Governance, Legitimation, Commons: A Public Sphere Framework and Research Agenda for the Public Library Sector

Introduction

This paper ^[1] asserts that public sphere theory can serve as an explanatory framework and research agenda for the public library sector. Public sphere theory offers one potential solution to the perennial question public libraries face: the problem of purpose. The question of purpose has been raised by several previous authors, especially in the U.S. (Harris 1973; Williams 1988) and the U.K. (Totterdell 1978). Recently, numerous frameworks have addressed the question of purpose, including economic development (Hancks 2012), social capital (Svendsen 2013; Vårheim 2014) and knowledge creation (Lankes 2011). In contrast to these approaches, public sphere theory emphasizes the inherently political nature of public libraries and focuses on issues of social justice.

Drawing from the existing literature on the public sphere and public libraries, this paper discusses the relevance of Habermasian public sphere theory to current issues and concerns of public libraries internationally. Public sphere theory has been discussed in the library studies field since 1995. Widdersheim and Koizumi (2015) incorporated new and existing research to form a conceptual model of the public sphere in public libraries. The model depicts public libraries as systems embedded in private actor environments. Within this model, three social arenas of the public sphere cut across the systems/environments boundaries. The three arenas are governance, legitimation, and commons. The arenas are relevant to current issues and concerns of public libraries. The present paper builds on and extends our prior work by discussing these arenas and explaining how the model addresses the problem of purpose.

The Public Sphere Concept

Public sphere theory is associated particularly with the work of German philosopher Jürgen Habermas. The notion of a public sphere did not originate with Habermas, but it did take on new life as a result of his writings. Previous to the original German-language publication of Habermas’s Habilitationsschrift in 1962, American philosopher and educational reformer John Dewey had already examined aspects of the public, the state, and democracy in 1927, and American political commentator Walter Lippmann had discussed media and public opinion management as early as 1922 (Lippmann 1922; Dewey 1954). Within Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, Habermas drew on German-American political theorist Hannah Arendt’s existing 1958 discussion of the distinction between public and private in ancient Greek city-states (Habermas 1989a; Arendt 1998). It was only with the publication of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, first in 1962 in German, then in 1989 in English, however, that the notion of a public sphere took on critical significance in a number of scholarly fields, including communication and media studies, European history, and political theory. The public sphere concept has been a central feature of debates on the social and political implications of the mass adoption of distributed computing and the Internet in the 1990s (McChesney 2013), mobile computing and social media in the 2000s and 2010s (Fuchs 2014), and the “transnationalization” (Fraser 2009, 77–99) of publics and media alongside the formation of the European Union, Arab Spring movements, business conglomerates, and recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is evident in all these discussions that Habermas’s work still reverberates today in multiple fields. Habermas continued to draw on and apply the public sphere concept throughout his career, especially in his theory of society (Habermas 1984, 1989b), his theory of democracy and law (Habermas 1996), and his writings on mass media and democracy (Habermas 2006).

The phrase “public sphere” is the English translation of the German word Öffentlichkeit, which literally translates as “publicliness.” It is a sociological concept that refers to a type of sociality. The public sphere refers to both an embodied public of private people and the communicative interactions they share (Murphy 2005). While there are many different kinds of public communication, including dramaturgical and expressive communicative interactions and any type of behavior that takes place in public settings (Goffman 1959, 1963), public sphere communication, as Habermas defines it, has specific criteria. The three necessary and sufficient conditions for public sphere communication are openness, debate, and common concern (Habermas 1989a, 36–37; Thomassen 2010, 40–41).

