LISR 16, 119138 (1994)

Discourse Analysis as a Research Method in Library and Information Science Bernd Frohmann
Graduate School of Library and Information Science University WesternOntario of The kind of discourse analysis practiced by Michel Foucault and his followers is a useful research method in library and information science (LIS). The method is introduced, some examples of its use are suggested, and several research questions are posed. The method permits analysis of the ways in which information, its uses, and its users are discursively constructed, especially in the theoretical discourses of LIS, such that power over them can be exercised in specific ways.

This article describes discourse analysis as a research method in library and information science (LIS). It is not only an important and neglected method, one that discloses significant problems and questions, but also one that draws from the quantitative approaches of several disciplines. The benefits of multidisciplinary qualitative research have been noted by Fidel (1993) and also by Bradley and Sutton (PEGa): The field has come relatively late to an awareness of qualitative research as it has been developing in sociology, psychology, anthropology, education and other social sciences. Research in library and information science has generally been characterized by a loose confederacy of approaches, including quantitative sociological methods, literary criticism, historical analysis, and experimental methods, but a serious cultivation of the potential of qualitative research has yet to emerge. (p. 405) Sutton (1993) added phenomenology, symbolic interactionism, philosophies concerned with the nature of social knowledge, and the ethnographic approaches of anthropology to this list of disciplines and methods. Discourse analysis belongs here too because it is a multidisciplinary method and because it provides the contextualization that Sutton argued is one of the main advantages of qualitative research. Other advantages of

Direct correspondence to Bcmd Prohmann, Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Elbom College, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada N6G 1Hl < frohmann@julian.uwo.ca z-. The author would like to thank an anonymous referee and the editors of this journal for their helpful comments on a previous version of this article.

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discourse analysis are evident when it is positioned iu relation to other LIS methodologies. This article also indicates the sorts of data relevant to the method and gives examples of problems in its domain Discourse analysis takes discourse as its object of analysis. Its data is talk: not what the talk refers to, but the talk itself. Unlike the discourse analysis of linguists, however, which usually (though not exclusively) studies ordinary oral conversation, the kind of analysis described here investigates what Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983), in their explication of Foucault, called serious speech acts. These are not the speech acts performed in the course of everyday conversation, but rather those performed by institutionally privileged speakers. Their remarks about Foucaults object of analysis are relevant to identifying the kind of discourse to which the method might be applied in LIS: . . . Foucault is interested in just those types of speech acts which are divorced from the local situation of assertion and from the shared everyday background so as to constitute a relatively autonomous realm. . . . Such speech acts gain their autonomy by passing some sort of institutional test, such as the rules of dialectical argument, institutional interrogation, or empirical confirmation. . . . This systematic, ~titution~d justification of the claim of certain speech acts to be true of reality takes place in a context in which truth and falsity have serious social consequences. . . . let us call these special speech acts serious speech acts. Any speech act can be serious if one sets up the necessary validation procedures, community of experts, and so on. (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1983, p. 48) LIS-talk is a set of serious speech acts, It is analogous to a dialect in which the nature of information, its users, and its uses are more or less explicitly addressed. It is a species of talk in which conceptions about these things are at issue; it is talk for which the various positions that such conceptions might occupy in intellectual space make a difference. It is also still the talk of a specific academic and professional discipline, one which, in spite of its perennial and increasingly wee-folded anxieties of irrelevance, is issued from specilic institutional sites by authorized speakers and distributed through specific institutional channels. If this academic and professional discipline disappears, there will, of course, still be talk about information, its users and its uses, and those with an interest in studying it will not want for data. Moreover, the historical investigation of IS-talk will have a terminus, an outcome with not ~~~iderable comforts for historians at least. But at present, discourse analysis in LIS has at its disposal a rich and growing body of data, consisting of academic and professional talk that addresses, either obliquely or directly, the question of what information and its near relations might be. It is worth emphasizing, even though the quotation from Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983) makes it quite clear, that discourse analysis does not study just words. Even everyday speech acts, as Wittge~te~ took considerable pains to point out, canuot be dismissed as just words, because they depend for their sense on identitiabfe social practices, requiring more or less regulation or policing, to stabilize signitiers lacking any essential grounding either in consciousness or in the supportive referents of an obliging real world. Serious speech acts may, by virtue of their explicit institutional habitats, be even less justifiably dismissed in the name of a methodological insistence

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on the priority of what talk is about rather than on talk itself. It is the salience of the institutions mentioned by Finlay (1987) that establishes the signilicance of discourse analysis:
. . . discourse analysis is the study of the way in which an object or idea, any object or idea, is taken up by various institutions and epistemological positions, and of the way in which those institutions and positions treat it. Discourse analysis studies the way in which objects or ideas are spoken about. @. 2)

