I think it is crucial we remember that “vocational awe” as a concept is two-pronged: it is meant to describe how librarians (& anyone working in a profession often described as a “vocation”, such as teachers, healthcare professionals, etc) are made “easy to exploit” because they are primed not to see their job as “just a job”, and it is also meant to underline a mechanism by which members of those professions will virulently defend their jobs & the institutions they are part of against any critique, most notably critiques that attempt to articulate how those institutions & those professions can be oppressive & violent & perpetuate exploitative & bigoted norms within society:
I challenge the notion that many have taken as axiomatic that libraries are inherently good and democratic [emphasis mine], and that librarians, by virtue of working in a library, are responsible for this “good” work. This sets up an expectation that any failure of libraries is largely the fault of individuals failing to live up to the ideals of the profession, rather than understanding that the library as an institution is fundamentally flawed. [emphasis mine]
By the very nature of librarianship being an institution, it privileges those who fall within the status quo. Therefore librarians who do exist outside librarianship’s center can often more clearly see the disparities between the espoused values and the reality of library work. But because vocational awe refuses to acknowledge the library as a flawed institution [emphasis mine], when people of color and other marginalized librarians speak out, their accounts are often discounted or erased. Recently, Lesley Williams of Evanston, Illinois, made headlines for being fired from her library due to comments (on her personal social media accounts), illustrating the hypocritical actions of her library in regards to the lack of equitable access to information. Although she was advocating for the core library value of equitable access, similar to that of the “Connecticut Four,” her actions were regarded as unprofessional.
Ironically, this focus on the way-s in which librarians et al are “victimised” by our professional context, while disregarding the aspect of “vocational awe” which is meant to critique all the ways in which members of “vocational” professions will close ranks & lock shields against any kind of analysis that does not accept those institutions as always-already perfect, could be considered an example of vocational awe!
If libraries are sacred spaces, then it stands to reason that its workers are priests. As detailed above, the earliest librarians were also priests and viewed their work as a service to God and their fellow man. Out of five hundred librarians surveyed, ninety-five percent said the service orientation of the profession motivated them to become librarians. Another study found that the satisfaction derived by serving people is what new librarians thrive on. Similarly, many Christians describe their religious faith as “serving God,” and to do so requires a life spent in service. Christians often reference Mark 10:45 to describe the gravity of a call to service: “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Considering their conjoined history, it should come as no surprise that librarians, just like monks and priests, are often imagined as nobly impoverished as they work selflessly for the community and God’s sake.
We are advocating for ourselves & our rights as workers while emphasising, ceaselessly & with great insistence, all the “selfless” ways in which we “serve” our community & how our “self-sacrificing” “passion” for our “mission” makes us “easy to exploit”. We are not advocating for ourselves by pointing out that a library is just a workplace, that being a librarian is just a job, & that if my cousin who works at an insurance company isn’t expected to buy work materials with her own money, to put in unpaid overtime as a matter of course, to accept that her vacation days are basically a fiction, to see her duties inflate constantly with no acknowledgment or compensation, to cobble together part-time positions for the whole of her career, etc, then it shouldn’t be expected of us either & really shouldn’t be expected of anyone. We are not deconstructing the outlooks that underlie vocational awe, we are reifying them.
What makes us “worthy” of advocacy & of protection are, specifically, our willingness to “sacrifice” ourselves for others & for the “good” of the community. This marks us as “exceptional”, “different” from “other” workers who are “different” from us because they are not motivated by “passion” (which like, for “passion” read “vocation”), & makes us unable to identify all the points of contact between our experiences on the job & that of a lot of other people in service positions. Our experiences of “exploitation” (quotes here because good gd, we do in fact have a white-collar job indoors & I think there is something a little obscene sometimes about the ways in which our profession discusses our issues when our offices are cleaned by like undocumented women of colour to whom most of us never even talk & with whom most of us feel no particular solidarity as workers) are not unique & are in fact common across many public-facing industries such as food service or retail - would you believe me if I told you how much overlap there is between my professional experiences as a librarian & that of friends who work the floor at Starbucks or at Aldi? A lot of the manipulative & coercive tactics their bosses use to make them accept job creep, excessive & haphazard scheduling, danger on the job, overmonitoring & micromanagement, but also the pressures they encounter when they take sick days or vacation days, etc are carbon copies of what I’ve seen happen to me & others within libraries. Bosses are bosses are bosses, whether your profession is one that is typically treated as a “vocation” within public discourse or not; it is not true that the ways in which we are mistreated are completely & wholly unique to us. When we accept this framing, we are essentially positioning librarianship as “set apart” from other professions, libraries as completely distinct from any other type of workplace & as wholly unique among them, & ourselves as essentially different from other workers, in exactly the way that “vocational awe” as a concept intends to critique!
As I mentioned earlier, vocational awe ties into the phenomena of job creep and undercompensation in librarianship due to the professional norms of service-oriented and self-sacrificing workplaces. But creating professional norms around self-sacrifice and underpay self-selects those who can become librarians. If the expectation built into entry-level library jobs includes experience, often voluntary, in a library, then there are class barriers built into the profession. Those who are unable to work for free due to financial instability are then forced to either take out loans to cover expenses accrued or switch careers entirely. Librarians with a lot of family responsibilities are unable to work long nights and weekends. Librarians with disabilities are unable to make librarianship a whole-self career.
We are reinforcing those norms when we focus exclusively on how much we sacrifice for our communities & how “passionate” we are about our jobs as the primary reason why our communities should care about what happens to us - when the reality is, what would actually help us is an ability to see & recognise all the ways in which we are not unique, in which even within industries that are not identified as relying on “altruism” & “creativity” (which like, if you think there’s no altruism or creativity in working retail or in like industrial soldering or whatever I’ve got news for you, but that’s a different topic - who is marked as having a “creative” or “altruistic” job in our discourse? why is the power plant maintenance worker who gets up time & time again in the middle of the night to solve complex, urgent industrial problems with no standard solutions, using his hands & his intellect & his imagination, & this so that people will have continuous uninterrupted access to electricity, not considered to have a “creative” or “altruistic” profession within those discussions?), workers are exploited in ways that will be familiar & recognisable to us. We cannot use vocational awe as a conceptual delimiter between professions because that actually defeats the purpose of vocational awe as a framework. We are accepting & perpetuating the idea that we are markedly & measurably “different” from other workers, & we render ourselves unable to analyse the institutions we are a part of as perfectible structures which are not ontologically good or even ontologically different from other workplaces but which are, rather, just workplaces, with bosses & employees, & where exploitation will occur along lines and through tactics that are familiar to many, many people across a whole gamut of professions.
I think the essential conclusion is this quote:
It is no accident that librarianship is dominated by white women. Not only were white woman assumed to have the innate characteristics necessary to be effective library workers due to their true womanhood, characteristics which include missionary-mindedness, servility, and altruism and spiritual superiority and piety, but libraries have continually been “complicit in the production and maintenance of white privilege.” These white women librarians in public libraries during the turn-of-the-century U.S. participated in selective immigrant assimilation and Americanization programs, projects “whose purpose was to inculcate European ethnics into whiteness”.
When we focus on our own victimhood, our own selflessness, our own defencelessness in the face of exploitation, the fact that we are just “too good for our own good” - what norms are we reinforcing within our profession? What foundational myths are we repeating & perpetuating, & what needs to they serve in us? Where do our loyalties lie, & what, ultimately, are we defending?
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