Right to the Library : Following Urban Planning Away from Stakeholder Theory
Abstract
In the field of urban planning a well-established and growing body of discourse encourages the rethinking of stakeholder theory. Like urban planning, librarianship has been using stakeholder theory nearly since the theory’s inception, with its prevalence accelerating since the mid-1990s. However, compared to planning, librarianship’s use of stakeholder theory has been undertheorized; in three decades, there have not been meaningful advances or critiques of stakeholder theory’s place in library management. This article will review the advent of stakeholder theory in the business management literature; distill urban planning’s criticism of the theory and ideas for moving past it; and suggest what from urban planning’s critique of stakeholder theory can be adopted in librarianship’s theory and practice. As in urban planning, these new directions for librarianship will be oriented towards democracy and justice, particularly racial and class justice. It will also suggest that library workers examine critically the suite of managerial methods borrowed from commerce and reconsider the kinds of scholarship we produce about library management.
Keywords
Library management, stakeholder theory, urban planning, democracy, neoliberalism
Introduction
We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. (Le Guin 2014)
In the field of urban planning a well-established and growing body of discourse encourages the rethinking of stakeholder theory. This ongoing reexamination is found at intersections of ideas such as the right to the city, critical race theory1 and other critical theories, and economic justice. It addresses a fundamental problem of stakeholder theory – “collaps[ing] differentiated subjects with complex relations into merely interested parties” (Ferrer 2021) – and challenges the neoliberal market-logics from whence it sprang. In urban planning, the goal of these new ideas is a “more inclusive and universal understanding of urban citizenship” (Ferrer 2021), mirroring ongoing discussions in librarianship about how to create more inclusive and just libraries for workers and patrons alike.
Like urban planning, librarianship has been using stakeholder theory nearly since the theory’s inception, with its prevalence accelerating with the rest of the neoliberal project since the mid-1990s. However, compared to planning, librarianship’s use of stakeholder theory has been undertheorized; in three decades, there have not been meaningful advances or critiques of stakeholder theory’s place in library management. Libraries (and planning) adopting the methods of neoliberal capitalism has generally been regarded as a wise choice, or at least a necessary one. But these “transformations...have no stated end-state to which they aspire” (Gorman 2012, 115). That is, without the goal of profit that business firms have, there is no reason to have adopted stakeholder theory or other neoliberal methods.
Why, then, has a method such as stakeholder theory, which was described by its originators as being a way for a firm to relate to those who have a financial stake in its success (i.e. its profit-making), taken root so securely in the managerial methods of librarianship (or the processes of urban planning)? Why have non-commercial institutions intellectually bought into capital’s management techniques when, as Michael Gorman asserts, “[t]he scientific management or business approach to libraries is largely based on unexamined assumptions” (2012, 122)?
This article will review the advent of stakeholder theory in the business management literature; distill urban planning’s criticism of the theory and ideas for moving past it; and suggest what from urban planning’s critique of stakeholder theory can be adopted in librarianship’s theory and practice. As stakeholder theory has not realized its promise of increased democracy in library (or planning) decision-making, these new directions for librarianship will be oriented towards robust democracy and justice, particularly racial and class justice. It may also inspire library workers to examine critically – or at all – the suite of managerial methods borrowed from commerce and to shake out of the austerity-induced stagnation of our scholarship (Connell 2019; Schleck 2022), which frequently foregoes the “why” of librarianship in favor of “how.”
The Rules of Acquisition: Review of the Business Literature2
By the late 1970s, business theorists were in search of a new direction that would unify ethics and profit-seeking, in light of neoliberalism’s overtake of the mid-20th century’s Keynesian compromise.3 In 1979, Charan and Freeman began to sketch out the idea, stating that firms “must now negotiate increasingly with a growing number of external groups. These groups can be conceptualized as ‘stakeholders’... They must be reckoned with because they can often influence an entire market or industry and because failure to negotiate adequately with them could result in drastic changes to a company’s objectives – or even its destiny” (Charan & Freeman 1979, 8). Five years after this article, Freeman’s book Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach4 describes stakeholders as “any group or individual who can affect, or is affected by, the achievement of the corporation’s purpose” (Freeman 1984, iv). Freeman again attempts to convince managers that they must proactively engage with these stakeholders to secure their firms’ ongoing success, whether or not those managers find such engagement distasteful or exhausting.
The changes in the business environment to which Charan and Freeman were reacting in the late 1970s and early 1980s were the results of neoliberalism’s ascension.5 As with classical liberalism, the central idea of neoliberalism is that market-logics – with markets unrestrained by state regulation – are the most efficient. Efficient at what is at this point rarely specified,6 especially when discussing non-commercial undertakings, and that murkiness is a feature, not a bug; that lack of clarity is a tool with which the neoliberal project first exerts and then maintains hegemony.
Fifteen years after Freeman’s book and after new facets of the idea had been proposed and rebutted (e.g. Freeman & Evan 1990; Donaldson & Preston 1995; Jones 1995), Jones and Wicks summarized stakeholder theory’s “essential premises” in four points, attempting to unify the various threads of stakeholder theory’s development under the umbrella of “convergent stakeholder theory”:
the corporation has relationships with many constituent groups (“stakeholders”) that affect and are affected by its decisions (Freeman, 1984);
the theory is concerned with the nature of these relationships in terms of both processes and outcomes for the firm and its stakeholders;
the interests of all (legitimate) stakeholders have intrinsic value, and no set of interests is assumed to dominate the others (Clarkson, 1995; Donaldson & Preston, 1995);
the theory focuses on managerial decision making (Donaldson & Preston, 1995). (Jones & Wicks 1999, 207; citations, italics and parentheticals original)
The purpose of stakeholder theory, and its utility to a firm, is to realize profit. As Charan and Freeman stated in 1979, a company's "destiny" could be secured or lost based on its relationships with its stakeholders. While Freeman (1984) and Williamson (1984) were solely concerned with corporate governance in their current business environment, within a decade corporate ethics were being folded into firms' relationships with advocacy groups, consumers, or the government. Efficient contracting can supposedly result through consistently acting morally: "The firm will gain competitive advantage if it is able to develop relationships with its stakeholders based on mutual trust and cooperation" (Jones 1995, 423). Looking back from the 2020s, this slow addition of ethics and morality reads as an ex post facto defense of capitalism, especially among the corporate scandals of the early 2000s, such as with Enron. (For a scourging of management theory and the business schools teaching it at that time, see Ghoshal 2005.) And even among those such as Jones who view stakeholder theory as an answer to questions of corporate ethics or morality, there is some recognition that "stakeholder theory is not comprehensive moral doctrine" (Phillips, Freeman & Wicks 2003, 493).
