College and Research Libraries L. CARROLL DeWEESE Status Concerns and Library Professionalism In an exploratory study~ specific hypotheses concerning the rela- tionship between status concerns and professionalization of individual university librarians were tested. Status concerns are found to be an important socio-psychological determinant of professionalization. They are related to such factors as age~ marital status~ work importance, work alternatives~ importance of library associations~ desire for auton- omy~ and degree of conflict with faculty. THE URGE to professionalize occupa- tional groups can be attributed to the status concerns of individuals compris- ing the "profession." Occupation has gradually replaced traditionally accept- ed status-assigning attributes such as an- cestry, ethnicity~ religion, and political affiliation. In addition to being a de- terminate of status, it is a principal ve- hicle of status ohange. Occupation re- veals more about a person's social stand- ing than any other single attribute or classification, with the possible excep- tion of race. A person is able to achieve status to the extent that he is able to choose his occupation. Conversely, his status becomes ascribed or fixed to the extent that he is unable to choose his occupation. The choice of an occupation assumes particular importance for indi- viduals living in a country such as the United States, where social advancement is highly valued. One would expect occupational char- acteristics to be closely related to status concerns. While occupational member- ship guarantees an individual certain Mr. DeWeese is a graduate student in the Sociology Department, Purdue Univer- sity, Lafayette, Indiana. privileges and immunities, it also im- poses certain restrictions and responsi- bilities upon him. The status of an oc- cupational group member is based more upon his predictable behavior than up- on his immediately observable behavior. Furthermore, a member's position with- in an occupation determines his status both within that occupation and outside of it. The relationship between an in- dividual's rank within the administra- tive hierarchy and his own jurisdiction- al responsibilities also affects his status. For example, a head librarian usually receives a higher status than a reference librarian. If a practitioner wishes to improve his occupational status, he must adopt one of three strategies: ( 1) leave his occupation for one of higher status; ( 2) increase his status within his occu- pation; or ( 3) improve the status of his occupation. Because specialization and other factors make it difficult for a practitioner to change professions, one would expect him to opt for occupa- tional or professional enhancement. Moreover, since his occupation is an im- portant status determinant, one would expect it to serve as the focal point for his status concerns. However, other af- I 31 32 I College & Research Libraries • January 1972 filiations such as family and church must also be considered. But if these alternative sources of status reward are held relatively constant, one can assume that an individual's status concerns will be directed toward his occupation. The desire of an occupational group to pro- fessionalize appears, then, to result in part from status concerns and from the absence of alternative status rewards. It is equally probable that structural characteristics of developing profes- sions, including long periods of inten- sive training in specialized areas, func- tion as a "closing system"; by relegating an individual to a specific «slot" and by precluding alternative sources of status reward, the system in effect limits his status improvement options. This leads one to expect that professional and oc- cupational enhancement is inversely re- lated to the openness of a social system -i.e., professional and occupational en- hancement is greater in a closing system. Goode has considered these structural characteristics of professionalization in view of their potential impact on the field of librarianship.1 He maintains that the status of librarianship is rela- tively limited, and that this limited sta- tus is ascribed to practicing librarians. If this is the ca-se, librarians who want to improve their own status must do so outside of their field (e.g., leaving the profession for "better" work, marrying well, writing a successful novel while remaining a librarian, etc.) or within their field (e.g., increasing their own professional status, or the status of the profession itself, or both). Since the professional librarian ex- pends much time and effort in develop- ing his skills and expertise, and since his status depends upon his professional af- filiation, it is likely that he will endeav- or to increase his status within the con- text of librarianship. He might, for ex- ample, elect to emphasize a particular area, subarea, or movement within the field in order to increase its status. More- over, a librarian with high status aspira- tions will probably