A couple days ago at a conference, I made an off-the-cuff comment to the effect that the primary function of impostor syndrome in librarianship is to enrich the vast and more or less parasitic apparatus of consultants, motivational speakers, thought leaders, and vendors adjacent to the field and the services we provide. Such persons are naturally invested in librarians lacking a sense of what they’re doing, after all, and can only profit from a state of affairs where librarians succumb to gullibility and stupidity because they think themselves incapable of understanding or solving problems. A couple people on Twitter thought that was an oversimplification.
Impostor syndrome in libraries springs from many sources and plays out in varying ways. Other contributing factors include:
The stupendous hyper-proliferation of library school graduates, which at best calls into question the illusion that the MLIS is a credential which points to any prestige or ability to assert one’s expertise on anything.
The tendency of librarianship, as an educational milieu, to attract (deliberately, it must be said, on the part of the library schools) people who have accurately assessed their abysmal post-undergrad job prospects and are subsequently looking for a low-bar labour sink in which to languish for a couple of years, hopefully emerging more qualified to survive, or who are attracted to LIS because of internal narratives (“I love books!” “I love libraries!”) that have little or nothing to do with the working environments in which graduates will find themselves.
The horrible, and often ultimately accurate, sense library school students have that they’re not learning anything of value at library school, or the sense of many students (who have already completed other undergraduate or postgraduate degrees) that what’s being taught is sophistry.
Following on from this, the compound anxiety many LIS professionals feel in new job roles for which they feel they are poorly prepared, or in working environments whose context they understand poorly owing to a lack of prior experience, which is a symptom of:
The sheer diversity of roles & specialties in “LIS,” which means “knowing what you’re doing” in one specialty or role may mean neglecting others. This state of affairs leaves people (rightly) asking “what does it mean to be a librarian? what are our common skills, common virtues?” – to which, as we all know, there is no easy answer.
The overwhelming whiteness and wealth of librarianship, which results in a hyper-privileged and strongly homogenous group of people, who in many cases really don’t have to work especially hard for a living, feeling a nagging sense that it’s all too easy. They’re right! It’s human nature to cast about for existential crisis when the psyche perceives some guilty imbalance in Fortuna’s wheel.¹ This is related to the narcissism of small differences which pervades most LIS discourse.
A corollary of the above, the worrisome feelings of culpability and externalisation associated with the guilt librarians feel over earning comparatively more money and prestige than technicians and clerks who perform substantially similar (read: increasingly identical) job roles.
Gender narratives which insidiously and constantly undermine women’s self-confidence and assertiveness in public life in a generalised sense, which to our questioning mind begs an experiential template (”aha! it must be impostor syndrome!”) that we can examine and critique in the specific sense.
The very real fact that the world is fucked-up, weird, and in the process of profound disintegration (as in we’re just coming to realise that our civilisation is coming to an end, and more rapidly than any of us would like), which naturally leaves people feeling a bit out-of-sorts, ESPECIALLY when they work in abstract white-collar jobs which don’t very obviously contribute to the core economic necessities of human life.
What’s not clear from any of this is that our prevailing approach to “impostor syndrome” (viz. expressions and narratives of support, commiseration, permission, a sense that “we’re all in this together”) actually does much of anything to undermine it as a force. Regardless, a better understanding of the foundations of impostor syndrome could probably do us all good.
There is, of course, a large & well-attested body of formal and informal writing on impostor syndrome out there, dating back nearly 40 years. Early investigations of the phenomenon tended to focus on a clinical conception of the impostor phenomenon as an acute mental health issue, rooted in anxiety and insecurity perhaps perhaps ultimately deriving from a stressful childrearing environment, that affects a comparatively small number of people. Subsequent research has also posited (as this post does) an ongoing affective dimension to the phenomenon. More recent scholarship has suggested that up to 70% of people may find themselves exhibiting features of the impostor phenomenon at some point in their lives, so it’s hardly restricted to LIS or to academe. People experiencing IP can fall anywhere on a continuum, it seems, so while there’s no reason to discount any individual’s experience, it’s also difficult to point to a Unified Theory or a One True Impostor Syndrome. As with so much in the realm of psychology, It’s Just Not As Simple As All That. A friend has suggested a few resources worth reading for those who might wish to get familiar with the general backstory.
Pauline Rose Clance and Suzane Imes, “The Impostor Phenomenon in High Achieving Women: Dynamics and Therapeutic Intervention” (1978)
Jaruwan Sakulku and James Alexander, “The Impostor Phenomenon” (2011)
Joseph R. Ferrari and Ted Thompson, “Impostor Fears: Links With Self-Presentational Concerns and Self-Handicapping Behaviors“ (2005)
R. O’Brian McElwee and Tricia Yurak, “The Phenomenology of the Impostor Phenomenon” (2010)
Mirijam Neureiter and Eva Traut -Mattausch, “An Inner Barrier to Career Development: Preconditions of the Impostor Phenomenon and Consequences for Career Development” (2016)
¹ Anecdotally I’ve noticed that public librarians I know don’t tend to talk about “impostor syndrome” in the context of their professional expertise or ability to succeed in their work environments, but instead in the context of shared discourse with academic librarians in particular. “Oh you all use such fancy words and spend so much time talking about thresholds and frameworks and problematising things, you must know so much more & be so much cleverer! I don’t know anything about those sorts of things!” This isn’t true. In many cases, academic librarians are just elitist assholes who are strongly insulated from the everyday sufferings of the world and who lack any frame of reference for critiquing the sophistry of their own work. I know this because I am one.
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