Additionally, theorists such as Orts and Strudler suggest that sometimes a firm only pretends to consider other stakeholders (2002, 217). Stakeholder theory can be used to enact corporate ethics, if ethical behavior is desired (or to make urban planning more democratic, if robust democracy is actually desired), but there is nothing intrinsic to stakeholder theory that leads to ethical (or democratic) results, especially where ethics (or democracy) are at odds with profit.7
The boundaries of who or what is a stakeholder have never been settled. There is a strong, though not universal, trend in only including humans and groups of humans (Orts & Strudler 2002; Phillips & Reichart 2000). While shareholders may continue to be at the head of the pack, potential stakeholders include “government agencies, environmentalists, consumerists” (Charan & Freeman 1979); “customers, suppliers, owners, managers, employees, and communities” (Freeman & Evan 1990); or “employees, suppliers, customers, and creditors – as well as shareholders” (Orts & Strudler 2002), who all may have some influence in whether and how much profit a firm is able to make.
Some interested parties – at least sometimes – are not considered stakeholders, and one theorist’s list of stakeholders may overlap with another’s list of non-stakeholders. Non-stakeholders might be the natural environment, government and its laws, aesthetics, cultural value, and the community (Orts & Strudler 2002). They also might be competitors and the media, who do not gain anything in particular if the firm is successful, even while they might have influence on the firm (Donaldson & Preston 1995). Regardless of who and what is considered in or out, there is broad agreement that the line needs to be drawn somewhere. Otherwise, a firm would be paralyzed by indecision as it attempts to weigh all possible outside opinions, stakeholder theory would become meaningless through dilution, and “[w]hen everyone in the world is a stakeholder of everyone else, the term adds little if any value and the critics’ charge of conceptual emptiness becomes a rather convincing one” (Phillips, Freeman & Wicks 2003, 492).
Given that stakeholder theory’s purpose – and the purpose of business firms generally – is profit, it was also not originally intended to be extended past the business world. Dixit (2012) suggests that this is because private firms and the market cannot perform public functions well, even on their own terms of efficiency, due to these functions' high complexity. Firms can be efficient at their "one-dimensional goal" of profit making, but the public sphere's complex and multitudinous goals do not lend themselves to the market or private commerce.
In addressing criticisms of stakeholder theory, Phillips, Freeman and Wicks state, “stakeholder theory is a theory of organizational strategy and ethics and NOT a theory of the whole political economy” (2003, 489; emphasis original). They were arguing from a pro-neoliberal position, so it is strange that they were unwilling to expand stakeholder theory throughout the political economy, since that expansion is precisely neoliberalism’s goal; they seem to have therefore accidentally made an argument against neoliberalism.
Supporters of this concept suggest that although stakeholder theory was originally applied to the private sector, they believe expanding stakeholder theory to include public institutions is a conceptual advance (see, e.g., Barnett 1997; Hutton 1995; Rustin 1997). While the effort to take business organizations seriously in political theory should be applauded, this particular translation from organizational theory to political theory represents an unwarranted dilution of stakeholder theory. Further, this watering down makes stakeholder theory more susceptible to charges that it is overly broad and meaningless or, if meaningful, the stakeholder economy amounts to little more than the “new socialism” – its contributions to the stakeholder debate being the sparse and occasional insertion of the word “stakeholder” into a tract about liberal macroeconomic policy (e.g., Corry 1997). (Phillips, Freeman & Wicks 2003, 491; references original)
Yet, stakeholder theory, as part of neoliberalism’s suite of methods, has become omnipresent in government, in non-profit organizations, and in the provision of public and common goods and services.8 Business firms adopted stakeholder theory to meet their goal of profit-making in a neoliberal, globalized economy. Libraries, which are almost entirely government or non-profit entities, do not have profit-making as their root motivation, which means that business’s tools and methods are not necessarily appropriate.
Planning the Neoliberal Project: Review of the Planning Literature
“‘[P]roject’ refers here to a fluid set of practices and strategies with a certain directionality and internal coherence in terms of actors, positionalities, procedures, and expected outcomes. Tracing this coherence allows the identification of causal sequences and recurring patterns in time” (Sevilla-Buitrago 2022, 3). According to Mark Purcell (2008), a central feature of the neoliberal project is the extension of and absorbing into the private sphere what was formerly considered the public sphere. This is supposedly a means of expanding democracy (of a certain kind) by removing the state’s presence from the personal life, decisions, and purview of individuals. Though this is a political construction, a common interpretation has been that this absence of regulation by the state enables markets for goods and services to find their own internal equilibrium through competition between firms and the push and pull of supply and demand. The extension of that market-logic throughout the rest of society and personal life, outside of commercial ventures, is neoliberalism.
A large part of this project is making capitalism seem natural and inevitable (Purcell 2008; Appleby 2010). It is therefore a cultural project, not merely an economic one. By absorbing and co-opting non-commercial institutions into market-logics, neoliberal hegemony seeks to constrain the imagination. If capitalist market-logics are the natural human state (as classical liberalism would have us believe) and the only system that is compatible with democracy (as neoliberalism would have us believe), then it would be both unnatural and immoral to seek any other system of economic, political, or social organization.
For planning, capitalism constrains the field by focusing planning efforts on the economic, profit-generating, or commodity values of land, rather than use values for that land’s inhabitants (Lefebvre 1996; Purcell 2008). It also accounts for the internal structures of the planning field and the methods used by it, as planning has adopted processes of the business world such as stakeholder theory. One particular expression of stakeholder theory in planning has been “communicative planning” (sometimes called “collaborative planning”), based on Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action.
Habermas published his Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns in 1981,9 contemporary with the work Freeman and others in the business field were doing to develop stakeholder theory – and in response to the same pressures and social changes. Habermas wished to replace instrumental rationality with communicative rationality, in which subjects (that is, people) generate a shared understanding of the world through speech and communication. It is not objective, per se; on the contrary, it relies upon shared subjectivity and social construction built through ongoing communication. Habermas’s theory requires his ideal speech situation be enacted by all parties, or at least there be a striving toward that ideal. That ideal is predetermined (by Habermas) and makes no reference to the specific situation in which it is to be enacted or to the needs or differences of the people enacting it. Purcell outlines the ideal speech situation as one where,
(1) no one who is affected by the decision is excluded from the discussion, (2) everyone in the conversation has an equal chance to speak, (3) each interlocutor is willing to empathize with and take seriously all others, (4) pre-existing power differences are prevented from distorting the conversation, and (5) participants must be pursuing not their own self-interest, but the common good of the group. The goal is for participants to use rational (that is, reason-giving) argument to move toward a shared understanding of the common good. Once arrived at a shared common good, they can make the decisions that best serve that good. (Purcell 2008, 45)
Therefore, communicative planning is a method of citizen participation that focuses on process and positions the planner as the facilitator of this ideal situation and the communication it generates. It is meant to get participants past the power relations, self-interest, and strong opinions (regardless of those opinions’ validity) they embody outside the space in which the communicative action takes place, with the planner as the force that nudges them into temporarily giving up those positions (Innes 1995).
