Time, New Public Management, and Canadian Academic Librarians’ Scholarship and Service
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Time is a critical factor in the success of librarians’ scholarship. Shared perceptions of organizational time enable, regulate, and constrain performance. Under the values and practices of New Public Management (NPM), intended to increase accountability and efficiency in the public sector, time in the university has become accelerated, intensifed, fragmented, and commodifed. Feminist and anti-colonial scholars remind us of the differentiated temporal impacts of NPM on women and other minorities in higher education, yet to date, its impact on the feminized profession of librarianship has not been examined. Using data from semi-structured interviews with 24 librarians working in Canadian U15 public research-intensive universities, the present article seeks to address this gap by exploring the impact of neoliberal timescapes on librarians’ scholarship and professional-service activities. Findings indicate that time is an important mechanism through which neoliberal governmentality is enacted. Being a “successful” researcher is largely dependent on intrinsic motivation and self-regulation. Trying to work with, rather than against, neoliberal timescapes facilitates research. Results also suggest that conficting organizational timescapes may exist between library directors and librarians, and that, as researchers, Canadian academic librarians are being held accountable to ambiguous performance standards and impracticable timescapes.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it