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Introduction
An article entitled “Libraries as Bureaucracies” appeared in the journal Library Trends in the Winter of 1978, which described the ways in which bureaucracy applied to the field of librarianship. Its author, Beverly Lynch, disabused readers of any misconceptions that bureaucracies could be characterized solely by “inefficiency and red tape,” and instead, defined bureaucracies as organizations designed “to control and stabilize environmental influences,” thereby maximizing efficiency (Lynch, 1978, pp. 260-267). The paper concluded with the statement: “libraries will remain bureaucratic in form” (Lynch, 1978, p. 267).
In total, 40 years later, these claims remain true: the term bureaucracy is still used most often in a negative sense, though bureaucracy prevails as the most common and effective means of management and organization – across most sectors, and including libraries (Lynch, 1978, p. 260; Graeber, 2015, pp. 3-21). Yet, much has changed, within the profession of librarianship and externally, since “Libraries as Bureaucracies” was first published.
Bureaucracies can be defined, broadly, as “any location where any number of people gather to discuss the allocation of resources of any kind at all” (Graeber, 2015, p. 21). Dictionaries describe bureaucracy as “a system for controlling or monitoring a country, company, or organization that is operated by a large number of officials employed to follow rules carefully”[1].
Most any mention of bureaucracy to be found in library literature, or in the social sciences, describes bureaucracies using the characteristics first named by the political economist and historian Max Weber. In the article “Libraries as Bureaucracies,” Lynch (1978) summarized these succinctly: “Weber’s ideal type of organization is a bureaucracy characterized by a hierarchy of office, careful specification of office functions, recruitment on the basis of merit, promotion according to merit and performance, and a coherent system of discipline and control” (p. 260).
When Lynch (1978) researched the topic, a dearth of “specific research on libraries as bureaucracies” required the author to look to research from other disciplines (p. 266). For the most part, bureaucracy is still overlooked and misunderstood, both within the library profession and throughout society, despite its great import and beguiling complexities. As David Graeber (2015), an Anthropologist at the London School of Economics puts it, “It’s as if, as a planetary civilization, we have decided to clap our...