Communicative planning tries to make up for the democracy deficits, the “thin” (Purcell 2008, 34) democracy, of neoliberalism. Because it fails to do so, planning has been criticizing communicative planning for almost as long as the idea has existed. The main criticism is that it does not – and cannot – meet its own goal of leveling power differences. It is impossible, or so rare as to be impossible in practice, to create Habermas’s ideal speech situations (Purcell 2008; Goodspeed 2016). Planning process participants cannot and do not leave their self-interest, biases, education and skill levels, emotional affect, etc. outside the room. As Alexander Ferrer (2021) writes, it “collapses differentiated subjects with complex relations into merely interested parties.” A well-executed planning exercise will not change the participants’ context or positionality, especially when deep-seated social discriminations and values discount some participants’ speech before they even open their mouths. Communicative planning demands that power be equalized in a planning process but offers no way to make it so.
Additionally, the planning literature is full of futility at the possibility of actually having the proper stakeholders in the room (e.g. McGuirk 2001, Purcell 2008), and of everyone being willing to take each other seriously and open to having their minds changed for the “greater good.” An extreme example is a 2019 New York City Community Board meeting, wherein “[a] neighborhood meeting in Park Slope descended into a belligerent free-for-all on Wednesday night, after the event’s invited speaker spewed conspiracy theories about a pedophile-linked bike lobby, then shoved a well-known cycling advocate” (Offenhartz 2019). There is also the presence of individuals who should perhaps not be included in planning processes and yet consider themselves, and are considered by others, to be stakeholders. Purcell calls these stakeholders "systematically included" (2008, 71) and lists property owners and corporate interests as among those who will never be excluded or have their inclusion critically considered. For example, in 2021 New York City's Metropolitan Transportation Authority held regional public hearings about congestion pricing in Manhattan below 60th Street (MTA 2022). These public hearings "offered residents of New York City, suburban counties, New Jersey and Connecticut the chance to comment on the plan" (McDonough 2021) – and showed a stark example of systematic inclusion, as those for whom the city is only "an object of cultural consumption for tourists, for a estheticism, avid for spectacles and the picturesque" (Lefebvre 1996, 148), were given as much ability to comment as those who inhabit the city.
Professional planners are to serve as “epistemic mediators” (Goodspeed 2016, 3) in this process. This role neglects that planners themselves are human, with human failings. They will enter the process with preferences, biases, desired outcomes, and adequacies or deficiencies in their skills as mediators. They, too, are cast in the impossible role of Ferrer’s merely interested parties, instead of differentiated subjects; as in libraries (Branum 2008), that neutrality is a myth.
What communicative planning actually offers, in lieu of meaningful democracy in planning decisions, is legitimacy. By having a process that appears “democratic enough” (Purcell 2008, 28), the outcome of that process can claim to be democratic, fair, and just, while perpetuating and reinscribing power differences through that process. By continuing to pretend that planning happens under ideal speech conditions, planners allow for power imbalances to be present but unrecognized in their processes. With the emphasis on process, “[c]ommunicative theory avoids dealing with the classic trope of what to do when open processes produce unjust results” (Fainstein 2000, 457). Thus, communicative planning has fallen victim to the exact problem – a deficit of democracy – that it was meant to address.
With planning’s ongoing criticism of communicative planning, some of the issues that surface wherever stakeholder theory is used for non-commercial ventures are visible. Though critical theory is often cited (e.g. Innes 1995), the relationship between communicative planning and critical theory is superficial. It is true that communicative action challenges an objective or scientific truth. But it does not address power and its sociopolitical origins in any practical way, which is central to critical theory. In response to the long-recognized deficits of communicative planning and the question of stakeholders, urban planning has presented an array of possible theoretical and practical answers.
Leonie Sandercock (1998), reacting not just to communicative planning but to the entire neoliberal project, proposes counter-hegemonic, insurgent planning, working from the margins to decolonize cities and ultimately the world. She wishes to get out from under planning’s professional identity and the history of the profession, which is a history of “planning as social control of (certain) bodies in space – women, ‘minorities,’ the poor, indigenous peoples” (Sandercock 1998, 41). She asserts that the profession is fundamentally not equipped to serve the emerging global, multicultural cities of the twenty-first century. Instead, planning needs a new goal: “to work for structural transformation of systemic inequalities and, in the process, empower those who have been systematically disempowered” (Sandercock 1998, 97). Ultimately, this kind of planner will need to be a traitor to the state and capital (and their profession), and instead form allegiance with the community they are working with.
Purcell (2008) offers a way forward that is largely an updated vision of Lefebvre’s “right to the city,” a vision of radical pluralism in response to neoliberalism. Lefebvre and Purcell focus on those who inhabit a city, who have a use value for the city, and not those who have a market value. Similar to Sandercock, the users of the space, those who inhabit it, should determine its (and their) future, rather than capitalists who treat the city as a source for wealth extraction and accumulation. This is the undoing and opposite of enclosure. With primacy given to use and inhabitance, instead of accumulation, democracy can be untethered from neoliberalism without ceding power back to a paternalistic state.
While no one has yet produced a formula – and it would probably not be appropriate to do so – the planners I have spoken with often refer to “weighting” the input received from groups and individuals. To account for existing power differences, those groups with less power and fewer resources should have their input weighted more in the planning processes. More effort should also be expended to solicit that input, as those with more power are readily available and willing to give their opinions. And those more powerful groups will have less to lose – or, and this does not merely concern dollars, can stand to lose it – so their input should be given less weight. This requires planners to have a nuanced critical power analysis (e.g. recognizing that racism is real and systemic, and that reverse racism is not), and is thereby not a simple method with fixed rules.
It is worth noting that many of these suggestions are micro practices (Westin 2022, 133) that require the ongoing overt effort of individuals. They only sometimes verge upon structural transformations in how planning (and democracy) under neoliberal capitalism functions. What do planners or librarians do when their practices are no longer “insurgent,” but are regular, typical, and performed from a consistent position of legitimate power? What are the macro practices and structural changes?
In the Library with the Monkey Wrench: Review of the Library Literature
There does not seem to be an article or book that introduced the concept and its theoretical antecedents to librarianship the way that Freeman’s 1984 book splashed stakeholder theory into the business world. The term is hardly present in the library literature, and then it is regularly to be seen, with little, if any, theory in between those two points.
If it wasn’t the entry point, the library profession’s use of stakeholder theory accelerated quickly after the Clinton Administration’s 1993 National Performance Review (hereafter NPR). Based on the findings of the report Creating a Government That Works Better and Costs Less, which was published that September (Gore 1993), President Clinton began issuing directives, “including cutting the work force by 252,000 positions, cutting internal regulations in half, and requiring agencies to set customer service standards” (National Partnership for Reinventing Government 1997). While this effort is mostly remembered for its attempt to improve federal government customer service (see Maret & Eagle 2013 for a genealogy of “customer” in libraries), it is obvious that “customer service” is not the only strategy the NPR borrowed from the commercial world. Deregulation, lean workforces, and replacement of employees with contractors are all hallmarks of neoliberal business methods that have been adopted by all levels of government. Yet, recall that Phillips, Freeman and Wicks (2003) suggested that such methods were likely to be inappropriate for use by government and other non-commercial organizations.
