If The Shoe Doesn't Fit, Don't Wear It

British organizational sociologist Joan Woodward asked "What organizational arrangements produce the highest level of performance?" She was taking an early Modernist approach to reexamine the Classical model's assumption that there is one best way to organize, an Occam's Razor of organization, if you'd like. She actually found, not surprisingly, that there is no "one best way" but rather that there are three typologies at work, dependent on what is being produced. The three typologies are unit and small batch production, large batch or mass production, and continuous processing. Chapter Five of Mary Jo Hatch's Organization Theory discusses Woodward's Typology in depth (pp. 134-137) but I was especially struck by the mass production typology, in which "highly routinized...procedures" produce "great quantities of identical products"(Hatch, p.136).

This typology is most often used in a manufacturing setting (think assembly line) but it occurred to me to wonder what would happen if this model were mistakenly applied to a facet of library services. In 1996, the Hawaii State Public Library System decided to react to a budget shortfall by taking collection development and all of the attendant activities of cataloging, purchasing, processing and even basic selection away from the individual libraries in the system and give the task to a vendor. There are, of course, other issues of power and authority, Marxist alienation, and differentiation and integration at work here (and I'd like to hear others' thoughts on these issues). But I'd like to suggest that one way to approach the uproar that took place in Hawaii is to see this as a misapplication of Woodward's mass production typology.

The Hawaii System's directors seem to have proceeded from the assumption that collection development was a routine process designed to provide identical products throughout the system. One size could fit all, in other words. I think there was an unfortunate extrapolation of the fact that some aspects of collection development are routinized (i.e. most processing) to the idea that all aspects could be.

But, as Rebecca Knuth and Donna G. Bair-Mundy point out on page 109 of "Revolt over Outsourcing: Hawaii's Librarians Speak Out about Contracted Selection" (Collection Management 23, no. 12 (1998): 81-112), the Hawaii System's move to routinize collection development was actually seen as causing "commodification, commercialization and homogenization of books, information materials, and libraries." I'm all for applying Woodward's mass production typology when it comes to the car I drive. In this instance, routinizations and standards keep me safe. When it comes to treating the libraries our society needs as similar commodities, however, I'd have to say "not so much." And, as the Postscript shows, I'm not alone in this opinion.

Postscript: The Hawaii System backed down and allowed individual libraries' collection development officers to return to exercising their professional judgement in service to the specific, not one-size-fits-all, communities that they served.

Becky H.