When serious speech acts manage, by their institutional authority, to create that relatively autonomous realm referred to by Dreyfus and Rabmow (1983), there is no choice but to listen. When Duden (PM), for example, showed the distance between the discursive construction of womens bodies in 18th century Germany and our modem body, her subject is not just words, but ways in which the structures of these specific discursive fields not only configure an extensive range of bodily modalitiesmedical interventions, moral and ethical postures, perceptions, and experiencesdut also account for a specific historical event: the birth of the isolated, objectified, material body, whose reality is the product of descriptions allowing the body to be read only through the grid of the anatomical atlas (p. 4). Or, when Laqueur (1990) revealed the discursive shift from the one-sex to the two-sex construction of the human body, he was not describing just talk, but laying claim to a different historical domain, to the broad discursive fields that underlie competing ideologies, that define the terms of conflict, and that give meaning to various debates (p. 23). Or, when popular journalists argue that a proper understanding of especially gruesome crimes require us to revisit the categories of evil and its grammatical relations, they do not argue for a merely verbal shift, but rather for a shift in power over the classification of criminals, away from contemporary social and psychiatric institutions to those governed by the newly nominated guardians of our moral order. In all these cases, discursive shilts signal changes in the exercise of power over bodies and minds. From at least 1876 to the present day, the discourses of LIS are thoroughly intertwined with specific institutional forms through which power over information, its users, and its uses is, has been, and will continue to be exercised. These discourses include specialized talk about information, its organization, who uses it and who does not, what its uses are, have been, or might be, the social and cultural roles of the organizations in charge of it, the introspective analyses of the professional, and even personal, identities of its keepers, and the programmatic pronouncements of its theorists who speak about how these things should be spoken about. Of course, many disciplines, organizations, institutions, associations, corporations, and groups other than those unique to LIS also speak about information, making their own contributions to the heteroglossia characteristic of this contemporary discursive field. The literature of LIS reveals, in spite of the fuzziness of the disciplines institutional borders, a sufficiently clear set of discursive practices, grounded in its central institutional sites, which work together to construct specific interlocking identities for information, its users, and its uses. The networks created by these identities, or subject positions, and their interrelationships configure the discursive resources available for the articulation of the fields problems. The ways in which its keywords-information, information users, and information uses- are used set the limits of possible questions, issues,

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hypotheses, demonstrations, data, and research methodologies. These ways of talking are not neutral with respect to institutional structures. Instead, their discursive elements get their meaning by their deployment within specific institutions. To study discourse in action shows the authorized range of possibilities for quite specific exercises of power over information, its users, and its uses. The benefit of such work is to situate LIS discourses more firmly within their complex institutional environments, thereby allowing more light to be shed upon the social and political context of information.
LIS THEORY AS DATA

Although several studies have raised skepticism about the multidisciplinarity LIS sometimes imagines itself to enjoy, LIS is nonetheless a multifaceted discursive field, offering many and various configurations of serious speech acts through which information, its users, and its uses are constructed. For example, a discursive species which would surely reward analysis is the incessant talk of machines, from the technophilic fantasies of Cutter (1@33), perhaps the first example of library science fiction, to the contemporary flood of articles and books on the hardware and software of the information age. Some questions for discourse analysts of this genre might be: How is information defined in accordance with the imperatives of machine storage, manipulation, and retrieval? How do the same imperatives determine a parallel set of discursive configurations of users and uses? What institutional platforms permit specific forms of enunciation of these identities? Other important species of LIS discourse are professional and corporate talk, not neglecting the advertisements that have appeared in professional publications at least since the 1876 founding of Library Journal. How do these discourses construct information such that it becomes the object of professional expertise, administrative structures, or corporate strategies? How does professional and corporate talk configure specific networks of concepts, definitions, propositions, hypotheses, arguments, speculations, and a myriad of other discursive elements through which specific forms of power over information is exercised? LIS theory is one region of the LIS discursive terrain that offers especially useful data for analysis. Theorizing presents a disciplines own rhetoric of self-identity, leaving a discursive trace of its dreams and aspirations, and an explicit and self-conscious record of how it would most like to be coveted, conceived, imagined, and remembered. Theory is the field upon which the discursive elements most explicitly proposed as central to the discipline are sown, nurtured, and pruned, whether they live to be cultivated or eventually rooted out. It is the discursive platform upon which the contests between the disciplines rival conceptual bases are staged, and the arena where the politics of its fundamental principles are practiced. Theory in LIS presents what Foucault (1980, p. 108), in discussing his reasons for studying psychiatry, called a low epistemological profile. One need not ally oneself with Jones (1976), who might be thought somewhat uncharitable for choosing This Incredible Stream of Garbage as the title of his article on 100 years of LIS literature, but only comfort ourselves, perhaps with the help of Hernon and Schwartzs (1993, p. 215) editorial criticism of recent, albeit less provocatively stated, similar sentiments, that library research is indeed at a relatively primitive stage in comparison with, say, chemistry or physics. Even the most charitable interpretation of LIS theorys low

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epistemological profile would suggest a rather catholic interpretation of the term theory in staking out the borders of my proposed discursive field. There are several candidates for theory-talk in LIS, and many different ways to group them. As pleas to make allowances for primitive stages of theory development often support, in various fields, arguments for soldiering on towards the ideal of the hard sciences, perhaps an obvious first choice would be those theoretical discourses that favor rigorous hypothesis testing, usually by quantitative methods. LIS is replete with examples; they can often be found clustering around the signifier information science and its promise of logical and epistemological rigor. They form one strand of a larger theoretical debate about the most promising approaches to theory construction in LIS. Another strand is woven from criticisms of positivism (for a recent exemplar, see Radford, 1992) and arguments for qualitative approaches (Bradley & Sutton 1993b; Fidel, 1993). Falling in the same category, but with a different focus, are the many explicit discussions of theoretical paradigms of the field or some portion thereof, either championing specitic sections of conceptual space as most accommodating to knowledge production and theoretical progress, or challenging the claims of rivals (e.g., Ellis, 1992). Because free use of Kuhns concept of a scientific paradigm is no less discouraged in LIS than in many other fields, further examples far less rigorously pursued are readily available. However, logical and epistemological rigor is not, for discourse analysis, a necessary condition, because the point is to study how theoretical signifiers are deployed to construct specific identities for information, its users, and its uses. It is not always the case that the kind of rigor one wants in judging the adequacy of logical and ep~temolo~~ rivals enables these identities to be seen most clearly. An ill-reasoned candidate for theoretical supremacy in LIS may be far less capable of scrambling its institutional voice by appeals to methodological precision and objectivity. Another kiud of theory-talk may be found among the many writings that champion conceptual imports. This article is one example, because it argues for the relevance to LIS of discourse analysis, a method developed outside LIS. The discipline has also heard from advocates of linguistics, general systems theory, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, hermeneutics, phenomenology, philosophy of language, and many others. Once again, the point of discourse analysis is not to adjudicate the merits of these rival claims. That job is best left to their proponents. Because conceptual imports bring with them discursive strategies from other disciplines, they often position notation in discursive networks suffl~ently different from those of LIS to throw into sharp relief specific exercises of power over it. The cognitive viewpoint in LIS, for example, employs discursive elements of a discipline whose ideological character has been noted for some time (e.g., Sampson, 1981). A fmal category of LIS writing which ought to be included if theory is given a properly catholic interpretation, consists of celebratory, inspirational, evangelical, and self-consciously ideological literature, whether pertaining to the discipline or to fields within it. This kind of literature records the discourses of LISs mission with respect to the moral, intellectual, cultural, and spiritual health of history, civilization, and society. Grand designs, such as Egan and Sheras (1952) claims for social epistemology, belong here, as do the many more focused opinion pieces or editorial comments that try to convey their vision of the essence of the field. Even when these writings are not scholarly and fail to comm~~te research results, they nonetheless more often than not communicate very clearly, and in terms sufficiently general to warrant their inclusion in a theory category, popular versions of notions of information that are