Like planners, most librarians work for various levels of government, non-profits, or socially-minded commercial enterprises. Thus, the push from the federal level for government to adopt the methods of commercial firms likely trickled down through state and municipal governments, as well as non-profits that serve quasi-governmental roles. It is likely that stakeholder theory found its foothold in libraries after this sea-change in the federal government. A search of the library literature bears this out; the word “stakeholders” is rarely present before 1993, and then is notably rising already in 1994 and 1995.10
Seemingly, none of this early literature translated the business field’s extensively articulated theory for librarianship in any meaningful way. Stakeholders and their purposes remained poorly defined, and librarians were somehow supposed to automatically know what the concept meant and when, how and why to use it. This sudden, unexamined ascension of stakeholder theory in the library world demonstrates that, with the notable example of critical librarianship,11 librarianship has a theory deficit – library workers do not connect their use of stakeholder theory to Habermas and the critical theorists in the way planners do, for example, nor write very often of instrumental versus normative theories the way business does. The library literature describes how libraries and library workers do things, but not why they do them or whether those methods are appropriate.
Many years on, libraries have made no meaningful advances in their conception or use of stakeholder theory. As examples of this lack of advancement are Cullen and Calvert’s 1995 article “Stakeholder Perceptions of University Library Effectiveness” and Harland, Stewart and Bruce’s “Leading the Academic Library in Strategic Engagement with Stakeholders: A Constructivist Grounded Theory” in 2019. This is not intended to pick these two articles out as particularly egregious; instead, they stand as exemplars of the genre. A meta-reading of them (and many other articles like them – again, these are only examples) shows that librarianship’s use of stakeholder theory has remained static. In 1995, shortly after Clinton’s NPR, the idea was being used uncritically, and it still is in 2019. Neither poles of that timespan question the appropriateness of using market-logics in libraries and the utility of stakeholder theory is an unquestioned premise.
Why has stakeholder (and probably other12) theory stagnated so much in library science? This can likely be laid at the feet of the field's ongoing manufactured austerity crisis, the perpetual do-more-with-less footing it has been on since at least the Clinton Administration's NPR, if not since Reagan and Thatcher. Operating in crisis mode for several decades, due to that same neoliberalism, has resulted in a field largely unable to do the scholarship of advancing theory. Add to this the increase in precarious short-term contract and project positions, similar to the adjunctification of college and university faculty, and the profession has little time for the rigorous scholarship that might advance both the field as a whole and individual careers. Think of the cataloger hired for a few months or maybe a year to clear a backlog. That cataloger will be unlikely to produce profession-advancing scholarship while they do so – never mind that once that term is over the backlog will begin accumulating again.13
Stagnant theory may also have been a latent aspect of the field since Melvil Dewey's time and the founding of librarianship as we know it. Ford (2012) charts almost a century of (mostly) laments over the lack of philosophy and theory. Maret and Eagle (2013) identify a period of hyper-capitalism in the late 19th through early 20th centuries that mirrors the current one. Similarly, the then-young field of librarianship felt that influence, resulting in early attempts at scientific management and the importing of business principles and methods.
As with planning, librarianship’s use of stakeholders often serves as a tool to legitimize decisions, by focusing on formal political equality in the process instead of justice in the results. Without a power analysis in that process, again as in urban planning, it is a “thin” democracy – trustees, business people, or large property owners are not giving up their positions of power, nor are contingent workers or racially- or economically-marginalized library patrons and workers gaining power merely by entering into such a process, while the process also reinscribes settler-colonial conceptions of property (Benoff 2022). Thus, recourse to stakeholders remains a tool for the powerful to make the decisions they wish to make and to retain their property, capital, and wealth, while claiming that everyone has had a chance to have input in those decisions, regardless of whether that input is taken seriously. Especially in institutions that supposedly create robust democracy by leveling access to knowledge and resources, such as libraries, this is unconscionable.
This is why, ultimately, libraries need to discard stakeholder theory. It has not delivered on its promise of increased democracy in libraries. If librarianship continues its use, it needs to admit that democracy is not the goal of public institutions nor of the processes that govern them: the purpose of a system is what it does. Planning’s theorists and practitioners were already disillusioned with stakeholder theory and communicative planning by the early 2000s (e.g. Flyvbjerg & Richardson 2002); twenty years later, it is time for librarianship to catch up.
Making the Road by Walking: Suggestions
At the point we have arrived there is an urgent need to change intellectual approaches and tools. It would be indispensable to take up ideas and approaches from elsewhere and which are still not very familiar. (Lefebvre 1996, 151)
In many ways, the mid-20th century Keynesian compromise was better for libraries than the current neoliberal order. Post-war expansions of public education, both K-12 and post-secondary, and of libraries within and adjacent to education were the result of consistent public investment, even if largely in support of a nation-state in the throes of the Cold War, as with the National Defense Education Act of 1958, and even as social and legal conditions, e.g. pre-Civil Rights segregation, resulted in differing situations for locales and communities. (See, for example, the entire February 1966 issue of the ALA Bulletin, which was devoted to discussing federal support of libraries.) Under neoliberal market-logics, federal, state, and local governments decidedly do not see public spending as a worthy goal to nearly the same extent, leaving libraries constantly begging for scraps.
The goal, however, cannot be a return to the mid-century Keynesian compromise, nor to a pre-industrial idea of the commons (see Benoff 2022). This is not only because to do so would be impossible; the post-war geopolitical position cannot be recreated, less so that of the pre-industrial era. By looking forward instead of backwards, librarianship can avoid the anti-democratic aspects of those political moments – oppressive patriarchy, homophobia, racism, and colonialism, as well as the paternalism of unilateral, top-down government decision making. For, “…idealization of the university under the public-good regime requires some strategic forgetting of the ways a relatively unified notion of the public good was achieved during those years...[and] this nostalgia is dangerous in that it risks ignoring some of the critical lessons of the last several decades and turns a blind eye to the sins of the public regime itself” (Schleck 2022, 43-44). Even now, planning functions as a regulator for the ravages of capitalism, by altering society to account for it (Sevilla-Buitrago 2022, 7), and Keynesianism itself served to bolster capitalism by mitigating its harms: “Keynes probably saved capitalism from itself and surely kept latter-day Marxists at bay” (Reich 1999).
As it is easier to review the past than see the future, and as ideas of what the future should look like will be iterated as librarianship struggles towards it, where to go from here is less clear:
Can you morph, by stages, from the political economy that we’re in now, which is neoliberal capitalism, to what you might call anti-austerity, to a return to Keynesianism, and then beyond that to social democracy, and then beyond that to democratic socialism, and then beyond that to a post-capitalist system that might be a completely new invention that we don’t have a name for? (Robinson & O’Keefe 2020)
First librarianship must internalize that neoliberal market-logics do not make sense for libraries and other public and common spaces, goods, and services. Librarianship must admit that it took the bait; the scarcity it has been operating under for the last few decades is a manufactured one. From there we can see that the tools of profit-motivated commerce, including stakeholder theory, are not in the best interest of thriving libraries.
