title: Negotiating the turn of professional legitimation: conditions, processes, and outcomes: a constructivist grounded theory study
Creators: name: Andres, Amy Jane
Publisher: name: University of Reading
Year: 2024

description: The social experience of professionals engaged in cross-boundary 
collaborations, in knowledge-based institutions, is not well understood. Faculty 
librarians in the United States provide a specific context for exploring the 
nature of this work. Despite the importance professional library associations 
and faculty librarians place on collaboration with discipline faculty, and how 
they contribute toward student learning outcomes, little is known about the 
symbolic meanings that arise during these collaborations and how they 
influence the collaborators’ perceptions and behaviours. Generally, the 
collaborations that occur between faculty librarians and discipline faculty are 
not mandated by the institution; rather, they emerge from informal, 
autonomous conditions requiring initiation by the faculty librarian or the 
discipline faculty member. Without the benefit of institutional mandates, norms, 
and performance measures to structure the collaborative process, the success 
of the collaboration is dependent upon the cohesiveness of the individual 
participants’ goals, values, and interactional behaviour. Although faculty 
librarians and discipline faculty are peers within the institutional hierarchy, 
tensions emerge in autonomous collaborations that reflect issues related to 
environmental pre-conditions including perception, agency, and professional 
identity. The presence of these tensions creates socio-political dilemmas for 
faculty librarians, resulting in a perceived threat to their professional legitimacy. 
This thesis, drawing on interviews and observations of faculty librarians and 
discipline faculty, presents a constructivist grounded theory that suggests the 
emergence of these tensions’ places faculty librarians in a vulnerable position 
where their professional legitimation can be compromised or denied. In 
response to threats of legitimation, the faculty librarians engage in a range of 
legitimation tactics to manage and negotiate their legitimacy within the 
collaboration. The tactics, described as facilitative and response-based 
processes to legitimation threats, include working with the emergent threats 
(Compromising), influencing conditions and perceptions related to threat 
(Persuading), and openly or quietly dissenting against the threat (Retreating). 
The critical point at which the interplay of tensions compromises or denies the 
librarians’ professional legitimacy is identified as the ‘turn’ in the legitimation 
process. The analysis presents the ‘turn’ as a phase of legitimation in which an 
informal legitimation hierarchy is established within the relationship, thereby 
signalling the subordination of the faculty librarian’s professional role and 
agency. The conceptual model presented in the study explains how
collaborative tensions influence a turn in legitimation, resulting in a socially 
constructed, informal hierarchy that threatens collaborative agility and stability. 
The grounded theory identifies legitimation as a critical sub-process of 
autonomous collaborations, thereby linking the legitimation and collaboration 
literature and providing a new understanding of the legitimation processes that 
occur in autonomous, cross-boundary, peer collaborations.