be more profes- sionally oriented and concerned with the professionalization of librarianship than a librarian with low status aspira- tions. Librarianship as a profession consti- tutes a closing system of status. If pro- fessional and occupational advancement is in fact higher within a closing system, it is likely to be strongly emphasized within librarianship. This does appear to be the case. Librarians write and talk a great deal about the professional na- ture of their occupation, their status relative to other groups, and other relat- ed concerns. They appear to be very concerned about their "image." Some li- brarians want to change the title of their profession to something like «me- dia science" in order to make their pro- fession sound more "professional." Nearly all librarians are concerned about being confused with clerks. Aca- demic librarians tend to envy faculty status. In short, librarianship would be an ideal testing-ground for exploratory research undertaken to determine rela- tionships between status concerns and professionalization. If, in fact, such status concerns do ex- ist among academic librarians, one can expect to encounter conflicts between li- brarians and faculty centering around the issue of autonomy. Professionals or- dinarily have control over their own af- fairs, and autonomy in their particular area of specialization. If a professional wants to improve the professional na- ture of his field, he should be especially concerned about his field's autonomy; however, an individual attempting to in- crease his autonomy tends to usurp a certain measure of autonomy from his clients. The clients may eventually be- gin to feel that they are losing status in an area previously under their control, and conflicts are likely to result. The in- dividual librarian is apt to perceive these conflicts; in fact, there should be ' a direct correlation between the impor- tance of the perceived potential status gain and the amount of conflict per- ceived. To the extent that faculty mem- bers have more status than academic li- brarians, and are therefore in a position to exercise some control over them ( e.g., the faculty's right to order certain books or make decisions autonomously regarding library policies), greater con- flict can be anticipated. Due to struc- tural limitations of librarianship, many faculty members view librarians as lit- tle more than glorified clerks. Some even feel that they are in a better position to determine how librarians should act and what they should do than the librarians themselves. Similarly, the degree to which an academic librarian is profes- sionally oriented is directly related to his desire for professional recognition and autonomy. An exploratory study of the thirty- nine professional librarians working in a large midwestern land-grant university library was conducted in order to deter- mine the intensity of their status con- cerns, the extent of their professional- ization, and other relevant factors. In- terviews using a focused interview ap- proach questioned the librarians inten- sively in order to identify their con- cerns, perceptions, problems, and con- flicts. 2 A focused interview approach means that an interview guide, based upon a provisional analysis of the · area of overall concern, is used to bring the central topics of inquiry into focus for the interviewer. This approach elicits a broad range of response in addition to a high degree of specificity of re- sponse. The approach was used to gain as much perceptual information as pos- sible from each respondent about his professional environment as he person- ally perceives it. An investigator trained in sociology acted as interviewer. Great effort was exerted to control bias and to assure the anonymity of each respon- dent. The length of interviews ranged Status Concerns I 33 from one session lasting one hour and twenty minutes with one librarian to three sessions totaling six hours with another. The average interview lasted slightly over two hours. The data obtained were coded and analyzed. Individuals were classified ac- cording to explicit criteria into high, mixed, and low status concern types. The same procedure was used to classify other data into relevant categories. Due to the exploratory nature of the study and to the limited size of the sample, measures of statistical significance were not used. Since the direction and strength of associations were predicted, and since all the variables used were as- sumed to be ordinal, a very powerful nonparametric measure of association called "gamma" was computed to assess the direction and strength of relation- ships.3 It should be emphasized that a "shot-gun" approach was not used to identify meaningful relationships in the data. The data confirmed the pre- dicted directions of all of the relation- ships studied. It was predicted, for example, that younger, less-experienced librarians would assign greater importance to oc- cupationally related status concerns than would