Perhaps the field could start with thinking about value, for both meanings of the word. Actually valuing libraries, in a non-monetary sense of value, would mean that they should not be subject to market-logics and competition. Competition, after all, means that some must lose so that others can win, a nonsensical dynamic for libraries. If the focus is instead on the use value of a common good, losers are not necessary; this produces “and” instead of the “or” of market competition. Librarianship can then find concrete actions that will create decision making structures and processes that produce democratic decisions and outcomes. This is necessary for the other meaning of value:
Libraries and all not-for-profit endeavors have to have an animating principle to take the place of the commercial and utilitarian principles that dominate the private sector. Values can be interpreted as fundamental beliefs and convictions that are clearly stated and defined. These values supply that animating principle – and become the reasons why we do what we do and that justify our working lives and the institutions we serve…In the case of academic libraries, those realities are the manifest and demonstrable value to individuals and societies of education, learning, reading, the pursuit of knowledge, free enquiry, and pure and applied research. (Gorman 2012, 115)
Notably absent in both kinds of value is direct reference to management, especially the management tools of commerce or Taylorist scientific management. According to Gorman, if libraries focus solely on management (or technology) and becoming business-like, they “have no stated end-state to which they aspire” (2012, 115), as “management and technology are tools and not ends in themselves with inherent value” (2012, 124).
With this refocus, library administrations and other decision makers can find clarity on what their responsibilities are, the same way that planners have been trying to figure out what their roles should be in a robust democracy. For, unfortunately, as Lefebvre reminds us, “The pressure of the working class has been and remains necessary (but not sufficient)...” (1996, 157). Instead of being the hand of the market and its interests, administrators can act in ways that truly further the best interests of their libraries and act as “fundamentally a facilitator of projects led by popular sectors” (Sevilla-Buitrago 2022, 217).
Like Goodspeed’s edict to planners, library administrators “must serve as epistemic mediators” (2016, 2), translating the needs of the library and its inhabitants into language and concepts that capitalists will accept, while not buying into the capitalist or neoliberal project themselves, instead privileging the epistemologies (Huq 2020) of library inhabitants. From that position, it is the administrator’s role to protect the library by standing between it and capitalism, while being able to code switch13 and move in both worlds, in service of advancing the library’s mission and values, just as Sandercock (1998) recommended for planners. In Westin’s conclusions of his analysis of the missing discussions of power in communicative planning paradigms, this “might not arise without some actors exercising power over other actors to stabilize power relations and create conditions for concerted action. Hence,...we might find that exercises of power over are preconditions for power with” (2022, 150; italics original). Library administrators should swap the current orientations of their power over and power with – so that, in contrast to current arrangements, they would have power with library workers and patrons, and power over the external commercial world’s impact on their libraries.
This may be a heavy lift for some library administrators, who have in recent years frequently been hired precisely for their orientation to neoliberalism, market-logics, austerity, and business-like management styles. And perhaps it is unlikely that many will do so. But power concedes nothing without a demand, so we might as well make the demand, and be direct about making it. Most library administrators have trained to be and worked as librarians, and supposedly hold the same professional values as those who still do. It is not, therefore, out of line to ask change of them, any more than it would be to ask it of rank and file library workers. Invoking realpolitik is often enough cover for low expectations and preemptive capitulation; it will not be done here.
This readjustment of administrator goals could address the issue of stakeholders by making the theory irrelevant, rather than futilely trying to map the idea of financial stakes onto a non-commercial undertaking. It addresses problems created by inequity between stakeholders and in processes, by repositioning many of the people and institutions that are currently considered to be stakeholders, and reassigning those that do not value libraries as a common good to positions of less power over libraries than they are currently granted.
Planning shows why this is necessary. Lefebvre and his successors wrote of a right to the city (“droite à la ville”), proposing inhabitance and use value as the epitome of entitlement to urban space. It is not hard to stretch that idea to cover public and common spaces, goods, and services more broadly. Under that umbrella I propose the primacy of a “right to the library” in library management methods. It pulls in inhabitance and use value as always trumping exchange value and wealth extraction. Where Lefebvre writes, “[The right to the city] can only be formulated as a transformed and renewed right to urban life…as long as the ‘urban’, place of encounter, priority of use value, inscription in space of a time promoted to the rank of a supreme resource among all resources, finds its morphological base and its practico-material realization” (1996, 158; italics original), we can substitute libraries for cities and urban life: libraries as place of encounter and prioritizing use value, space for library inhabitants’ social reproduction.
This approach enables librarianship to figure out whose opinions on the running of the library should be paid attention to and who should be making decisions – what someone’s stake is in it. Both inhabitance and use value point towards library patrons and library workers. Workers gain their inhabitance by spending so much of their lives in the library, tending to its needs and encountering patrons and each other. They draw their subsistence, qualitatively different from the wealth extraction of capitalists, from the wages they earn in the library. Patrons claim use value and thereby their own inhabitance through their presence in the library’s spaces (physical and virtual) and through their encounters with other inhabitants and with the library’s free-at-point-of-use goods and services that are collectively owned by the public of which they are a member. These are the library’s equivalent of Lefebvre’s “working class" as he continues, “Only the working class can become the agent, the social carrier or support of this realization…Who can ignore that the Olympians of the new bourgeois aristocracy no longer inhabit” (1996, 158-159). It is only public divestment – a tenet of neoliberalism – that has required non-public funders and others of Lefebvre’s Olympians to have a relationship with libraries that they do not inhabit, allowing them to shoehorn themselves into the role of a stakeholder via private funding. By altering the relationship to these Olympians, libraries can hereby partially correct the issue of systematic inclusion.
The question then becomes how to balance the different opinions, needs and desires of those who do have claims of inhabitance and use value. Responsive universalism (Rossi & Táíwò 2020) or targeted universalism (powell [sic], Menendian & Ake 2019) offer a theoretical starting point, and directly speak to the deficits of communicative action and communicative/collaborative planning.
[Policies] should be weighed and designed to address social identity-based disadvantages with specificity...[and] only a 'targeted' universalism that responds to marginalizations inherent in our social structures is true universalism, insofar as it aims at impacting everyone equitably without homogenizing them....In other words, universalist programs need to become truly universal by becoming responsive to differences, such as racial differences. (Rossi & Táíwò 2020)
This should not be difficult for libraries to incorporate, as we already, at our best, understand and practice related principles such as universal design, in which assets such as physical spaces and websites are designed so that as a baseline they are accessible vis-à-vis many common disabilities, which does not detract from – and may provide better – usability for people without those disabilities. Audre Lorde tells us of the potential of incorporating difference, and the power that difference can provide: “Within the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) difference lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being. Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged” (1984, 111-112).
Returning to the planning literature, this is all similar to Purcell’s “networks of equivalencies” (2008, 82).
