Into the Future: The Foundations of Library and Information Services in the Post‐Industiral Era (2nd edition)

Citation

Duff, A.S. (1999), "Into the Future: The Foundations of Library and Information Services in the Post‐Industiral Era (2nd edition)", Library Review, Vol. 48 No. 7, pp. 49-50. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.1999.48.7.49.5

One still meets librarians who loudly profess themselves to be “practitioners” with no time for the “abstractions” of information society studies. Into the Future is a short, sharp refutation of such Philistine nonsense. It maintains that a forward‐looking librarianship must grasp the philosophical underpinnings of the current socio‐cultural environment. More particularly, it provides a wealth of evidence to the effect that a better understanding of the information society can help librarians in their “attempt to write their own job descriptions in the information age”.

The first two chapters introduce skilfully the whole information society debate, giving Harvard sage Daniel Bell, his due as the central exponent of post‐industrialism. Bell′s controversial doctrines, as set out in works such as The Coming of Post‐Industrial Society (1973), are explored critically from several key angles. His tendency towards technological determinism, his technocratic politics, and his apparent willingness to portray information as a commodity as opposed to a public good, are all discussed with special respect to their implications for the theory and practice of librarianship. The authors show that, while Bell may have been widely ignored by librarians at least until recently, his ideas nevertheless infiltrated mainstream professional thinking by way of F.W. Lancaster′s writings on the “paperless society”. Thus, there is no escape from information sociology, for it has largely framed the ongoing internecine polemics over “fee versus free”, “print versus electronic”, and “access versus ownership”.

There is more, much more. Chapter 3 delves into theories of the role of the state and their implications for information policy. The discussion is tied closely to the situation in the USA, taking the Constitution as the point of departure and profiling President Clinton as the “first post‐industrial democrat”. Only a fool would deny that American policies have a major impact on the rest of the world, so there is much in this chapter that can illuminate librarianship everywhere. For example, the authors note that the ideology of privatization championed by Reagan has continued to flourish in the supposedly left‐wing Clinton administration: substitute the word “Thatcher” for “Reagan” and “Blair” for “Clinton” and you have a perfect description of political apostasy in the UK.

Subsequent chapters examine the sociology of professions and work, again very competently. The book′s conclusions, however, are weak. The authors endorse without adequate argumentation a relativist philosophical position on the meaning of justice and freedom (“essentially contested concepts”). Moreover, to say that “librarians, and their opponents in the information‐as‐commodity school, must agree to disagree and then turn to serious attempts to argue well about these concepts”, is to say nothing at all. By studiously refusing to take sides, either in normative political philosophy or the (derivative) professional debates, the authors let themselves down at the last hurdle after a vigorous run.

In the main, though, this is a wide‐ranging, erudite, incisive and eloquent study. There are only 130 pages of text, but they are densely populated with ideas and citations. It remains to be asked how much the second edition differs from the first, published in 1993. Barring the section on Clinton and the curious insertion of an extra author on the title page, very little appears to have been added. In fact, as the preface points out, the second edition is an abbreviation of the first. Thus any recommendation must be conditional: this is a very good book, but buy it only if you do not have the first edition.