older, more-experienced li- brarians. The status concerns of older librarians should diminish at the same rate that their career opportunities di- minish and other concerns assume great- er importance for them. This trend was identified in the data. Table 1, where the enti_re sample of librarians is rep- resented, reveals a moderately low de- gree of association with a gamma at -.2332 level of association. In Table 2, which uses only ideal typical cells to clarify relationships, the measure of as- sociation is at a relatively high -.7142 degree of association. Librarianship is stereotyped as a wom- an's profession. What effect this image has had upon the status concerns of males and females within the profes- 34 I College & Research Libraries • January 1972 Age 24-34 35-45 46-54 55-65 Total TABLE 1 AGE AND STATUs CoNCERN LEvEL Data Status Concern Level High 6 5 3 4 18 Mixed 4 2 4 1 11 'Y = -.2332 TABLE 2 Low 1 3 2 4 10 Total 11 10 9 9 39 !DEAL TYPE AGE AND STATUS CONCERN LEVEL Age 24-34 55-65 Total Sex Male Female Total Data Status Concern Level High 6 4 10 'Y = -.7142 TABLE 3 Low 1 4 5 SEX AND STATUS CoNCERN LEVEL Data Status Concern Level High Mixed Low 10 8 18 6 5 11 'Y = .0500 6 4 10 Total 7 8 15 Total 22 17 39 sion was not predicted in advance. As can be seen in Table 3, virtually no dif- ference in status concern levels was found between males and females in the. sample. The level of association is so low as to be insignificant. Although sex does not seem to ac- count for differences in status concerns, marital status does. Since marriage con- stitutes a major alternative for status satisfaction and reward, one would ex- pect married males and females to show less status concern toward librarianship than single males and females. Differ- ences in status concern levels would also be expected between married males and females. The identity of a married man, playing the role of 'oreadwin- ner," is reinforced primarily by his ca- reer, whereas the identity of a married woman playing the role of ''housewife and mother" is reinforced primarily in the home. Thus, the status concern level of married men should not vary signifi- cantly from that of single men, whereas married women should show lower pro- fessional status concern than single women. These predictions are borne out in the sample. Tables 4 and 5 reveal that single men and women in the sample were more concerned about the status of their pro- fession than were married men and women. As Table. 4 confirms, there is a relatively low association in the predict- ed direction between married and single males and their status concerns. Table 5 reveals a moderate degree of associa- tion in the predicted direction, by indi- cating that single females are more con- cerned about their occupational status than are married females. It should be emphasized, however, that in terms of both Table 4 and Table 5 and of the variables used, the measures of status concern associated with marriage status and occupation are. quite strong. It has been assumed heretofore that the more a person identifies with his oc- cupation, the more status concerned he will be about career and occupational matters. If this assumption is correct, single men and women should be more conscious of the importance of work in their lives than married males and fe- males. This assumption was substantiat- ed by the answers to: "What do you consider to be your chief satisfactions in life.?" Tables 6 and 7 show the re- sults. It can be seen that four out of fifteen, or 26.7 percent of the married men failed to mention their work as a chief satisfaction, while none of the single men failed to mention the impor- tance of work in their lives. Four out of five, or 80 percent of th-e married fe- males failed to mention work as a chief satisfaction, whereas orily five out of 12, j TABLE 4 MARRIAGE STATUS AND STATUS CoNcERN LEVEL: MALES Data Status Concern Level Males High Mixed Low Total Married Single Total 6 5 4 4 1 2 10 6 6 'Y = .1764 ideal case 'Y = .1429 TABLE 5 15 7 22 MARRIAGE STATUS AND STATUS CONCERN LEVEL: FEMALES Females Married Single Total Data Status Concern Level High Mixed Low 1 3 1 7 2 3 8 5 4 'Y = .3333 ideal case 'Y = .4000 TABLE 6 MALEs AND PLAcE oF WoRK IN LIFE Place of Work in Life Not Total 5 12 17 Males First Second Third Fourth Mentioned Tot. Married 2 8 0 1 4 15 Single 3 1 3 0 0 7 Total 5 9 3 1 4 22 TABLE 7 FEMALES AND PLACE OF WoRK IN LIFE Place of Work in Life Not Females First Second Third Fourth Mentioned ·Tot. Married 0 Single 4 Total 4 0 2 2 1 0 1 TABLE 8 0 1 1 4 5 9 5 12 17 WORK ALTERNATIVES AND STATUS CONCERN LEVEL Data Status Concern Level Work Alternatives High Mixed Low Total Could leave 3 3 4 10 Mixed 3 4 3 10 Couldn't leave 11 5 3 19 Total 17 12 10 39 'Y = .3250 ideal case 'Y = .5714 Status Concerns I 35 or 41.7 percent of the single women failed to mention it. Although not presented here, a sep- arate analysis revealed that the more status concerned librarians are, the more likely they are to mention work