Agency and Knotworking in Coproduction: Change Laboratory in an Academic Library

• In Event: Coproduction Practices: Reconfiguring Professional Knowledge and Work

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
The paper presents an analysis of co-production and knotworking in a Change Laboratory intervention with University of Helsinki librarians and research groups identified as their key clients. The process generated a set of new services and a new organizational model for the library.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
Agency is commonly defined broadly, encompassing almost any form of the human capacity to act intentionally. Drawing on Vygotsky and the dialectical tradition, this paper emphasizes the human potential of transforming conditions and forms of collective life. Agency is manifested when people form intentions and execute willful actions that go beyond and transform the accepted routines and given conditions of the activity and organization. Vygotsky’s principle of double stimulation and Davydov’s principle of ascending from the abstract to the concrete serve as theoretical concepts for exploring the emergence of this type of agency.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
To examine this approach to agency, the paper analyzes an application of the Change Laboratory intervention method in the university library of University of Helsinki from 2010 to 2011. Transcribed discourse data stemming from nine Change Laboratory intervention sessions are analyzed with the help of the theoretical framework sketched above. The discourse data is analyzed as a longitudinal trajectory of agency formation in the actions of the professional community of librarians and their clients.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
The broader background of this project is the emerging crisis of university libraries worldwide due to the increasing availability of online publications which radically reduces the need for traditional librarians’ work. The library of University of Helsinki asked our center CRADLE to conduct an intervention study that would help the library professionals and managers to redesign their work. The activity-theoretical notion of knotworking was used as the leading idea of the project for developing new services and new models of collaboration between librarians and research groups.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view
The analysis shows how the idea of knotworking was appropriated by practitioners in the co-production effort as a second stimulus to articulate the fledgling new ways of working librarians initiated during the intervention. The library director played an important role in this agentive process, portraying knotworking as a theoretical abstraction for her personnel. Knotworking was appropriated as an initial simple relationship which first served the purpose of collaborating with research groups, but then led to envisioning a new approach of managing the work within the library and other concrete applications. The notion of knot served as both a second stimulus and initial abstraction.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work
So far there are no other cases documented in the literature in which the second stimulus is shown to have both these functions. The coinciding of these two functions in this case indicates that double stimulation can open up possibilities for ascending from the abstract to the concrete in efforts of co-production.

Author

• Annalisa Sannino, University of Helsinki