Lauclau and Mouffe, and to a lesser extent Hardt and Negri, explicitly reject the reduction of subjects to an identical political subjectivity because it stifles the difference that is fundamental to democratic polity. The equivalence they insist on emphasizes the difference, in addition to the commonality, among political subjects. Radical equalization, then, in the context of radical pluralism, cannot entail total equalization whereby all people must have identical material circumstances or identical political power. It cannot mean people are reduced to being identical political subjects. Rather, it claims a radical equalization of material wealth, political power, and cultural esteem. It demands more than just the modest redistributions of the Keynesian era… It demands instead a substantial equality whereby all people are materially, politically, and culturally equivalent in a way that makes political equality truly possible. (Purcell 2008, 85; italics original)14
In combining Purcell’s networks of equivalencies and the philosophers Rossi and Táíwò’s responsive universalism, library inhabitants could move away from the undifferentiated, merely interested parties of a stakeholder theory that serves the status quo as well as from the lack of power analysis inherent to communicative action. These concepts could provide a roadmap for differentiated library inhabitants with needs of varying and sometimes competing urgency to make decisions about their library together.
In that, so far, libraries do not exist as truly flat organizational structures, library administrators could also borrow from Bell’s “embedded planning” (Bell 2018; Chellew et al 2024). As with responsive universalism and universal design, embedded planning should be not difficult to incorporate into librarianship – the concept and practice of “embedded librarianship” (e.g. Kesselman & Watstein 2009) is well established and could thereby be extended to the internal management of libraries. Per Bell,
Embedded Planning means the planner moves with intention to work on the ground in the community to:
Understand people’s needs
Build trust and authentic relationships
Increase participation for marginalized communities through street-level engagement
Participate in daily community life, and, ultimately
Advance equity.
My phrase “move with intention” is crucial. It means you push your work as much as possible to the spaces and places of the community. Embedded Planning is a praxis because it puts ideas into action to better our communities. You can do this too. (Chellew et al 2024, 40; italics original)
Similarly, about embedded librarianship, Shumaker writes, “if a regular part of your work involves participating in a group, community, or organizational unit primarily made up of non-librarians, providing knowledge and information services as a part of the group, then you are participating in a growing trend of embedding librarians and their services in settings outside the library” (now-vanished 2008 call for participants by David Shumaker, quoted in Kesselman & Watstein 2009, 386).
Perhaps, as planners have embedded themselves in the communities subject to planning, and librarians have embedded themselves where their patrons are, decision-making library administrators could embed themselves among libraries’ inhabitants. Adopting Shumaker, their regular work could be situated among non-administrators, among those who are subject to their decisions. This could not be a solely performative embedding, and should instead reflect Bell’s “move with intention”: “push [administration’s] work as much as possible to the spaces and places” of the library’s inhabitants. Perhaps an administrator becomes as an inhabitant, rather than the current position of Lefebvre’s Olympian. Faced with the quotidian goings-on of the library in a more visceral way, and grounded in responsive universalism, perhaps the decisions made will be more equitable, just, and democratic. If nothing else, constant exposure to inhabitants might accustom an administrator to taking seriously inhabitants’ stakes, needs, and opinions; inhabitants, in turn, get access to power that is otherwise frequently denied by administrative inaccessibility.
Having reviewed the deep theorizing around stakeholder theory in planning and compared it with the paucity of theory in librarianship, and while it is a tall order for library workers in an atmosphere of overwork and austerity, the under-theorization of librarianship needs to end. To avoid traps such as stakeholder theory, librarianship should embed its theory & praxis in broader philosophical ideas and discussion, as planning has, and as it has done to a limited extent with critical librarianship. Librarianship can then avoid both making mistakes – such as having the utterly unexamined approach to stakeholder theory that it does – and the somewhat put-on or feigned innocence (Benoff 2022) that it allows itself to maintain in the face of useless and even harmful ideas. If Habermas has not panned out, for all the reasons outlined above, librarianship could turn to other critical theorists, or to pragmatists, Indigenous scholars, and others.
In tandem with a new turn towards theory, library inhabitants must stay vigilant, since neoliberalism can and will co-opt everything, including solutions offered here. Anything concluded otherwise will only be the next thing assimilated and co-opted for the neoliberal project. Planning can suggest what libraries could do next, but that will only be valid for a short while, and library inhabitants will need to be prepared for their next move.
A Bridge to Somewhere: Conclusions
The aim of libraries’ use of stakeholder theory, nominally, has been to democratize decision making. Having clearly failed, it is time for new directions. If librarianship can move away from neoliberalism’s market-logics, we just might stand a chance at succeeding in the vital task of realizing democracy and justice in our institutions. We must use other, new tools to do so, as Audre Lorde reminds us; “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change (1984, 112; italics original).”
The intrinsic problems with stakeholder theory’s use in libraries are:
It was adopted from business management without theoretical development to adapt it for librarianship, nor has that theory developed in the intervening years.
The business field indicated that it would likely not be appropriate for non-commercial organizations.
It systematically includes some people who should not be included in decision making, because of their sociopolitical positions.
It results in the exclusion of some people who should be included in decision making, because of their sociopolitical positions.
It does not have mechanisms for addressing power differences and dynamics between people subject to decisions.
By focusing on formal political equality in process, instead of justice and democracy in results, it manufactures legitimacy for unjust decisions.
Those administering decision making processes (e.g. planners or library administrators) are falsely positioned as objective and neutral.
It is evident therefore that those inhabitants interested in creating a just profession and libraries that are truly inclusive should not be using stakeholder theory, especially without serious critical consideration. In comparison to librarianship, planning has significantly more advanced theoretical work on the question; there are many ideas that librarianship could adopt from planning to move us forward. These can be adapted and altered as needed for local contexts.
Strategies adopted from planning that libraries could explore include:
Avoiding the trap of nostalgia for the Keynesian compromise.
Rejection of market-logics for library management, as libraries do not have a profit-motive; instead, valuing libraries in non-monetary ways and giving primacy to use value.
Expropriating decision-making power over libraries from those who do not value libraries in non-monetary ways and who do not inhabit libraries.
Naming specific people and groups and naming what their stakes in a decision are, instead of obscuring power and domination by calling them “stakeholders.”
Balancing different opinions, needs, and desires of library inhabitants through responsive universalism; making common cause across difference through networks of equivalencies.
Library administrators embedding themselves into the work of the library and the day-to-day experiences of library inhabitants.
Advances in librarianship theory and the application of critical lenses; librarianship could look to work that has been done in other fields.
Forwards-looking vigilance against assimilation and co-option of ideas and methods by neoliberalism; preparation for what to do once these strategies are co-opted.
With this foundation, there are rich avenues for further investigation. Drawing again from planning, future research might, for example, investigate how the late-20th century autonomist contemporaries of neoliberalism’s foundations forked away from “the crisis of Fordism-Keynesianism, such as creativity, difference, knowledge, communication, participation, social networks, and capacities for collective appropriation and self-management” (Sevilla-Buitrago 2022, 29), and how those strategies might illuminate possibilities for inhabitants to manage their libraries.
