Gendered Narratives of Innovation through Competition: Lessons from Science and Technology Studies.

Library and information science is a technologically intensive profession with a high percentage of women, unlike computer science and other male-dominated fields. On the occasion of the 2011 ALISE conference, this essay analyzes the theme "Competitiveness and Innovation" through a review of social psychology and science and technology studies literature. Both theme concepts have ramifications for LIS education. Librarianship and teaching are both professions that resist commodification because they rely on embodied labor and personal interaction. Competition, as a management or learning style, may not promote meaningful innovation in LIS education, and instead risks creating a climate that is hostile to its chief demographic. The feminization of LIS can be seen as a strength insofar as it promotes the relative parity in numbers of men and women full-time faculty. LIS education should build on this strength in its innovation practices, enabling friendly encounters between technologies, and men and women alike.Keywords: science and technology studies, self-determination theory, gender, technology, equity, educationIntroductionThis paper will inspect the theme of the 201 1 conference of the Association for Library and Information Science Education, "Competitiveness and Innovation," through a feminist science and technology studies framework. The purpose of this analysis is to tease out the implicit values of competition and innovation for library and information science education, and to open up some of the literature from the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies for use in LIS. This analysis begins at the implicit notion that competition and innovation are a natural fit, entailing each other, and that therefore, competitiveness could be helpful and fruitful in an educational setting. The ostensibly quantitative, measurable, and hence objective concepts of competition and competitiveness stand in contrast with the qualitative, descriptive concepts of both "Culture and Collaboration," the previous year's theme.I will then examine cultural accounts of technological innovation and progress in the context of pedagogy and librarianship. My analysis will draw on social psychology and sociological literature, as well as accounts of technological innovation from science and technology studies and feminist science studies, to reflect on aspects of education for librarianship that are resistant to the "measure, control, and automate" rationality of US-style economic competition. Particularly, I will:1 . Argue that competition and innovation are not causally linked, while analyzing and troubling both concepts.2. Show that competitiveness and innovation are gendered in ways that make them troubling ideals for LIS and LIS education.3. Make a case for an approach to pedagogy that is effective, appropriate to LIS work, and difficult to commodify.There are some preliminary caveats: First, when we talk about the co-construction of technology and gender, we have to be careful to avoid essentializing. This means not taking apparent differences between men and women to be timeless, necessary, or inevitable; descriptions of the particular ways that competition, innovation, and labor manifest in our culture are not intended to be prescriptive. They are also statistical generalizations: not all men and women behave in the ways described. Additionally, the characteristics described in this essay are not presumed to be static and stable characteristics that happen in all times, all cultures, and all places, or for all people who are men or women. Rather, one of the purposes of this review article is to historicize and denaturalize the concepts of competition and innovation, and that includes the social configurations in which they arise. This is informed by Bowker and Star's (1999) pragmatist insight that "things perceived as real are real in their consequences" (p. 13).CompetitionI will start by examining the concept of competition. …