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often more rigorously and analytically worked out elsewhere. Because the primary criterion for inclusion in this category is that some general notion of information be more or less explicitly addressed (m contrast, say, to the technological literature that also embodies such general notions but in disguised form), their failure to play by the rules of scholarly research does not mean that these discourses are not valuable. Discourse analysis, therefore, transgresses in its choice of data some of the familiar borders between traditional oppositions of scholarly/non-scholarly, professional/ nonprofessional, or research/nonresearch. THEORY AS INTELLECTUAL LABOR Theory construction is a social process of intellectual labor. It is therefore no less implicated than any other labor process in the contests for power that configure our social world. Sometimes the relationships between labor and institutional power are not so clearly visible in the case of intellectual work. If we consider, by contrast, clear cases of nonintellectual work, such as shoveling coal, it would be diflicult to dismiss Benigers (1986) example of the extension of institutional control over the individual work rhythms of Bethlehem steelworkers by a very specific product of Frederick Winslow Taylors application of scientific management to their movements: the 21pound load shovel (p. 295). But perhaps the most dramatic instance of the thoroughly social construction of the configurations of not only manual labor but the laboring human body itself may be found in the case used by Seltzer (1992) to illustrate the redrawing of the line between the animate and the inanimate in machine culture (p. 156). It is a brief fantasy that appears in Henry Fords autobiography My Life and Work (1923). The production of the Model T required 7,882 distinct work operations, but, Ford noted, only 12% of these tasksynly 949 operations -required strong, able-bodied, and practically physically perfect men. Of the remainde-and thii is clearly what he sees as the major achievement of his method of productionwe found that 670 could be filled by legless men, 2,637 by one-legged men, two by armless men, 715 by onearmed men and ten by blind men. (p. 157)l Fantasy or not, Fords inventory is exemplary of the rigor extended by institutional imperatives to fragment and literally dismember the human body. In the discourses of Fordist labor processes, the unified body occupies merely one position in a classification of assemblages of limbs and faculties, ordered by their functions in the Fordist production line. The whole point of Fordist and Taylor& labor discourses is to replace the unified human subject by sets of movements and actions subject to managerial control. A basic assumption of discourse analysis is that intellectual labor is no less caught in the network of institutional power relations than the labor of shoveling coal or

I am indebted to Tom Carmichael for making me aware of this example in his paper Postmodem men: The male body in America, read to the conference Le Corps et ses lettres/E%ody words, 7-9 October 1993, Univzrsity of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada.

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working on Fordist production lines. The discursive configurations, conceptual patterns, and rhetorical rhythms of theories in general, and LIS theories in particular, owe as much to institutional imperatives as do the configurations, patterns, and rhythms of manual work. Both are labor processes, whose origin, meaning, and substance are constructed from social-rather than, for example, merely mental or cognitiv~materials. Just as the Fordist production line can be read as a discourse that constructs the human subject as a specific range of assemblages of limbs and faculties such that specific exercises of power over it are made possible, so too can LIS theories be read as discourses constructing their relevant theoretical elements--in particular, specific conceptions of information, its production, organization, dissemination, and use---in such fashion as to likewise enable exercises of power over information users. At the present time, the LIS literature contains few studies that attempt to deal with the kinds of issues indicated here. Some efforts have been made in the related field of ideology studies, most prominently by Michael Harris and his collaborators (Harris, 1986, Harris & Hannah, 1993; Harris & Itoga, 1991), but their subject is the ideological functions of specific institutions, particularly the American library, and do not take LIS discourses as their special topic. Schraders (19S4a, 1984b) work on definitions of information science tells us much about an important region of LIS discourse, but because its aim is to clear the ground for improved theory in the field, its epistemological motivation is different from the kind of analysis indicated here. Radfords (1992) essay pointing LIS in the direction of Foucault stops short of using his methods to analyze LIS discourse. Because, outside LIS, the resources are too plentiful to enumerate in this short space,2 only two writers will be discussed. The first is Dorothy Smith, and the second is Nancy Fraser. Smith (1990) has given an especially fruitful analysis of the operation of power in and through theoretical discursive practices. She proposed a reflexive critique of the ideological practices by which we create and express objectified forms of knowledge that are constituents of power in contemporary societies (p. 11). Smith showed how to identify objectified forms of knowledge as the specific achievements, or products, of theoretical processes of intellectual labor. Because, according to the view of theory suggested here, theoretical practices are also practices of power (Sawicki, 1991), these objectified forms of knowledge are also specific properties of institutional organization (Smith, 1990, p. 11). Smith analyzed, infer ahz, the ways in which mental illness as a theoretical construct, or objectified form of knowledge, becomes a property of very specific institutional exercises of power and control. Mental ilhiess is not a natural state, but rather one constructed by processes of intellectual labor drawing

