Multidimensional Library Neutrality: A Primer

Lessons in institutional and practitioner neutrality from political science and city planning.

Image: Vancouver Public Library [focusedcapture, Flickr]

Introduction

Since first publishing our article "The Role of Multidimensional Library Neutrality in Advancing Social Justice: Adapting Theoretical Foundations from Political Science and Urban Planning,” in the Fall 2022 issue of the ALA’s Journal of Intellectual Freedom and Privacy, we have received some very positive feedback, while one of us (MD) has further incorporated the article’s proposed scheme into a subsequent Heterodoxy in the Stacks post, “Library Neutrality and Pluralism: A Manifesto” (which is one of this Substack’s most-read articles)¹. We’ve also received requests for a condensed, plain-language version of the arguments, not only because the article is behind the journal’s paywall, but because the article is fairly theory-heavy. We therefore thought it would be a good idea to present a stripped-down version of the main arguments here on the Substack, which would also have the benefit of helping to encourage a broader discussion about them.  

Our impetus for writing the original article was four-fold: the first being that we were concerned about the struggles our profession was going through in 2020 regarding its stance on neutrality in the face of conflicts concerning controversial issues in collections and public meeting rooms; second, was that we felt no reasonable debate regarding these challenges was really possible due to a lack of any formally-adopted definition of the term neutrality itself on the part of ALA or the Canadian Federation of Library Associations (although it is mentioned in the latter’s Code of Ethics); and third, that our own academic backgrounds in political science (JW) and city planning (MD) seemed to offer a new and fruitful path forward in the neutrality debate, as both of these disciplines have rich histories of theoretical and practitioner debate and literature on this very issue. Finally, a major subtheme to which we devoted some attention in the paper was the ethical implications inherent in any profession seeking to intervene in and “improve” society—which, again, is very much the domain of political science and planning—but have in recent years been championed by such LIS authors as R. David Lankes in his Atlas of New Librarianship, but which we believed was an inappropriate “mission creep” for our field. As a result, we felt compelled to offer insights on neutrality drawn from these two closely-related disciplines. We’ll start with political science.  

Neutrality in Political Science 

Why political science (which is a very different thing from policy or politics)? Political Science theories allow us to examine libraries and librarianship in a very different way.  In short, it flips the lens away from specialization in information content management to how libraries fit as a public agency within the context of the modern state. It allows us to view the role of the library not as a service provider from the client perspective, but within general understandings and parameters of a modern, liberal democracy.  

We used the specific ‘agents of the state’ model put forward by Patrick Dunleavy and Brendan O’Leary in their 1987 book Theories of the State: The Politics of Liberal Democracy, to parse out how the interactions of state actors create contesting visions of policy-making and responsiveness. We found this useful in stripping away sterile informational definitions of neutrality used commonly in library science—and the multiverse of political ‘–isms’—to replace them with an active matrix of neutrality constructed on what neutrality can mean to the state, and to those interacting with it.  

The agents of the state model posits that there are three potential types of state agent regardless of what a specific agency’s function is: 

• Cipher states:  the state as an arena in which policy choices are made on a case-by-case basis, or a weather vane that moves according to the political winds. Compared to social forces, the state is relatively weak, and may be perceived as not having its own interests. Neutrality is expressed in absence, or as mechanistic approach to problem-resolution. 

• Guardian states are those with a strong sense of institutional force as a “balancer” serving the public interest. Agencies and their staff may have a personal sense of their role to balance social forces and counter what it sees as instability or crises, but position themselves as neutral—that is, ensuring the integrity and proper functioning of the political system and its institutional mandate—thereby serving the interests of the system itself.  

• Partisan states, as the name implies, hold a partisan interest in their own favor. The state’s interests, or those of individuals or actors within the state machinery, predominate. Public interest is secondary to serving state/actors’ interests. Partisan states see the need for a strong, perhaps dominant state to resolve intractable problems. Neutrality is absent, or equated to silent assent. 

We place librarians’ professional ethos of neutrality firmly within the Guardian State model.  We identify this essentially as a Weberian ethos: librarianship—as with most professionalized work—contains strong norm-development around education and proven, evidence-based practices.  The Guardian model fits well with librarianship’s self-identification as a guardian of knowledge for all. Our acknowledged end-goal is to find a means to preserve and strengthen this model in the face of what are increasing challenges from Partisan and Cipher understandings that have always existed outside the practice.  

We place the current challenges from populist-authoritarianism of the right and left firmly within the Partisan mode: where desired outcomes overrule all other interests. We contend that within librarianship, left-authoritarian Partisanship proposals are increasing within the profession to the detriment of traditional liberal library norms—specifically, that some self-defined ideal outcomes outweigh all other considerations of expertise, process or state-balancing. 

