Theorizing scholarship as craft pride in the LIS field

Abstract

This article applies the Marxist notion of craft pride, a sense of labor fulfillment that becomes lost in worker alienation, to argue that research and writing and publishing might resolve some of the malaise felt by many academic librarians in their work. Though publishing is an institutionalized practice, it can have transgressive value when viewed as a craft in which the creator has ownership over his/her work. At the crux of this discussion is the argument that scholarship in Library and Information Science (LIS) should move beyond only using quantitative and qualitative methods.

Keywords

• labor, Marx, worker alienation, scholarship, neoliberalism, malaise, academic librarianship, capitalism