Every Appearance of Common Sense?: Applying Pierre Bourdieu’s “Sociological Gaze” to the Profession of Librarianship
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper utilizes an ALA resolution from 2016 and the resulting arguments on an ALA public forum to analyze the profession of librarianship from a perspective informed by Pierre Bourdieu’s theories. Drawing on scholarship from sociology, organizational studies, and LIS, I argue that the concept of a profession is a form of symbolic capital working within multiple fields of power. Analyzing librarianship with this framework enables us to identify the internal and external battles being waged over control of symbolic capital within fields of power, and ask why we value “the profession” to such a degree. Within the profession, professionals, para-professionals, and managers are constantly attempting to shore up or acquire additional symbolic capital. Externally, professions are struggling to maintain their symbolic capital in relation to each other; some professions, like medicine and law, have been more adept at consecrating cultural, social and economic capital into symbolic capital. Ultimately, this approach makes clear that the concept of “a profession” is neither absolute nor neutral; it is a constructed, deeply historical socio-cultural classification system that has been embedded into our collective understanding of how labour is valued. Ultimately, bolstering support behind the notion of a “profession” might not be the most prudent course of action for librarians going forward; in fact, I’ll suggest that uncritically supporting the “profession” goes against the philosophical tenets that librarians are purported to uphold.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.017 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.108 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".