2 The writings of Michel Foucault, his followers, interpreters, and critics provide the necessary theoretical foundation, and many of the applications of his ideas in the field of cultural studies provide useful models for analyses of LIS discourse. In political science, the theories of Ernest0 Laclau (1!290), particularly in New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, present a highly germane investigation of the relations between discourse and power. Finlays (1987) work is a useful Foucauldian analysis of technologies central to the field. Poster (1993) has written an exemplary discourse analysis of electronic databases, interpreting them as identity construction systems that create subject positions such that power can be exercised over them in specific ways. Recent work on the social construction of scientific knowledge is also highly relevant, especially the work of Karin Knorr Centina, Bruno Latour, Steve Woolgar, Ian Hacking, Steven Yearly, Andrew Pickering, H. M. Collins, and Michael Mulkay.

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upon the discursive resources of specific forms of institutional organization. Smith showed how the power to construct and deploy definitions designating particular subjects as mentally iIl is related to the imperatives of psychiatric, legal, and penal institutions. Her analyses of sociologists theoretical talk about mental ilhress as constructing subjects such that power over them is exercised through these institutions are especially relevant to studies of LIS theoretical discourses. The main goal of theoretical labor with respect to mental ilhress becomes the objectification of this discursive element, such that, in Laclaus (1990, pp. 34-35) terms, it becomes sedimented, a process whereby the concept itself emerges as an objective feature of the natural world through the occlusion of the historical contingencies of its construction. Smiths reflexive technique aims to uncover the processes through which mental ilhress is constructed as a theoretical element, thereby revealing its role as a property of institutional organization. The lesson for LIS is quite clear, since Smith showed that disclosing the operation of power in and through theoretical practices involves tracing connections between two sets of elements: the theorys products, or its objectified forms of knowledge, and specific characteristics of institutional power. A reflexive critique of LIS would, therefore, show how LIS theories, through their contested definitions and discursive constructions of information, information user, information need, and the like, enable specific institutional exercises of power over the production, organization, distribution, and consumption of information. It would reveal LIS theory production as a process of intellectual labor, and its products as properties of specific forms of institutional organization. The following very brief and oversimplified historical sketches illustrate how such a critique might be pursued. EXAMPLES: HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY Deweys Technobureaucratic Discourse

Since Melvil Dewey was, according to the orthodox genealogical narratives of librarianship, the centre of modern library history, its progenitor, a modern demi-urge who created modern library history from formlessness and emptiness (Miksa, 1983a, p. 49), his way of talking about information is perhaps an appropriate place to begin a discourse analysis of the field. Moreover, as there are now several useful analyses of Deweys contribution, fruitful comparisons can be made between their methods of investigation and the one proposed here. Garrison (1979, p. 61), example, showed for the ideological aspects of the public library movement, arguing that the efforts of the early library missionaries of the genteel tradition who preceded Dewey in the struggle for symbolic cultural dominance served to legitimate, reinforce, reflect, and transmit ideology congenial to a capitalist society, so as to socialize the populace to the economic inequality fostered by a capitalist mode of production and instill the beliefs required to support it (Garrison, 1983, p. 30), a thesis familiar also to readers of Michael Harriss work. Perhaps at least as important as any of its specific theses, Garrisons work insists on Deweys historical context, situating his standardization, uniformity, and mechanization of library procedures, equipment, and training within a general penetration of rational technique into an ever-expanding area of American social life in the last quarter of the 19th century. Deweys contribution is part of the national movement toward rationalization and specialization (Garrison, 1979, p. 169)

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in which a new professional class of managers and specialists gained economic power and its attendant cultural status. The main theme of Garrisons (1979,1983) interpretation---the close relationship between Deweys technocratic organization of librarianship and a concurrent technocratic shift in the favored operating techniques of capital accumulation-fmds support in Miksas (1983a, p. 52) reading, according to which Deweys contribution to modern librarianship may be viewed as his expression of a corporate ideal in relationship to libraries. Procedures of standardization, uniformity, efficiency, rational organization, and scientific management were the means by which Deweys goal-he incorporation of the librwas meant to be achieved. This interpretation of Deweys contributions---the founding of the first library school, the almost fanatical attention to the routinization of library procedures, the conception of the American Library Association as a means of organizing professional ideas, the production, distribution, and marketing of library supplies as a profitable venture elements of a single vision, of the library as a corporate entity, has the virtue of making important connections between them and the corporate form of institutional organization so crucial to the historical development of American society. The main elements of Garrisons (1979, 1983) and Miksas (1983a) analyses can be summarized, albeit with a violence to their subtleties hardly avoidable in this too brief sketch, by pointing out that, for the most part ,they move within an interpretive framework of interests, motives, and beliefs. Garrison (1979, p. 62), for example, described her methodological commitments as deriving from a combination of interest theory, according to which idea systems are determined by the economic motivations of those who adhere to such systems, and strain theory, which conceives of ideology as a production of ideas designed to ameliorate the social and psychological stress experienced by those who profess the ideas (p. 63). For Miksa, many basic interpretive issues are addressed by presenting evidence of Deweys beliefs. For example, the relationship between Deweys efficiency gospel and prevailing notions of high culture values becomes problematized as whether or not Dewey believed the former to be the best means to achieve the latter (Miksa, 1983a, pp. 57-58). The shared assumption of both analyses is a stable subject, whether, as in M&as case, the familiar psychological ego or, as in Garrisons, a class defmed by its members beliefs in specific idea systems.3 In either case, our understanding of how information is constructed in Deweys talk about it is referred back to one of these two forms of subjectivity. A discourse analysis of the kind of talk about librarianship that might fairly be characterized as Deweyan owes much to these studies, especially to their insistence on its historical context. Any analysis whose aim is to show how information, its users, and its uses are discursively constructed is, necessarily, a historical project.

