CONCLUSION: INTEGRATING CLIENTS INTO THE
strategies are not available in written exchanges. This means that correcting another person’s characterization could lead to an escalating angry ex- change (known as a ‘‘flame’’ in listserv discussions).
Participants in the face-to-face conversation responded enthusiastically to the relatively rare opportunity to discuss shared clients in a context where most interactions with clients are brief and anonymous. Recognizing mutual clients affirmed participants’ perspective of the problem and that it was not caused by shortcomings on their part. It also demonstrated the consistency of client needs and behaviors across time and location, providing a sense of continuity in a rapidly changing environment.
In negotiating local policies and rules, participants in both conversations assumed that bureaucratic approaches were appropriate to their status as professionals. However, they proposed rules and policies without account- ing for the fact that bureaucratic approaches require people to internalize the rules through interactions. Clients do not share an identity with one another as ‘‘library users,’’ and so they have limited motivation to inter- nalize rules. This means that interactions with service workers can create conflicts in which the worker expects the client to understand and adhere to rules that oppose the client’s own wants and needs. For the service worker,
‘‘being the bad guy’’ by enforcing rules is in conflict with the professional identity librarians work to construct in these data. Therefore, participants look to technological means of enforcing rules. This strategy is also likely to disappoint them in application, because clients see workers as being re- sponsible for the technology present in the service context, even if the reality is that they are not trained or authorized to correct problems.
Two features of service interactions emerged in the data but cannot be fully analyzed without further research: the impact of computer mediation on service interactions, and the interwoven factor of gender. As the com- puter/network becomes a fourth party in the shifting service dynamics along with clients, workers, and managers, its ‘‘needs’’ must be attended to in order to serve the customer or to gather information for management. Being seen as a technology expert may be perceived as a way to raise prestige and/
or income. This strategy may require supporting the value of the technology even in adverse circumstances, which might increase the client’s frustration.
This situation requires additional emotional labor, either in facing down clients’ anger or in providing reassurance and calming them down.
Hints about the role of gender in how professionals perceive and negotiate technological issues can be inferred from the relative participation of men and women in the listserv discussion. Of the 52 participants, 25 were men, 25 were women, and 2 could not be confirmed from the data. This represents
far more male participation than is proportional with the profession overall.
Men comprised only 16% of American librarians in 1997 (Statistical Ab- stract of the United States, 1999, p. 417), although they make up a higher percentage of academic librarians. Counting articles rather than contribu- tors provides further evidence that men dominated the listserv discussion.
Of the 76 articles, 33 were posted by women (43%) and 40 by men (53%)—
the men on average took more turns in the conversation, with an average of 1.3 articles per woman and 1.6 articles per man.
I hypothesized that this dominance reflected not gender per se but or- ganizational position. That is, I thought it is possible that administrators (those who manage other professional librarians) posted more often re- gardless of gender. However, the data did not bear this out. Of the 52 contributors, 14 are supervisors (27%) who posted 19 articles (25%), and 27 are non-supervisors (52%) who posted 42 articles (55%). (The organiza- tional position of the remaining 11 contributors could not be confirmed.) The fact that non-supervisors participated at roughly twice the rate of su- pervisors may stem less from gender than from the uneasiness the front-line workers experienced concerning technology. With less say over how tech- nology is implemented, they may feel more desire to interact with others in the profession to attempt to restructure their professional identity around it.
Although further research exploring the role of interactive service in professional identity is needed, these preliminary findings suggest the im- portance of fostering awareness of the difficulties of service in the context of rapid change. This awareness should not be aimed at developing practical techniques for dealing with idiosyncratic individuals or more effective rules and regulations, but rather a mutual foundation of shared goals and un- derlying professional commitments. It is vital to include in these discussions the workers least able to make exceptions to policies or to provide custom- ized service.
Discussions of ‘‘problem patrons’’ as case studies can point to the grow- ing complexity of what clients think libraries can and should provide and what workers in the library expect clients to know and be able to do. Tech- nology is used in other knowledge contexts (e.g., real estate, travel, banking) to externalize basic interactions. Libraries have also externalized basic in- teractions to online settings (e.g., finding full-text articles, renewing books), leaving the more complicated and potentially more frustrating tasks to be completed in the library with the assistance of staff who must apply not only more technological skill but also more emotional labor. Posting rules and implementing technological controls will not eliminate this source of conflict in the library context. If relating to people is neglected as an aspect of
professional identity as the prestige of technology grows, the stress of emo- tional labor will grow for those responsible for mediating the needs and expectations of clients who do not fit the institutional mold.
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