Organizational culture overload

In the last two days I have taken a careful look at (but not fully read) Organizational Culture and Leadership by Edgar H. Schein and Communication & Organizational Culture by Joann Keyton. These books were recommended background for one of our Comprehensive Exam questions--I imagine my exposure to them will help with my Management class as well.

Besides Comps, my immediate interest in these books is to help me think about how library cultures differ from other cultures I've been exposed to and how one library's organizational culture might differ from another. What kind of organizational culture might be a good fit for me? An answer to that could aid me during my job search.

Both books make it clear that professional culture and organizational culture are not equivalent. In many libraries, there are enough librarians and they have enough power within the library that a librarian culture will be primary. But that's not true in all libraries. One of the reasons I didn't pursue that Top Secret job was because I could see that I would be entering a government contractor culture. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I'm too excited about entering a library culture to settle for anything else in my first job as a professional librarian.

As someone who was a computer programmer in the 1980s working on a Vax computer by DEC, I enjoyed this quote on page 5 of the Schein book:

It turned out that at DEC, an assumption was shared by senior managers and most of the other members of the organization: that one cannot determine whether or not something is "true" or "valid" unless one subjects the idea or proposal to intensive debate; and further, that only ideas that survive such debate are worth acting on, and only ideas that survive such scrutiny will be implemented.

Although I didn't realize it at the time, that was a widely held assumption among computer people and my lack of debating ability was a detriment to my career as a software engineer. Fortunately, intensive debate does not appear to be a prominent aspect of library culture. Plus, I improved at it as I got older and more confident.

(Here's an inside joke for readers of newlib-l: I am over 40. I am a woman. My oldest computer program, written on cards, is older than some of my classmates. No library science classes were slowed down to remedy any lack in my computer literacy.)

How do the professional cultures of library school professors differ from librarians? Most of my professors have been librarians earlier in their career. But their current concerns are academic ones and so, as they should, they model academic culture rather than library culture. One of the things I like most about the Mizzou program, as it's implemented in St. Louis, is that many of our face-to-face classes are taught by working librarians from different libraries. We get a good, if vicarious, exposure to several library cultures. Mizzou's program provides a nice dose of the real library world with enough theory that you don't forget that you're in graduate school.     #

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