This paper offers a comment on one of the contexts in which the issues of library policy may be viewed, viz. the way in which economic rationalism impinges on cultural life - more pointedly, whether it poses a threat to scholarly cultural values. I will suggest that there is tension, indeed opposition, between the values associated with economic rationalism and those which are associated with a flourishing scholarly culture.
But what is economic rationalism? In earlier forays into this area I have avoided the term, partly because its definition is so disputed, and partly because it is often defined too narrowly to capture all the inter-related concerns which one frequently hears expressed. However, the term is so widely used in Australia - not, in general, elsewhere - that I shall now put forward not a strict definition but a broad characterisation, with cultural as well as social and economic implications in mind.
According to a typical economist's definition it is 'a microeconomic agenda that focuses on reducing government intervention in markets'. This may be the core idea from a professional economist's standpoint, but such a formulation does not indicate why economic rationalism has been such a focus of political and ideological controversy.
Andrew Norton, a self-proclaimed economic rationalist, brings in something of this ideological dimension: economic rationalism is 'a large intellectual and political movement, encompassing a wide variety of views favouring a greater role for markets and a reduced role for government'. I will take this as a starting point, but will suggest that it needs to be filled out by taking account of specific ways in which these goals, especially that of reducing the role of government, are pursued. It is here that some of the cultural implications may be discerned.
Michael Pusey voices a widely shared concern when he writes that economic rationalism is 'a doctrine that says that markets and prices are the only reliable means of setting a value on anything' - value is equated with cost. Here I want to draw attention to the related, or underlying idea, the privileging of what is measurable - only what can be quantified counts in policy decisions.
I also want to bring in another dimension: economic language, or discourse, in particular its encroachment into spheres extending far beyond economics. In this discourse, highly positive connotations are automatically associated with certain concepts such as competitiveness and efficiency, with certain approaches such as cost-benefit analysis (with its requirement for quantification) and more broadly with those utilitarian values which are deeply embedded in the Australian political culture.
I note in particular three inter-related aspects of this discourse:
(i) the problematic way in which the apparently unexceptionable is applied in practice. For example, who could question the need for clear priorities? Yet if this is combined with the practice of taking account of only what is measurable there may be serous distortion of the values at stake.
(ii) the extension of economic language into other spheres. While this may in itself offer insights, these depend on its being combined with other approaches. If it replaces other modes of thought - for example the historical, or the appeal to any philosophical system other than the utilitarian - the narrowly economic mindset behind policymaking impoverishes social and cultural life.
(iii) the straightforward misuse of economic language and quasi-economic concepts. The language of economics is increasingly being used to obfuscate what is at state, and to rationalise or legitimise decisions which are questionable or even indefensible in plain language. I have in mind such examples as the claim that the value of teaching and scholarly writing can be measured by simple 'performance indicators', or the increasingly threadbare disguising of the reduction of publicly provided services through claiming all cost savings as an efficiency dividend.
Economic rationalism, thus broadly understood, is a discourse - a loose framework of thinking, something more untidy, less well-defined than an ideology - but one which favours a certain ideology, variously described as neo-liberal, neo-conservative, New Right, or perhaps the ideology of late twentieth-century capitalism, Anglo-American model. It is a discourse which combines unattractive features of both economics and politics, and bodies ill for the disadvantaged, for those dependent on the state, and those with few votes. What are its consequences for scholarship?
I shall offer three brief examples drawn from a visit to the UK, where the effects of the discourse and ideology are so evident, in 1994-95.
(i) Revisiting the British Library after twenty years, I noted an unmistakable decline in the quality of service to readers. One could no longer count on reliable service at all levels, but might find the wrong book being delivered, books incorrectly shelved, and the like. Plans for the library after it moves to its new building, sadly overshadowed by St. Pancras station, include the locating of books that cannot be housed in the new library no longer in the London area but in remote Yorkshire. The common concern in both instances appears to be the primary of cost savings. What is not measured - the needs of readers, the library's reputation in the scholarly world - is a secondary concern.
(ii) One of the pathologies of the British university system (needless to say, Australia has others) is particularly striking to the visitor. In order to promote research resources are made available to individuals and institutions with high scores, measured by performance indicators which unavoidably reward sheer volume and rapidity of publication. Those who publish more slowly or give greater priority to teaching find their resources cut, seriously so. The most visible consequence is an unseemly competition among universities to attract high scoring researchers; more serious, though less evident in the short run, is the effect on the quality of teaching and scholarship, and on the morale of the many institutions which fail to attract the star performers.
(iii) Bookshops provide a third example. At first sight they are flourishing; the visitor is impressed by the proliferation of the Dillons chain, and even Blackwells, now established in many cities. One becomes aware, however, of the limitation of the range of books on offer. No longer is there a wealth of books catering for idiosyncratic interests, for the unorthodox and the eccentric. The browser is seldom rewarded by finding something completely unexpected. Competitiveness means that the chains will stock what will sell quickly. Far from promoting greater diversity of choice, the competition which has led to the concentration of firms tends to promote homogenisation.
These examples illustrate the effects of a heavy emphasis on cost and measured benefit, to the institution in question - moreover, of a short-term perception of benefits. Although the discourse and ideology extol the freedom of choice there is little concern for the actual choices and interests of individuals - readers, students, scholars, book-lovers - in particular for those in search of something out-of-the-way, something different. Still less is there concern for intangible cultural values such as the sheer diversity of books readily available.
In the Australian context, where the underlying utilitarian culture is more pervasive than in Britain, the effects of measuring cost against measurable benefit is particularly striking in the case of education. It s value is defined in terms of explicit short-term benefit to the economy, in particular to the interests of business and employment. There is not much place in this kind of calculus for broad cultural or scholarly values - unless indeed like Donald Horne in a recent article one makes an argument for the long-term utility of a broader, wide-ranging humanist education in terms of the versatility and flexibility required by the present economy. The point is well taken, but may it not concede too much to utilitarianism?
Possible Implications for Libraries
What would be the ideal collecting policy for a major library - a country's principal library resource? Alternatively, one could pose the question for the library system as a whole, but only if it really functioned as such, with agreement on different specialisations. The Australian case offers to fall a good way short of this.
Above all, the country's principal library would seek to extend the range, the diversity of what as available to readers, including the range of what is available in the principal scholarly languages. The ideal goal, in practical terms, would be to develop a collection where it is possible to study a very wide range of subjects in reasonable depth. Since not everything can be collected, this entails criteria concerning quality, and points to a need for substantial numbers of highly skilled staff. Judgments of what is significant in the massive flow of published work cannot be made mechanically (e.g. by including certain publishers and excluding others). They require broad expertise and responsible informed judgment, both at senior levels and in specialised areas. Such skills are costly.
Such goals and ambitions - essentially, as I understand them, the traditional goals of the National Library - go against the grain of economic rationalism. If libraries are to maintain scholarly depth and exploit the new technologies this will cost more, not less. The goal of breadth of coverage goes against ruthless prioritising. The utility of holding a significant scholarly work which few will consult is difficult to measure. And scholarly readers have few votes. It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that the National Library's collection policy has amounted to an acquiescence in the hegemony of economic rationalism.
This has been a pessimistic analysis, but is not meant to be deterministic. One counter to the orthodoxies of applied economic rationalism has been noted - the appeal to long-term utility and cost, in this case the cost of Australia's having no acknowledged major scholarly library. These could also be political strategies of seeking out responsive MPs. But these may also be a need for something more far-reaching, not only an ideological struggle against neo-liberalism but something like a Kulturkampf against the hegemony of utilitarianism and the quasi-economic discourse.