The nuances of Garrisons (1979) analysis should be acknowledged, because she recognized the importance of oppositional movements: . . . it is important to recognize the way in which the complex, conflictual relationship between the American economic structure and the institutions within that social system generates protest and countercurrents to the reigning elite forces. . . . A revisionism that does not recognize this abrasive interaction leaves little room for popular victories, multiple outcomes, chance consequences, and the irrationalities of life. We should abandon the terrain wherein sunshine conservatives maintain the meritocratic character of American life and dissenters show the consistent oppression of the passive or mystified weak by the mighty (p. 60). An understanding of conflict should not be limited, however, to contests between stable identities (e.g., between the oppressed and the reigning elite forces), but should also recognize the discursive conflicts at work in the social construction of these very identities.

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Furthermore, the emphasis on the relationships between Deweys approach to librarianship and emerging forms of professional and managerial expertise deployed on behalf of corporate interests certainly points in promising directions. But discourse analysis is not so comfortable with the assumption of stable subjects, whether understood as personal or class identities. Instead, it interprets such identities as themselves constructed from available discursive elements. Even without holding our analyses hostage to the outcome of meditations on Lacanian and associated postmodem mysteries, whether we learn all we can even from Deweys own writings by resolving their tensions and reconciling their ~on~adictio~ by appeal to an individual egos belief-system is, nonetheless, a question of considerable intuitive urgency. The further reach of analyses featuring class interests certainly permits us to grasp problems left untouched by biographical narratives, but class identities based on belief systems shared by several egos fare no better than personal identities in our postm~er~ poststru~~~t, and deco~~ucti~t intellectual climate. The concept of ideology, the vehicle for the expression of class interests, is, therefore, of limited use, because, as Foucault (1980, p. 118) wrote, it refers . . . to something of the order of a subject. If Foucault was right, the articulation of class interests is to be understood as the work of constructing an imaginary unity from discursive elements eluding the closure of any specific, albeit transpersonal, intentional@. The analysis of the discursive field in which these elements are embedded has a legitimate claim to priority over ideology studies. The application of discourse analysis will be illustrated by the brief example of the discursive tensions at work in Deweys writings about best books. The analysis shows that Miksas (1983a) resolution of these tensions by appeaLg to Deweys belief in efficiency as the means to h&h culture values fails to do justice to the discursive traces of contests for the control of intellectual and cultural capital taking place in his day. Consider, first, the following passage from The Profession, where Dewey (1978b) explained the duties of the librarian: He must see that his library contains, as far as possible, the best books on the best subjects, regarding carefully the wants of his special cornrn~~. Then, having the best books, he must create among his people, his pupils, a desire to read those books. He must put every facility in the way of readers, so that they shall be led on from good to better. He must teach them how, after studying their own wants, they may themselves select their reading wisely. (p. 70) The emphasis on best books and the readers guided passage from good to better invoke familiar elements of the discourses of high culture, accordiug to which the truth about books is told in terms of the properties establishing their position in a cultural hierarchy. However, Deweys emphasis on the librarians careful regard for the wants of his special community and the bending of his pedagogical efforts towards helping readers so that, alter studying their own wants, they may themselves select their reading wisely, employ an antagonistic discourse of control over intellectual capital that undermines the abiity of signiliers such as best books to articulate those traditional high culture values required by M&as (1983a) psychologistic means-ends reading. In Book Selections, where Dewey (1877) was concerned with what is today called collection management, the stable hierarchies of the old cultural order not only

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fade from view but are thrown into question: When it is remembered that [the task] is to choose a single hundred or a single thousand from the millions of volumes in existence, the difliculty, not to say the utter impossibility, of getting the best hundred or the best thousand possible, will be apparent (p. 391). Anticipating opposition to his plan to make [readers] wants known through recommendations, Dewey wrote: It is objected to this plan that books persistently advertised and placarded before the people are most apt to be asked for. Granted; but if advertisements and favorable notices and recommendations from those who have read, excite a desire to read a book, is it not just what is wanted? (p. 392) Here, the stable cultural order has disappeared altogether, replaced by readers excited desires, stimulated by a kaleidoscope of advertisements and the roar of power presses. Deweys (1877) remarks are even more pointed than might be apparent to modern readers, because they were written at a time when the second paperback revolution sharply polarized attitudes towards popular culture (see Coser, Kadushkin, & Powell, 1985, p. 21). Moreover, Deweys overriding (and characteristic) concern for the niceties of routine and details of procedure attest to the imperatives, not of high culture, but of efficien~tandardixed, mechanized, and bureaucratic technique for implementing readers recommendations: Recommendations of books by readers should be in writing, either in a book prepared for the purpose and kept at the desk for entries, or, better still, on slips of a uniform size, which can then be arranged alphabetically, bringing duplicates together, allowing the removal of those rejected or already purchased, and as each lot comes in, checking off conveniently and sending notice to the person desiring. A model form for this printed slip is in preparation by the Co-operative Committee, and will be accompanied with full directions for use. (p. 392) Furthermore, efficient technique is managed, not by bookish men, those oldfashioned guardians of high culture, but by practical, hard-headed men: Several men of sterling common-sense, but without many literary pretensions, would secure a better working selection than the average committee made up of bookish men (pp. 392-393). These specialists and experts oversee the production of a Manual of best books, which will put in the hands of our librarians a ready-made vade mecum which we feel sure is to be the Coming Catalogue (Dewey, 1978a, p. 164). The Manual is an annotated catalog, containing notes giving, in the fewest possible words, a clear idea of the merits and faults of the book, its reliability, form of treatment, etc. (pp. 161-162).Due to its standardized cataloging, its uses extend beyond the value of the annotations:
. . . the call numbers of the books in each library could be written in the margin, or if enough copies were wanted for distribution, the call numbers could easily be set in the margin, and a special edition could be printed at small expense. Each library would then have to issue a catalogue only of the books not included in the Manual. . . . The Manual gives the best possible selection to purchase. . . . With the notes to assist, and knowing the special wants of the community, the selection of a thousand volumes from the list of