as a chief satisfaction in life. This finding tends to support the assumption that the more important an alternative behavior is for an individual, the more status con- cerned he will be concerning that status satisfaction alternative. In short, this means that a librarian who perceives his work as important will be status con- cerned about it. Some librarians feel they could, if they wanted to, leave the profession via either lateral or upward mobility. Oth- ers feel that it would be extremely dif- ficult to leave librarianship for some other occupation or profession, or feel they simply would not want to leave librarianship. Since a person's occupa- tion constitutes a major source of status satisfaction, he can be expected to place even greater emphasis upon it if he feels that other occupational alterna- tives are unavailable to him. If this is the case, he will experience closure and his status concerns should increase. The data presented in Table 8 support this assumption, and indicate a relatively moderate association in the predicted di- rection. The ideal type analysis reveals a relatively strong association with a gamma of .5714 in the predicted direc- tion. When a librarian wishes to leave the profession, but sees few status re- ward alternatives open to him, his status concerns with reference to librarianship increase. The most highly status concerned li- brarian, then, will tend to be a young, single male or female librarian who per- ceives few available career alternatives. The least status concerned librarian, ac- cording to the data collected, will tend to be an older married woman who sees many equal or preferable work alterna- tives available to her. Other categories 36 I College & Research Libraries • January 1972 of librarians will tend to fall some- where in between these status concern extremes. A variety of factors affects the amount of status concern an individual has with regard to his occupation or ca- reer. But the question remains as to the effect a person's status concerns has up- on the professionalization of his occu- pation. Earlier in this paper it was con- firmed that the higher the status con- cerns of an individual, the more con- cerned he will be with the professionali- zation of his occupation. One indication of a person's professional concern is re- flected in his view of the importance of professional associations, and his relation to it. There is a direct relationship be- tween how much control a person exer- cises over his own professional affairs and the way he views himself, or is viewed by his peers, as a professional. In the interview, the librarians were asked, "How important are professional associations for the library profession?" Table 9 shows that the librarians were expressing themselves in the expected direction with a strongly moderate as- sociation reflected by a gamma of -.4639. The ideal type case analysis gamma is a somewhat strong association, and lends additional support to the anticipated trend. High status concerned librarians are more likely to regard library associa- ·tions as important than low status con- cerned librarians. The librarians were also asked, "Should professional associations be more important for the library profes- sion?" Table 10 reveals the expected as- sociation between the status concern lev- el of a librarian and the probability of his feeling that professional associa- tions should be more important. The answers to the preceding two questions indicate a substantial correla- tion between status concerns and the de- gree to which an individual emphasizes bis professional associations. The second and perhaps more impor- tant indicator of an individual's pro- fessional concern is predicated upon the issue of autonomy. The librarians were asked, "Should librarians have more control over their own affairs?" Table 11 indicates the responses. A high de- gree of association is found, with rela- tively high -.6996 gam-ma level of asso- ciation and with an extremely high -.9047 ideal type case gam-ma level of as- sociation. It does appear to be true that a high status concerned librarian is more likely to value autonomy than a low status concerned librarian. Although only limited measures are used to judge an individual's profes- sional emphasis, status does seem to be a very important factor in the profes- sionalization of one's occupation. High status concerned librarians tend to be more professionalized than low status concerned librarians. A status concerned individual is not only likely to perceive conflict regarding TABLE 9 STATUs CoNCERN LEVEL AND IMPORTANCE OF LIBRARY AssociATIONS Status Concerns High Mixed Low Total Data Library Associations Important Unimportant 17 1 10 1 8 2 35 4 'Y = -.4639 ideal case 'Y = -.6190 TABLE 10 STATUs CoNCERN LEVEL AND "SHOULD PROFESSIONAL AssociATIONs BE MoRE IMPORTANT?" Data Total 18 11 10 39 Should Professional Associations Be More Important? Status Concerns Yes No Total High Mixed Low Total 13 8 5 26 5 3 5 13 'Y = -.2857 