Librarianship might also explore tactics for moving from insurgent to normalized strategies and from micro-practices to macro-practices. Efadul Huq writes “that [insurgent planning] practices shift the ground of knowledge from that of professional analysis to that of first-hand collective knowledge of social groups living under oppressive conditions. IP practices start to theorize planning—with its concerns for public good and social justice—from these other sites of epistemologically partial yet advantageous positions” (2020, 381). Perhaps the work to be done is on how to operationalize that epistemology without diluting it. The insurgent tactics of “violating modern state laws, accepted customs, the police order, and sovereignty of states” (Huq 2020, 377) might then be retained for the newly inhabited library’s relationships with the neoliberal world outside of it. These avenues for future investigation might be considered through the practical lens of organized labor and patrons unions (such as at the Hennepin County Library; see Library Patrons Union 2024) as expressions of inhabitance.
Lastly, there are likely other neoliberal management techniques and organizational principles that have been brought into libraries from the business world that could also be re-examined (see Vong 2021 and Vong 2024 for a good start). Similarly, there may be research to be done in primary and secondary sources to more exactly pin down the rise of stakeholder theory and other neoliberal management techniques in libraries and other public institutions, especially in the years immediately after the Clinton Administration’s NPR.
In desiring to make libraries a more just environment for their inhabitants, this article has, by charting its development through the business literature and its discontents in planning theory and practice, attempted to refute stakeholder theory as a tool in the library management toolbox. The field of planning, being another public service profession with a strong theoretical foundation, has provided a rich basis from which libraries can criticize neoliberal management methods such as stakeholder theory, as well as a solid ground on which librarianship can begin to build more just possibilities.
Notes
1. Given ongoing political events, a definition of critical race theory is necessary. From the British Educational Research Association: “CRT is a body of scholarship steeped in radical activism that seeks to explore and challenge the prevalence of racial inequality in society. It is based on the understanding that race and racism are the product of social thought and power relations; CRT theorists endeavour to expose the way in which racial inequality is maintained through the operation of structures and assumptions that appear normal and unremarkable” (Rollock & Gillborn 2011). “Critical race theory is an eclectic and dynamic form of legal scholarship that evolved in the 1970s in response to the stalled progress of traditional civil rights litigation to produce meaningful racial reform. The founders of the critical race theory movement include such legal scholars as Derrick Bell, Charles Lawrence, Lani Guinier, Richard Delgado, Mari Matsuda, Patricia Williams, and Kimberle Crenshaw. Topics addressed encompass affirmative action, race-conscious districting, campus speech codes, and disproportionate sentencing of racial minorities in the criminal justice system” (Taylor 1998, 122).
2. For those familiar with the Star Trek reference, I suggest chapter 4 of David K. Seitz’s excellent A Different Trek, which discusses the Ferengi in depth.
3. For a clear and concise overview of Keynesian economics, the IMF’s article will do, much as it pains me; see Jahan, Mahmud & Papageorgiou 2014. The Keynesian compromise was a balance between public state regulation and capitalist private interests, whereby the state used its power to prevent social instability wrought by runaway capitalism. The state took an active role on its side of the balance sheet, as opposed to the laissez-faire approach that capitalism and liberalism demand. Keynesianism was the prevailing school of economic thought in the West from the Great Depression until the birth of neoliberalism in the 1970s.
4. In that “stakeholders” were mentioned in the business literature in the mid-century, the idea was mostly rejected; see chapter 2 of Freeman 1984. To wit, discussing H. Igor Ansoff’s 1965 book Corporate Strategy, “The thrust of Ansoff’s criticism is to point out that the stakeholders whose support is necessary for survival is a contingent phenomenon, dependent on a number of situational variables. Ansoff, wrongly, I believe, rejected such a theory in favor of one which searches for a universal objective function, where stakeholders serve as constraints on the level of the objective which is obtainable at a point in time. Such a search for the real objective of the firm was to occupy a substantial part of the corporate planning literature during the subsequent years” (page 33).
5. Purcell (2008, 9-13) describes a key part of this neoliberal ascension and its effects on the business environment with the term “glocalization.” Not merely globalization, as is more commonly used, it is an ouroboros relationship of rescaling between local, national, and global levels of economics and politics. Courchene writes, “nation states have become too large to tackle the small things in life and too small to address the large things. Paquet (1994) refers to this as the "Gulliver Effect” – nation states are unable to deal effectively either with the dwarfs of Lilliput or the giants of Brobdingnag. However one chooses to express this, the point is that economic power is being transferred upward, downward and outward from nation states. This tendency for economic power to shift both the global and local levels is captured by the term ‘glocalization’” (1995, 3; citation original).
6. Kim Stanley Robinson, in Jacobin: “Take the term ‘efficiency.’ In capitalist economics, that’s just regarded as almost a synonym for ‘good,’ but it completely depends on what the efficiency is being aimed at. You know, machine guns are efficient, gas chambers are efficient. So, ‘efficiency’ as such does not mean ‘good.’ It is a measure of the least amount of effort put in for the most amount gotten out” (Robinson & O’Keefe 2020). On efficiency, Freeman and Evan (1990) say, "[o]rganizations emerge simply because they are the most efficient form of dealing: they minimize the transaction costs." For an example from the library world, at the Charleston in Between conference in 2022, representatives from then-recently merged Clarivate and ProQuest mentioned saving quite a bit of money where "...there are overlap functions between the companies, for example technology and infrastructure… An example of where this is starting to come from already is with our Office365 migration. We've moved all of the ProQuest employees in just four months…which is a remarkable feat" (Schonfeld, Burghardt & Mosseri 2022, 23:08). It is more "efficient" (that is, it costs less in total) for one larger company to subscribe to a service than for two less gargantuan companies to do so. Per neoliberalism, it is not the firms themselves that are efficient, but the entire market. “In the neoliberal imagination, open and competitive markets not only produce the most efficient allocation of resources, but they also stimulate innovation and economic growth. Thus, market logics and competitive discipline should be fostered in the economy, and they should even be extended beyond the economy, to institutions like the state, universities, hospitals, schools, and so on" (Purcell 2008, 13). Does this mean that allocation of resources efficiently happens for all people and organizations? Arguably not. Libraries are annually forced to surrender their budgets to software and database vendors, in a manner so inefficient (for the libraries) that academic libraries including University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and the entire SUNY system have canceled their "big deal" subscription packages with Elsevier and others (Aiwuyor 2020).