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Frohmann five or ten thousand would be trifling compared with the present methods. . . . The librarian has merely to mark the shelf-mark in the margin of the Manual, and the book is catalogued beyond improvement for the public. (p. 164)

At no point does this discussion of best books invoke the familiar certainties about literary and intellectual value common to the pronouncements of bookishmen. Instead, Dewey (1978a) relied upon outcomes of votes taken among a committee of five charged with producing the Manual. Here are examples of the language used to describe the members of the committee: The aid of specialists must be called in (p. 162); the work requires the aid of the specialists and experts (p. 162); the list gains the authority of the committee of experts (p. 163); and if a small library cannot purchase all the items on the list, an expert could go through the catalogue (p. 164). System replaces cultured judgment; the authority of individual cultural expertise is overruled by the authority of a systematic mobilization of practical, common-sense experts -men of experience. Systematic, rational, and bureaucratic organization of their work constitutes the committee as a new authority-exercising subject. Intelligence, competence, and expertise pass to managerial control of rational procedures required to construct new corporate agents who can get the job done. Once the hierarchy of high culture classics is thoroughly dislocated by technobureaucratic discourses in which the truth about books and readers is told in the terms of professional management, the expressions best books and the readers guidance from good to better do not have the same meaning as in their high culture readings. The discursive tensions in Deweys text between high culture and efficiency cannot be fully resolved by appeal to a means-ends relationship, regardless of Deweys beliefs. The language of efficiency destabilizes the language of traditional high culture, bespeaking a new order in the production, organization, distribution, and use of documents. The old hierarchy of readers, arranged from the lowly and childlike common reader whose wants need careful tending to reach full cultural maturity, to the fully cultured gentleman whose wants are in tune with real, objective, cultural, and intellectual value, is swept away in a crowd of general readers who define their own wants, even if influenced by the new mass production of reading materials and their associated marketing techniques. Deweyan technobureaucratic discourse speaks a language befitting the transformation of books and reading from cultural monuments to intellectual capital. Like all other forms of capital, intellectual capital is no exception to the new rules, that the best return on investment requires professional management. The discursive construction of librarianship as the institution, operation, and maintenance of rationalized, mechanized, standardized, and technobureaucratic procedures constructs an identity for the librarian-professional colleague of the corporate executive---w hich contests his (the gendered pronoun is deliberate) traditional role as guardian of high culture. One of the reasons for studying Deweyan technobureaucratic discourse is that many research questions are posed when large-scale library classilications such as the decimal system are interpreted as among the objectified forms of knowledge produced by LIS theory. For example, does the attempt to inscribe definitive and stable boundaries between academic disciplines in library classifications help construct intellectual capital in a form vital to the social construction of professional expertise as the form of control over its articulation, administration, and regulation? IS the power required to maintain explicit social hierarchies of control over intellectual capital

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at least partly exercised through discourses that define, separate, and arrange an array of intellectual disciplines? Are the kinds of power and control over intellectual capital that require the definition, regulation, and maintenance of scholarly, educational, and other edifying uses of texts at least partly exercised through an articulated system of subjects sufficiently stable to permit literary warrant to provide the basis for classifications and subject catalogs? What are the relationships between Deweys technobureaucratic discourses, through which very specific forms of discipline are exercised over the multifarious aspects of librarianshi~library procedures, professional training, books, their subjects, and their readers--an d other important discourses of rationalized technical expertise which in Deweys day performed the very effective ideological labor of legitimating new methods and structures of capital accumulation? Do the discursive features of Deweys greatest objectified form of not also extend the properties of thenknowledge-his decimal classificationemerging forms of institutional organization, such as the modern corporation and its scientific management, to organizations of intellectual capital? And how does the discursive grid of technobureaucratic rationality, which was deployed in Deweys talk about librarianship in an attempt to stabilize the signifiers denoting subjects of books, compare to and develop historically from the grid of fundamental notions-available to every educated gentleman--which was deployed by Cutter (accepting the interpretation of Miksa, 1983b) as the basis of his alphabetical subject catalog? And if, in Cutters case, the imperatives of a stable social order grounded in a social consensus on fundamental notions achieved by proper education, and, in Deweys case, a technobureaucratic rationality serving newly emerging forms of capital accumulation, can, indeed, be disclosed in the discursive products of their intellectual labors, then we might also ask, what alternative forms of document organization were employed by librarians dedicated to the service of publics excluded from the benefits of dominant social relations? If questions like these are worth asking, then specific objectified forms of knowledge, particularly knowledge about documents and their organization by the competing library classifications and subject organizations of late 19th-century America might be revealed as closely related to specific kinds of institutional power and control over competing forms of intellectual capital. Moreover, investigations of the ways in which specific subject positions were discursively constructed in these objectified forms of knowledge should reveal the historical origins of corresponding contemporary constructions.
Ranganathans Facets

