Commodification of the Information Profession: A Critique of Higher Education Under Neoliberalism

Abstract

The structures that govern society’s understanding of information have been reorganised under a neoliberal worldview to allow information to appear and function as a commodity. This has implications for the professional ethics of library and information labour, and the need for critical reflexivity in library and information praxes is not being met. A lack of theoretical understanding of these issues means that the political interests governing decision-making are going unchallenged, for example the UK government’s specific framing of open access to research. We argue that building stronger, community oriented praxes of critical depth can serve as a resilient challenge to the neoliberal politics of the current higher education system in the UK and beyond. Critical information literacy offers a proactive, reflexive and hopeful strategy to challenge hegemonic assumptions about information as a commodity.

Open or Ajar? Openness within the Neoliberal Academy

“…The broader movement of openness has suffered the effects of the diffusion of the meaning of The use of openness for the purposes of entrenching the power dynamics of capitalist social relations into a broader model of marketised governance should be a concern for public services, public goods, and the commons. It presupposes information as a commodity [35] and, for library and information workers, raises a range of ethical concerns around stratification and barriers to access and re-use of information.…”

“…Recognising the genealogies and multiple lineages of openness [2] helps us to understand the tensions that exist across open praxis. Neoliberalism's appropriation of scholarly communication [35] and research output management serves to curtail the radical potential of openness to challenge existing political norms. As Stuart Lawson [4] notes Alexandra Samuel [36] similarly discusses a political model for open-source software that embraces the social requirements of its structure at a grassroots level for "self-reliance: a long-standing, decentralized campaign that disseminated complex technical skills to a wide range of would-be self-helpers."…”

When students become customers; the changing relationship between the student and the academic: a case study from social sciences in turkey

“…Higher education is organized as a product, delivered for its 'exchange' value' (Naidoo & Whitty, 2013) and becomes a form of 'capital' (Lawson, Sanders, & Smith, 2015). With the neoliberal notion of 'homo-economicus', individuals are expected to invest in themselves.…”

Libraries, democracy, information literacy, and citizenship

“…Libraries have not been unaffected and tendencies described in British (Goulding, 2013;Greene and McMenemy, 2015;Lawson, Sanders and Smith, 2015;Quinn and Bates, 2017), and North American (Buschman, 2012;Gregory and Higgins, 2013a;Enright, 2013) contexts are nowadays also valid in Sweden. By experiencing the social consequences of neoliberalism and by recognising that these consequences are shaped by a hegemonic order, possibilities for change and resistance are opened up.…”

“…The compilation focuses mainly on libraries in higher education in North America, with examples on the empowering potential being provided, but it is clear that these examples are exceptions to the rule. The neoliberal challenges to academic librarianship has also been critizised in a British context (Lawson, Sanders and Smith, 2015). Katherine Quinn and Jo Bates presents a gramscian analysis of the work done by the Radical Librarians Collective (2017).…”