7. About this pretending in university decision-making, Connell writes, “No contemporary management reveals a major policy without declaring that it has engaged in Wide Consultation. The consultation may be an online survey, visits to department or faculty meetings, ‘town hall’ forums where a manager fronts a lecture theatre, or briefings to which middle and junior managers are called, notionally representing their units. These devices have replaced actual decision-making by voting in constituted bodies, and they are normally spurious. The policy choices are made by opaque processes within the senior management group” (2019, 133). This despite that class of senior managers being what Zitron has called the “business idiot,” whose existence and incompetence are the direct result of neoliberalism: “the higher you get up in an organization, the further you get from the customer, the problem you've solving, and any of the actual work, and the higher up you get, the more power you have to change the conditions of the business” (2025, italics original). Similar is the familiar phenomenon of greenwashing, in which an organization attempts to launder its reputation by making empty motions towards environmentalism, while doing little to change the largescale environmental or climate harm on which their profit-making depends. An example from the library world is RELX, which owns Elsevier. Elsevier (33+ percent profit margin aside (RELX 2025, 69)) publishes the fossil fuel industry’s literature and thereby facilitates the continuation and expansion of that industry; other parts of RELX host oil, gas, and coal industry conferences and finance climate change denying politics. At the same time, Elsevier makes much of their support for the 2015 Paris Agreement and similar toothless commitments to limiting global warming (Lyall, Ortiz & Billo 2025).
8. While planning tends to talk about “public” goods, services, spaces, etc., economics has distinct definitions for a public good vs. a common good. Suber (2016, 3), in discussion of open access e-resources, says, “a public good is non-rivalrous and non-excludable. A good is non-rivalrous when it’s undiminished by consumption. We can all consume it without depleting it or becoming ‘rivals.’ Radio broadcasts are non-rivalrous; my reception doesn’t block yours or vice versa. A good is non-excludable when consumption is available to all, and attempts to prevent consumption are generally ineffective. Radio broadcasts are non-excludable for people with the right equipment in the right area.” Common goods, on the other hand, are rivalrous, but are non-excludable; consider a public library building that cannot hold every patron at the same time. I have used the phrase “public and common” throughout this article to encompass these meanings and the different fields’ use of them, unless a specific meaning is intended.
9. Habermas’s Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns was first published in English as The Theory of Communicative Action in 1984-1987, translated by Thomas McCarthy.
10. I cast a wide net in LISA, LISTA, and the general index of EBSCO Discovery Service. LISA is readily illustrative, as it has a bar chart for the results date range; I searched “noft(stakeholder*) AND noft(librar*)” to look for the truncated stakeholder* and librar* in all fields except the full text. LISTA does not readily search all fields but full text, but a search of “AB (stakeholder*) AND AB (librar*)” to look for the terms in the abstracts is somewhat equivalent. The same “AB (stakeholder*) AND AB (librar*)” was used in EBSCO Discovery Service.
11. Critical librarianship, sometimes abbreviated as critlib, is the application of critical theory’s examinations of sociopolitical power structures to librarianship, especially where that power is rendered invisible by normalcy and convention; it has strong relationships with other subgenres of critical theory such as critical race theory and queer theory. Its strengths lie in collection development, cataloging, and classification (e.g. Drabinski 2019; Henry, Kauffman & Chiu 2022; all of Sandy Berman’s work) and in instruction and information literacy (e.g. Beilin 2015; Baer 2016; Tewell 2025). It is less strong in other areas, such as systems (though Matthew Reidsma’s work and AI refusal are promising entry points) or management (Silvia Vong has made an excellent start). The praxis of critical librarianship has received deserved criticism for its insufficiency in addressing white supremacy (Hathcock 2015; Leung & López-McKnight 2020) and for its departure from critical theory’s roots in Marxist questions of class (Brett 2024).
12. One of these others seems to be project management. The library literature has focused on whether or not libraries are using formal project management methods such as those from the Project Management Institute and bemoaning the lack of training most librarians have in the same (see, for example, Winston & Hoffman 2005; Searcy 2018; Guimaraes et al 2021). However, as with stakeholder theory, PMI and the Project Management Body of Knowledge originated in business – aerospace, construction, and defense in particular (Weber 2018) – and similarly little work has been done to critically examine whether it might be appropriate for a non-commercial undertaking such as libraries or, if so, adapt its theory for our particular needs.
13. In the professoriate, "casualized teachers are not funded to do research, even though many of them have a PhD – which is a research, not a teaching, qualification. It is difficult to create a research agenda if you have no funding, no job stability, and no office” (Connell 2019, 67). How much harder, therefore, for librarians who often do not have that research training, while also facing the same lack of stability, funding, facilities, etc. Meanwhile, many higher education librarians must publish to advance their careers (whether or not they are considered faculty or are eligible for tenure); public, school, and other librarians might do so as well to satisfy an intellectual itch or distinguish themselves on the job market. With precarity and overwork combined with that necessity, our literature fills with ever more articles about how a catalog was migrated or how a building was renovated or how a service was reconfigured for cut positions, but little actual theory, let alone its creative advancement. “Creativity in research means expanding the archive, devising new forms of encounter with materials, imaginative patterning, and linking different knowledge formations. What Jane Kenway and Johanna Fahey call 'the research imagination' grows out of conditions that support adventurous work. Academic freedom is only part of this. Just as important are workforce security, funding for the full labour process of research, and an organizational culture that trusts staff to use time and resources well” (Connell 2019, 173-174). Julia Schleck goes further and shows that academic freedom itself is fully dependent on those conditions and that the quality scholarship dependent in turn on those conditions and academic freedom is lost under neoliberalism, as universities have become as corporations. “As in the corporate sector, universities have sought to develop a "flexible" workforce, one that managers consider necessary to be able to maximize revenues. Flexibility in academia, as elsewhere, involves developing a large bank of employees who can be hired at the last minute on short-term contracts to execute a limited number of tasks and then fired or not rehired when it is no longer advantageous to the institution. This drive to overhaul academic labor has resulted in a professoriate that is now overwhelmingly "contingent," in other words, hired into positions defined by their short-term nature and nontenurable status” (Schleck 2022, 39).
14. Originating in linguistics and referring to ways that bi- and multilingual speakers "[shift] from one linguistic code (a language or dialect) to another, depending on the social context or conversational setting. Sociolinguists, social psychologists, and identity researchers are interested in the ways in which code-switching, particularly by members of minority ethnic groups, is used to shape and maintain a sense of identity and a sense of belonging to a larger community” (Morrison 2016). The concept can expand to include tone, body language, modes of dress, and other expressions that allow people to move between milieux – primarily as a strategy enacted by members of non-dominant groups moving between theirs and that of the dominant group. For examples, see Demby 2013.
15. This evaluation of difference and equivalence is absolutely not the same as the “separate but equal” of pre-Civil Rights segregation in the United States, which was confirmed in the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision and began to be undone with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and which we know was never actually equal. Purcell’s use of “networks” is the key to seeing why it is not the same. Segregation separated groups of people based on their differences – primarily Black and white people, but its intersections with other axes of oppression also influenced separations of gender, sexuality, class, geography, other racial differences, religion, etc. – and consequently made organizing across identities in common cause or in solidarity quite difficult. In a network of equivalence, the point is interconnection; especially in Purcell’s field of planning and as a successor of Lefebvre’s right to the city, the density of urban life makes this an embodied reality.
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