The new methods of subject control of information inaugurated in the 1930s by Ranganathan and his followers provide an interesting case study of the transformation of contradictory discursive tensions within a single theoretical project into competing objectified forms of knowledge. Ranganathans new method of subject analysis exhibited both revolutionary and conservative tendencies. On the one hand, it threatened to destabilize traditional discipline categories altogether, by dispersing them into a field of conceptual elements and syntactic rules designed to reconstruct any subject whatsoever. On the other hand, the imperatives of library shelf arrangement grafted a traditional discipline-based classification system onto these analytico-synthetic principles of subject analysis.

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The resulting instability forces questions regarding the theoretical basis of any classification system. Do its fundamental categories belong most properly to a conceptual order with a pragmatic priority, one whose stability derives from the empirical regularities of social practices grounding intellectual and academic disciplines? Or, do they belong to a conceptual order with cognitive priority, one whose stability derives from the universality of mental structures? Or, perhaps scientific realism offers the best guidance to fundamentals, providing categories that derive from the structure of the world as known to science. LIS theory presents these concepts4tellectual and academic disciplines, mental categories, or the structure of the real world-s natural and objective, as competitors on an epistemologically leveled field of hypothesis testing, verification, logic, and truth. However, answering these questions without regard to the contingencies of their discursive, social construction is the unacknowledged achievement of theoretical intellectual labor. These questions do not have exclusively epistemological answers. They raise political problems, because they derive from the competing discourses of the various factions vying for control of alternative forms of intellectual capital. For example, the conservative aspects of Ranganathans system support the continued accumulation and management of a form of intellectual capital structured by a system of differences maintained by firm distinctions between traditional intellectual disciplines and clear boundaries between their constituent stable subjects. Discourse analysis shows the relationships between the discursive features of both this system and its various representations in LIS theory, and the discursive fields beyond LIS that construct identities for information and its users that depend upon the stability of authorized disciplines and subjects. The intensity of struggles beyond LIS over the discursive construction of these identities is illustrated by the vigorous counteroffensive mounted by the National Endowment for the Humanities (see Bennett, 1984, Cheney, 1988, DSouza, 1991, 1992) on behalf of a secure, hierarchical, and clearly labeled canon, and directed against a fantasized, impertinent intellectual guerrilla warfare commanded from headquarters at Duke University. A more recent example is Patrick Buchanans culture war: inaugurated by the founding conference of his American Cause Foundation, The Culture War: A Struggle for the Soul of America. Both cases attest to the abiding and perhaps accelerating political interest in control over a form of intellectual capital whose organization accommodates the property rights long considered the exclusive assets of cultural elites. LIS theories and objectified forms of knowledge are not and have not been innocent bystanders to these struggles, as their genealogy from Dewey to Ranganathan and beyond clearly shows. With the need for state control of scientific and technical information so clearly dramatized by such triumphs of industrial research pressed into the service of the nation as V-2 rockets, U-boats, and jet aircraft, a new profession relying on discourses of information science as the source of its identity could distance itself from traditional librarianship by alliances with the power over information exercised through the revolutionary aspects of Ranganathans system. This power sought control over a form of intellectual capital especially valuable in the wake of postwar mobilization of scientific production in the interests of the nation-state. The accumulation of this new form of intellectual capital owed little to the traditional disciplines, but depended instead upon an alternative system of differences, embodied in an alternative objectified form of knowledge about the organization of information. When information is objectified as a fluid set of temporary assemblages from analytico-

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Analysis

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synthetic principles rather than as a set of fixed positions in a ~cip~e-o~ente~ hierarchical subject organization, it constructs information in a form appropriate to the mission- and problem-oriented organ&&ions of intellectual capital valued by institutionalized science and its associated information-processing technologies. These revolutionary elements of Ranganathans system, articulated most clearly by the Classilication Research Group in the United Kingdom and reaching its apogee in Austins (1971) explicit divorce of analytico-synthetic principles from shelf arrangement were seized in the US. by military-supported developers of huge-scale thesauri designed to control scientific information (see Lancaster, 1977, p. 6). Thus, a specific possibility within the new discourse of knowledge organization was realized by the multi- and ~ter~p~~ formation retrieval imperatives of centralized scientific production working for a newly concerted alliance of monopoly capital and the state. LIS theory played an obliging role, aiding the process of sedimentation, by mobii linguistic and mentalistic postulates that allowed the appropriate retrieval languages to be articulated as the expression of universal, natural, and objective structures. The Shift to Users The shift in LBs theoretical attention from iuformation system to information user is especially suited to questions of the role of LIS theories in the discursive construction of specific identities for information, its users, and its uses. A benefit of the shiR to users is that it problematixes, rather than stab&es, the related notions of information users and donation needs. When users are forced into the center of theoretical vision, questions arise of how their identities, and especially their information needs, are constructed in theoretical discourses. Precisely how are users of information positioned as subjects in user-centric information theories? From whose perspective, and in the light of what and whose interests, are their capacities and their possibilities of action viewed? Frohmann (1992a, 1992b) argued that some user-centric LIS theories of information construct information as a commodity and its users as consumers. In user-centric theoretical discourses, the power of late 2&h-century consumer capitalism, rather than the power of technobureaucracy or of the alliance of science and the state, is exercised over information and its users. Nancy Frasers (1989) discourse analyses and especially her concept of the politics of needs interpretation also show how discourse analysis can contribute to an ~derst~~g of user-centric LIS theories. Frasers (1989) analysis of the ways women are positioned as subjects in the discourses of the U.S. social welfare system makes two very important points that show the co~ections between user-centric theories and issues of power and control over information. First, after citing Foucaults statement that Need is also a political instrument, meticulously prepared, calculated, and used (quoted in Fraser, 1989, p. 161), Fraser argued for a shift of theoretical focus to the politics of needs interpretation. The interpretation of peoples needs, she pointed out, is itself a political stake, indeed sometimes the political stake (p. 145). The application of this insight to LIS is straightforward: The proliferation of LIS talk about users suggests investigations of the politics of the interpretation of information-user needs. In addition, therefore, to such indispensable structural inquiries as, for example, economic and political analyses demo~trat~g the specific ~titution~ concentrations of power over information enjoyed by the information industries (see, e.g., Mosco, 1989; Mosco & Wasko, 1988; Schiller, 1981,1984,1989; Webster & Robins, 1986), LIS also needs

