Critical Library Performativity: Toward Progressive Change in Academic Library Management and Organizations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Can library managers be #critlib? Do articles and conversations about critical theory really lead to progressive changes in library organizations and management? Critical management studies (CMS), a subfield of management studies, calls for denaturalization of taken-for-granted management practices, reflexivity in methods, and anti-performative goals. However, worried that CMS is too idealistic and ineffective, some of its adherents have proposed a theoretical construct they call “critical performativity” (CP). CP aims to bridge critical theory and authentic engagement with practicing managers. This article introduces and summarizes CP scholarship, and then considers the lessons CP has for critical library scholars, workers, and managers. Unlike our CMS scholarly counterparts, most librarians who align with critical perspectives are also themselves practitioners. For us, CP offers useful framing and thought-provoking ideas for integrating our critical leanings and our daily practice in order to work for achievable change.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.023 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".