But we also contend that the public itself has always seen the state (and public libraries) in Cipher terms, making it resistant to—or at least confused by—Guardianship, subject only to general norms of deference to the state: “the customer is always right”; “we didn't vote for X”; “our taxes pay your salary”.  In the current environment of anti-intellectualism and a collapse of deference to expertise, combined with winner-take-all polarization, right populism in particular has been very effective at undermining liberal democratic norms that defer appropriately to professional judgement and administrative expertise; replacing them with ‘democratic’ will.  Contemporary Cipher and Partisanship models within and without the library profession exhibit a strong affinity for impatience, quick fixes, outcomes regardless of other consequences, and a will to power.  

A state-centric focus also allows us to examine legal, institutional, cultural and political norms that differ between liberal democracies in terms of boundaries and guidelines for agency behaviour. It also allows for better understanding of interactions between agencies. The differences between the American and Canadian political and legal systems for example, point to comparative—both different and similar—tensions and understandings regarding constitutional rights, legal redress, policy control and direction. The American system placing far more emphasis on partisan control linked to electoral appointments is more of an inherently cipher state model.  These differences matter because within the context of government, libraries and library staff have only a certain scope to define and enact certain policies—which of course also affects Partisan ambitions to wield and conflate “professional judgement” as state power.  

In short, by bypassing the standard case-by-case and bottom-up/top-down arguments on freedom of information and speech, we are freer to step back and redefine neutrality from the perspective of the library acting in its role as a state agent; or, in liberal-democratic vulgate, a government public service. How the public library should best do so through its relationships with members of the public may be gleaned from the professional domain of city planning. 

Neutrality in City Planning  

While the modern city planning movement has its roots in the 19^th century with efforts to improve housing and hygiene in overcrowded and dangerous industrial cities, we focused in the article on the postwar city planning movement in North America, and four major modes of planning: Rational Comprehensive Planning (RCP), Advocacy Planning, Radical Planning and Collaborative Planning.   

Rational Comprehensive Planning views planning in highly scientific, rational terms, emphasizing quantitative data and analysis in the service of the planner’s own vision and expertise. This mode of planning was instrumental in the massive all-at-once urban development and renewal programs in the postwar era, including rapid suburbanization, freeway construction, slum clearance and public housing projects. In this mode, values were assumed to be irrelevant: planners viewed themselves as purely objective and neutral, believing their own values could play no role in influencing their analysis or affecting outcomes. 

A growing awareness of the shortcomings of this approach in the 1960s and how the pursuit of purely rational ends could bulldoze over (sometimes quite literally) the aspirations of affected communities, led to a drive for more incremental approaches such as Advocacy planning. This mode saw planners representing the interests of affected communities in front of planning commissions and abandoning the assumed value neutrality of rational planning to align their values to those of the communities with whom they worked.  

In the early 1970s, impatience with the even-handedness and incrementalism of Advocacy led to the development of Radical planning. In this mode, the planner is the “hired gun” of the community, which takes the lead in the planning process, inverting the relationships of Rational planning. The risk here, however, is that the planner can become so absorbed by the values and aspirations of the local interests who hire them that they can no longer mediate conflict in the community.  

Twenty years later we see the emergence of Collaborative planning, in which the planner is viewed as a facilitator between many stakeholders, who seeks to generate knowledge and communication about local issues and mediate between interests. Here the many values among all involved—including on the part of the planner—are openly acknowledged, but the planner is ethically committed to not impose their own values on the stakeholders.  

As we argued in the article, the value neutrality of the Rational planner was viewed as an unquestioned state of affairs: the planner simply was neutral. However, the value neutrality of the collaborative planner is quite different: they acknowledge their own values, but seek to not impose them on others. We labelled these respectively as Value Neutrality 1 (NV1) and Value Neutrality 2 (VN2), pointing out that the critiques in the library literature against neutrality in our view frequently mistook the latter for the former. In addition, the critical LIS literature tends to overlook the limitations of radical librarianship in terms of being able to mediate between conflicting community interests.    

But there is more. Beyond Value Neutrality, each one of these modes also expresses starkly differing conceptions of neutrality as regards to how the planner views the stakeholders, the processes involved and the goals of the planning process. Adapting the medical ethics work of Shahram Ahmadi Nasab Emran (2015), we labelled these as Stakeholder Neutrality, Process Neutrality and Goal Neutrality.  

The Rational planner believes themselves to be neutral (VN1) but is decidedly not neutral as regards stakeholders, processes and goals, which are all driven by the planner. In representing a specific community, the Advocate planner isn’t neutral in terms of values, stakeholders or goals but considers the planning process as a neutral one. The Radical planner being hired by the community isn’t neutral towards any aspect of the planning process, but should ideally practice VN2; but may in fact wholly adopt the values of the community. Only the Collaborative planner can be said to meet all four dimensions of neutrality by not imposing their values or vision, and in treating all stakeholder equally and according to the same processes, so that they can help facilitate the community’s ability to achieve its goals.  