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inquiries showing how information needs are constructed according to specific, and highly contestable, interpretations. Second, Frasers (1989) focus of inquiry is not needs but rather discourses about needs (p. 162). Needs talk, she pointed out, functions as a medium for the making and contesting of political claims: It is au idiom in which political conflict is played out and through which inequities are symbolically elaborated and challenged (pp. 161-162). The politics of needs interpretation is, therefore, waged not only in the implicit assumptions of institutional practices, but also in the quite explicit and overt discursive practices of contesting factions. Research on the politics of the interpretation of information-user needs involves, therefore, investigations of the norms and assumptions about formation needs implicit not only in specific practices of formation transfer, whether by actual or proposed formation systems, but also in specific theories of LIS. Theories, particularly those that feature users as their centerpiece, are an important set of discursive practices in which interpretations of needs are quite explicitly spelled out, and through which political conflict is waged over the interpretation of information needs and over the identities of information users. Frasers (1989) remarks about the politics of needs interpretation are important not only because her methods can be applied to an analysis of the theoretical elaborations of user needs in LIS, but also, and more generally, because they are based upon a concept that is crucial to discourse analysis+he institutionalized construction, through discourse, of networks of identities. The idea comes from Foucault, who in spite of his ~te~reters always considered himself a theorist of identity or subjective rather than a theorist of power. His analyses of how ~stitution~ed discourse constructs the resources by which the self is understood-its obligations and responsibilities, its possibilities of action, its essential and peripheral elements, and its relationships to others and to the institutions in which it is embedded-hold out great promise for an understanding of the historical processes whereby specific identities have been constructed for users of information. Studies of information users form a major component of LIS research. Discourse analysis of the ways in which the identities of users are constructed in LIS theories can contribute to this work by challenging the assumption that the identities studied---children, young adults, women, scientists, engineers, chief executive officers of corporations, academics in various disciplines, graduate students, undergraduates, social scientists, and many mar-are natural, or found identities, much like the objects of naively interpreted physical science. If physical science itself is today challenged by efforts to demonstrate the social construction of its natural objects (see, e.g., Bloor, 1978; Knorr-Cetina, 1981; Knorr-Cetina & Mulkay, 1983; Latour, 1987; Latour & Wooigar, 1979, Pickering 1984), then attention to theories about the construction of the subjects inhabiting our social world is even more urgent. If the resources available to articulate information needs belong to discourses, that are themselves the outcomes of political conflicts, then it is unlikely that noncritical social science methodologies, includiug the qualitative techniques of interviews and deep questionnaires, will disclose in their studies of information users any more than characteristics deriving from dominant systems of the production, distribution, organization, and ~o~umption of information.

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The analysis of LIS theories as a set of discursive practices motivates research on the politics of the interpretation of information, its users, and its uses. Discourse analysis also motivates investigations of the historical contingencies of the resources available for these interpretations. The natural, given, or objective characteristics of information users, for example, are revealed as products of relations between specific social practices and institutional attempts to achieve closure over the discursive elements available to articulate social and personal identities. LIS theories are part of the discursive means of constructing identities for information users. The pre-Deweyan cultured reader evolved in Deweys day into the subject whose information needs were constructed according to an interpretive grid of technobureaucratic procedure. Later, the scientific information imperatives of the nation-state, relying upon discourses of a rigorous, scientifically constructed universal retrieval language capable of completely surveying all knowledge, constructs a user for whom information seeking through information retrieval systems is the exercise of natural, given, and objective mental faculties. And today, in a political climate hostile to almost any social structures other than those deriving from the market imperatives of consumer capitalism, the identities of information users are constructed in LIS theory in terms congenial to consumer consumption of the electronic information awaiting delivery via the electronic superhighway. In each case, institutionalized discourses set the terms in which needs for information are articulated. A discourse analysis of the whole LIS field will not limit itself to investigations of its theories, but at this stage, theory construction is perhaps a promising place to begin. REFERENCES Austin, Derek. (1971). Two steps forward . . . . In B. I. Palmer (Ed.), It&f un education: Sir lectures on classijication (2nd ed., pp. 69-111). London: The Library Association. Beniger, James R. (1986). The control revolution: Technological and economic origins of the information society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bennett, William J. (1984). To reclaim a legacy: A report on the humanities in higher education. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Humanities. Bloor, David. (1978). Kitowledge and social imagery. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Bradley, Jana, & Sutton, Brett. (1993a). Reframing the paradigm debate. Librcuy
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