Pam McKinney here live blogging the final session from day 1 of the #LILAC23 conference, this session wasled by Darren Flynn who is a PhD student at UCL, as well as working in a library context. Darren’s study is informed by the psychology of social class, which tries to understand how people socialise within a social class, and how this affects their behaviour, and differences in values, behaviours, predispositions and preferences.
Middle class norms negatively impact on working class people, for example in the UK school system the concept of school choice is exploited by middle class people but can negatively affect working class people who cannot exercise their choice in the same way. Darren spoke about the spectrum between interdependence and independence. People from working class backgrounds are more likely to rely on their communities and act in a more interdependent way. People from middle class backgrounds tend to focus on the development of personal preferences and choice, and independence. People from working class backgrounds tend to show more empathy, and recognise others’ emotional state. People from a middle class backgrounds tend to be more self-reflective and focus on the self in relation to events.
Generally people from working class backgrounds have less power, and are more constrained by rules and procedures, so learn to overcome and navigate systems and processes. This leads to a pessimistic outlook on life. People from middle or upper class backgrounds have a higher belief that they can change their environment, and are more politically active, they are less likely to put up with situations they don’t like.
The distinction between pro-social and pro-self: people from working class backgrounds are more pro-social they give more money to charity and people from middle class backgrounds tend to be more driven by individual goal setting, and have a more transactional attitude to help giving. These dispositions are not mutually exclusive, but equity is related to the balance between them. Darren looked at 197 job advertisements published between November 2021 and October 202, and all mentioned teaching or training related to information literacy. The research looked at 50 person specifications that were included in the job advertisement. All the data were anonymised and the institutions removed, then analysed each was scored against the criteri explained above.
For example working in a team and collaborative working was evidence of interdependence, and negotiation skills were evidence of an influential mindset.. Darren performed some quantifiable analysis on the data using SPSS, to analyse the individual pairs of dispositions and the correlation between pairs. The results showed that the job adverts and job specs analysed skewed towards independence and reflective skills, which are more middle class dispositions. They were skewed towards pro-self and the more influential rather than adaptive, again the more middle class dispositions. Based on this data, there is evidence that person spec criteria are biased towards dispositions that are more middle class, which influences entry into the profession and career progression.
This affects sector diversity, but could be for a variety of reasons e.g. there is a lot of re-use of job specs without much critical analysis. Cultural reproduction is the concept that the views and dispositions of a dominant group are reproduced, so if middle class people are writing job descriptions then they will enshrine middle class dispositions. So people from marginalised backgrounds experience jarring consequences of these dispositions and has consequences for the structures in libraries. If recruitment and promotion is biased towards middle class people, are the solutions we present to students also biased towards the middle class?
Photo of the conference venue by Pam McKinney
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