions.Modern academic libraries, as organizations devoted to the preservation and production of cultural knowledge through the efficient collection and processing of information, stand directly astride the cultural fissures that generate transformational discourse.This article surveys the resulting corpus of library and information science (LIS) literature about organizational change in academic libraries and uses multiple methods to build a syncretic interpretation that may be able to overcome some of the traditional problems of qualitative research.To accomplish this, multiple interpretative frameworks were applied by means of an especially flexible and powerful qualitative analysis software
Author: Mark T. Day
Language: English
Subfield: Library and Information Sciences
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1538497551