ideal case 'Y = -.4444 18 11 10 39 the issue of autonomy, but also to be concerned about a conflict situation. This is particularly likely if he per- ceives himself as meriting higher status. At the university studied, a host of fac- tors evidenced that, with regard to sta- tus, university administrators explicitly and implicitly considered librarians to be second-class citizens in comparison to the faculty. When the study was con- ducted, several strong implicit differ- ences in status did appear to exist among many librarians and faculty members. If an individual librarian is to improve his status, he must gain fac- Status Concerns High Mixed Low Total Status Concerns High Low Tctal TABLE 11 STATUS CoNCERN LEVEL AND WANT MoRE AuTONOMY Data Want More Autonomy Yes No 15 3 10 1 2 8 27 12 'Y = - .6996 ideal case 'Y = - .9047 TABLE 12 STATUS CoNCERN LEVEL AND CONFLICT WITH FACULTY Data Conflict with Faculty High 14 4 18 'Y =-.6800 TABLE 13 Low 4 6 10 Total 18 11 10 39 Total 18 10 28 STATUS CoNCERN LEVEL AND MENTIONED FACULTY STATUS DIFFERENTIAL Status Concerns High Low Total Data Mentioned Faculty Status Differential Yes 8 1 9 'Y = -.7560 No 10 9 19 T otal 18 10 28 Status Concerns I 31 ulty status at both an explicit and im- plicit level. The librarians in the study were asked, "What are. some of the persistent sources of difficulty that librarians feel in relationship to the faculty?" Since there is a need for distinctiveness only the answers of the high and low status concerned librarians will be considered. It was found that the low status con- cerned librarians reported relatively lit- tle difficulty with the faculty. Among them, two mentioned no conflict, one re- membered only one. instance of conflict, three indicated minor complaints, and one librarian indicated concern about not "being accepted as equal members of the faculty." The low status con- cerned librarians' answers to this ques- tion ranged in length from twenty to eighty-six words, with an average length of forty-five words. In response to the same question, the high status concerned librarians answers were longer, more detailed, and ex- pressed more status concern than those of the low status concerned librarians. All the high status concerned librarians mentioned conflict with faculty; quite a few answers were very strong, eight answers were distinctly longer than the low status concerned librarians' mean answer, and only four were relatively moderate. The range in length was from twenty-five to 230 words, with an average length of seventy-eight words. High status concerned librarians re- ported more conflicts with faculty than low status concerned librarians. Table 12 classifies their responses in quantita- tive form. A very high association is in- dicated by a gamma of -.6800. Responses are classified in Table 13 in terms of those which clearly referred to the relationship between the conflict problem and the status differentials be- tween librarians and faculty. An ex- tremely strong association with a -. 7560 gamma level of association is revealed in the predicted direction. Status con- 38 I College & Research Libraries • January 1972 cerns do appear to have an important bearing on explaining the presence of reported conflict between librarians and faculty, and conflict does seem to be en- gendered, or at least perceived, to the extent that librarians try to improve their status. Status concerns, then, do seem to be an important social-psychological deter- minant of professionalization. The trend toward professionalization does relate to status concerns and to the ab- sence of alternative status rewards, just as professional and occupational en- hancement is inversely related to the openness of a social system as perceived by an individual. Additional research and closer analy- sis should be devoted to this topic. Larg- er samples need to be gathered and stud- ied so that stronger experimental con- trols can be exerted. Questions relating to the relationship between the location of an individual within an organization and the effect this has upon status con- cerns need to be examined. A large-scale organizational environment tends to hamper the working professional's per- sonal autonomy. High status concerns and personal conflicts are probably char- acteristic of any professional-centered, large-scale organization, but this assump- tion cannot be substantiated without hard facts. Collecting these data would be a challenging undertaking, and one well worth our effort. The author gratefully acknowledges the partial support of this work by NSF grant GN -759. REFERENCES 1. William J. Goode, "The Librarian: From Occupation to Profession?" The Library Quarterly 31:306-20 (Oct. 1961). 2. See Robert K. Merton, M. Fiske, and P. L. Kendall, The Focused Interview (New York: The Free Press, 1956) . 3. For an explanation, see Leo A. Good- man and William Kruskal, "Measures of Association for Cross Classification, 1," Journal of American Statistical Associa- tion 49:732- 64 (Dec. 1954).