It is this fourth mode—being also consistent with the Guardian state model—that we advocated for adoption by the profession of librarianship, which we refer to as Multidimensional Library Neutrality (MLN).

Case Study: Applying The Four Dimensions of Library Neutrality to the ALA’s Code of Ethics #9 

With our proposed MLN model, neither the library as an institution or the librarian are neutral; rather they acknowledge that every process is laden with values but that all stakeholders also hold their own values; therefore the library and the librarian are ethically committed to a Guardian role, and strive not impose their values—or those of any stakeholder group—onto the whole (Value Neutrality 2). All community stakeholders are welcomed and are treated respectfully and equally (Stakeholder Neutrality), and are invited to make use of library materials and spaces to meet their own goals (goal neutrality), subject to the terms of the library’s transparently-applied policies and processes (process neutrality). 

To practice in accordance with these four dimensions means acknowledging that the public library doesn’t serve a single, unitary public good, but rather the many diverse interests of multiple publics. As a consequence, the library is committed to representing and welcoming many diverse views, despite the possible objections expressed by other stakeholders. 

To better illustrate, we applied MLN to ALA’s 2021 insertion of a 9th clause to its Code of Ethics: 

We affirm the inherent dignity and rights of every person. We work to recognize and dismantle systemic and individual biases; to confront inequity and oppression; to enhance diversity and inclusion; and to advance racial and social justice in our libraries, communities, profession, and associations through awareness, advocacy, education, collaboration, services, and allocation of resources and spaces. 

While well-intentioned, as we pointed out in the article, 

this new ethic raises significant questions, namely that it sets no practical limitations on the library worker as an agent of social change. Will they be expected to “confront inequity and oppression” everywhere? If so, will it be universally accepted among library workers in each case who the oppressors are? It also doesn’t clarify how library workers might address systemic biases in society or —more troublingly—that there might be ethical concerns in intervening in the minds of individuals to “dismantle” their “individual biases” (2-3). 

Under a commitment to the four dimensions of library neutrality, just a few small changes in wording and intent scale back the commitments to those within the scope and competencies of librarianship, resulting in rather different implications for the relationship between the library and its users: 

We affirm the inherent dignity and autonomy of all library users (Stakeholder Neutrality), and each user’s right to access the collections and services of the library for their own purposes (Goal Neutrality). We work to recognize and dismantle potential barriers to access that may be experienced by members in our communities as a result of their experiences of socioeconomic status, race, sex, ability etc. We work to advance structures and processes that strengthen our profession and our institutions’ abilities to provide all with opportunity for knowledge, education, participation and dialogue (Process Neutrality), through advocacy, instruction, collaboration, services and equitable resource allocation to collections representing multiple points of view, and spaces devoted to free inquiry and encounters with difference (Value Neutrality 2). 

Conclusion 

Based on our analysis we concluded that it makes a significant difference in the professional discourse whether one is making an ontological claim—that libraries are neutral—as opposed to an ethical one—that they have an obligation to strive to be so; and not in some vague, difficult-to-define sense of “objectivity,” but in specific terms of these four dimensions of values, stakeholders, processes, and goals. Given the diverse multicultural societies which modern public libraries serve, we argued that adopting such a stance would be more ethical than imposing on those stakeholders a singular comprehensive ideology, regardless of how passionately such a belief system might be upheld by some staff.

Adopting the Multidimensional Library Neutrality model certainly won’t mean that community controversies regarding collections or programs are going to be easily resolved. Far from it. But MLN does offer, we believe, a robust ethical foundation on which to negotiate and mediate these conflicts as a Guardian of the public interest. From a broader professional perspective, it also encourages a culture that naturally constrains the impulse on the part of the librarian to act on their own political values in order to intervene in and “improve” society—a task for which political scientists and city planners are rigorously educated (including in terms of the social ethics involved), but which has never been the domain of librarianship.    

Postscript 

The citation for our original article is 

Dudley, Michael and John Wright. "The Role of Multidimensional Library Neutrality in Advancing Social Justice: Adapting Theoretical Foundations from Political Science and Urban Planning." The Journal of Intellectual Freedom and Privacy 7 no. 3, (Fall 2022). 

A free pre-print version is also available at the University of Winnipeg’s Digital Repository WinnSpace. Pagination cited above refers to this version. 

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Sources 

Dunleavy, Patrick, and Brendan O’Leary. (1989). Theories of the State : The Politics of Liberal Democracy. New York: New Amsterdam. 

Emran, Shahram Ahmadi Nasab. (2015). “The Four-principle Formulation of Common Morality is at the Core of Bioethics Mediation Method.” Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy: A European Journal 18 no. 3 (2015): 371–377. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-014-9612-7 

1. The four dimensions of library neutrality were adopted in 2023 by the Association of Library Professionals, of which one of the authors (MD) is a founding member.