Journal ArticleDOI
Face to Face with the ‘Sovereign Consumer’: Service Quality and the Changing Role of Professional Academic Librarians:
Annette Davies,Ian Kirkpatrick +1 more
TLDR
In this paper, the impact of service quality initiatives on the role of professional academic librarians is considered, and it is argued that these initiatives offer a powerful legitimating device which is currently being used to support radical changes in professional work.Abstract:
This article considers the impact of service quality initiatives on the role of professional academic librarians.1 It is argued that these initiatives—by asserting the dominant role of ‘sovereign’ consumers—offer a powerful legitimating device which is currently being used to support radical changes in professional work. One possible outcome of this is a weakening of professional autonomy and power to unilaterally determine levels and standards of service. The case of academic librarians is adopted to illustrate these points. Firstly, two ideal types of library and professional organisation, developed from a review of the librarian literature, are compared. These are the ‘traditional’ and the ‘service quality-led’ models. Following this, a case study of an academic library which has recently adopted various quality improvement strategies is discussed. The results of this investigation suggest that not only have service quality initiatives provided a legitimation for radical change, but they have also generated a number of unintended consequences and hidden costs for the users of library services. Finally, some of the wider problems associated with service quality initiatives in the public sector are discussed.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Customer Care in a Consumer Society: Smiling and Sometimes Meaning it?
TL;DR: In this article, a focus for research by drawing on two emerging and largely distinct streams of literature on service/emotion work and organizations in consumer society is proposed, where experiences of ''customer care'' and related ''corporate culture' initiatives are examined.
Journal ArticleDOI
A Report on Librarian-Faculty Relations from a Sociological Perspective
TL;DR: This paper reviewed social science and library studies literatures on librarian-faculty relations, and presented a preliminary sociological analysis of these relations, finding an asymmetrical disconnection between both groups: Librarians and faculty identify a disconnection that keeps the two separated, but only librarians view this disconnection as problematic.
Journal ArticleDOI
Managerialism and Accountability in Higher Education: the Gendered Nature of Restructuring and the Costs to Academic Service
Annette Davies,Robyn Thomas +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined the impact of New Public Management (NPM) on the constitution of professional identities and the implications for academic service in UK higher education, and found that a more gendered academic profile is being promoted which, for a range of reasons, women find more difficult to confront.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Consumer Rules
TL;DR: The authors deconstructs the rhetoric of marketing and provides a fresh and sceptical view about its potential to deliver the benefits it claims, except perhaps in a limited sphere of the financial services.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
The cult[ure] of the customer
TL;DR: The notion of the sovereign consumer as a paradigm for effective forms of organizational relations has been explored in a wide variety of organizational developments: just-in-time, total quality management, culture change programmes as discussed by the authors.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Librarian: From Occupation to Profession?
TL;DR: In this article, the authors consider the problem of downward social mobility in an open class stratification system, where each occupation has a higher or lower average income than others, and those which have risen have done so at the expense of others.
Journal ArticleDOI
What is ‘popular music’?
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine the way in which popular music is constructed through the interlocking effects of two structures which they call the economic and the discursive, and argue that the perceived lack of vertical integration in this area of the music business is an aid in the attempt to construct popular music as a cultural artifact and therefore as something neither subject to economic based standards of usefulness nor subject to commercial pressures.
Journal ArticleDOI
Quality and public services
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that the issue of quality in the public service is an inherently political one, and that there are important problems of information asymmetries between service providers and service consumers.
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