Specialization, territoriality, and jurisdiction: librarianship and the political economy of knowledge - Navigating Among the Disciplines: The Library and Interdisciplinary Inquiry

The Need for Integration:

The Social Organization of Knowledge

If librarianship follows this path of increasing specialization, however necessary that may become in order to keep current with new knowledge, does it then simply break up into so many balkanized specialties and lose whatever unity it once may have had? To some extent this is inevitable, but it does not mean that there are no paths to integration. Earlier versions of this dilemma have been faced in the past. For example, in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, the research output mushroomed and the great university libraries took shape (Bestor, 1953, p. 176). At the same time, the professionalization of teaching took over the domain of education. In response to both trends, librarians developed general classification schemes and cataloging services. These are still being used and continue to exercise both practical functions in retrieval as well as a general intellectual function of cognitive organization.

This older path to integration is well worth keeping, but there is another that could also be followed to somewhat different effect. This path is not new either, but it has emerged much more recently than the bibliographic control schemes that mark the heyday of progressivism in American librarianship; it is rooted in the histories and sociologies of knowledge. It is an approach that was first called "social epistemology" in the early 1950s (Wilson, 1983, p. viii; Egan & Shera, 1952) and as recently as the late 1980s (Fuller, 1988). Basically, it is the study of the social organization of knowledge production and distribution or, alternatively the sociology of formal knowledge. "Production" takes care of the original work of the scholar, writer, scientist, and artist, and overlaps with the publishing industry that transforms this work into a distributable text; "distribution" covers the activity of the librarian proper - i.e., selecting, acquiring, gaining access to, collecting, controlling, assessing, evaluating, mediating, and all the other functions librarians fulfill in matching texts with their users (the word "text" like the word "work" is deliberately format-neutral, as it will have to be in a multiformat knowledge environment).

From this viewpoint, what underlies and integrates the work of all librarians is that it deals with texts that encode the knowledge works of their producers. A widening of the traditional jurisdiction, in effect making the librarian a kind of specialist in the social organization of knowledge, brings some of the integrative potential which so often seems to disappear as knowledge production itself becomes more specialized. As librarians become more specialized in respect of subject, language, area, and format, they follow the differentiating trend, but as they understand the underlying social activity of knowledge production, they discover an integrative force that binds together all knowledge-treating activity. It is obviously not possible to treat this in depth here, but it is reasonable to present some sense of a general outline of the social organization of knowledge as it affects librarians.