Openness means inclusivity of participants, the idea that anyone can in principle take part in the conversation regardless of personal characteristics such as class, race, gender, age, and status. Conversation that is exclusive is not public sphere communication. Common concern means that participants abstract out of their particular situations in order to consider what is in everyone’s best interests. If liberalism refers to private autonomy, or the maximization of one’s own private interests, then the public sphere condition of common concern refers to republicanism or public autonomy – consideration of the greater good in conjunction with one’s own private good (Habermas 1996). The condition of debate means that the conversation focuses on the give and take of reasons. In public sphere communication, the best argument wins the day, regardless of the interlocutors’ relative social or political capital. Personal characteristics and social power are in principle bracketed out in order to inoculate the conversation from social power and coercion. Johnson (2006, 24) states that a key point of the debate condition is the understanding that no topics are off limits to discussion and criticism. This means that interlocutors can always question and interrogate personal motives, ecclesiastical dogma, and potential biases and distortions in the conversation.

The public sphere is a historical category – it was not always “there” in early modern Europe, and it remains an open question how it has transformed or dwindled in power in various times and cultures – whether it is still “here.” The central argument of Habermas (1989a) is that the public sphere emerged alongside the development of capitalism, nation-states, and political bureaucracy in early-modern Europe, reaching its pinnacle in the eighteenth century. The public sphere became a social space that was differentiated out of civil society and acted as a mediator between private citizens and state authorities. As feudalism collapsed and markets grew domestically and abroad, emerging national authorities became accountable to a powerful and expanding bourgeoisie. Royal authorities could no longer display power publicly in an acclamatory way and expect consent; rather, a growing state apparatus had to be legitimated by a public of private people. Central to bourgeois values at this time were the humanist, enlightenment ideals of reason and human rights. While not instantiated in practice because of existing inequalities of gender and status, public sphere discourse nevertheless rested on the concerns of openness, common concern, and debate. The public sphere transformed in the sense that its existing forms seemingly collapsed, becoming sites of manipulation and control by state and economic powers.

The eighteenth-century public sphere depended on a range of media infrastructures, technological changes, and social contexts. Among these were the printing press, newspapers, commercial publishing houses, journals, pamphlets, salons in France, coffee houses in England, and table societies in Germany. Within these increasingly complex media ecologies, bourgeois persons conversed about cultural and political topics. The public sphere thus influenced civil society culture and political administration (Habermas 1989a; Cohen and Arato 1995). From the beginning, the public sphere was not an undifferentiated, monolithic whole, but rather a collection of diverse enclaves of discussion and debate (Habermas 1987, 359–60). Topics ranged from science to literature to economics.

The public sphere concept is still used to explain societal structures within modern capitalist welfare states of today. Within Habermas’s political theory and his theory of society, public sphere contexts act as relays through which the private concerns of members of civil society become public. These public values and interests are amplified in the public sphere by interest groups, media channels, political parties, and associations – public opinion “suppliers.” The public concerns then travel toward the administrative core via public opinion “customers” such as lobbyists, public representatives, and formal publics such as courts (Habermas 1996, 354–55; Peters 2008). The process of public opinion traveling from societal periphery to the political decision-making core is the process of communicative power influencing the state. In the decision-making core of parliaments, courts, and the executive offices, public opinion is taken up and institutionalized in the form of laws and policies. These laws and policies are implemented by state agencies, affecting the Lebenswelt – lifeworld – of civil society members. The process of the effects of laws and policies travelling from political center to societal peripheries is a process of political power (see Figure 1).

Figure 1:

The public sphere, its role, and location between societal periphery and state.

Habermas’s original narrative of the public sphere ended in the twentieth century when the public sphere became a site of public manipulation and advertising (Habermas 1989a). Media infrastructures that once supported debate and counter-power became more expansive in scope but diluted in critical function. Mass media channels and state domination limited citizens’ capacities to challenge state and economic imperatives. While Habermas continued to rely on a notion of the public sphere to reconstruct how deliberative democracy should work, the public sphere has been forever ambiguous and contested. Structural Transformation ended on an uncertain note and a call to action: “the public sphere has to be ‘made,’ it is not ‘there’ anymore” (Habermas 1989a, 201)

Habermas’s notion of the public sphere has been intensely debated from a variety of angles. Did it actually exist in eighteenth-century Europe as Habermas said it did, and did it ever exist in the U.S.A. (Schudson 1992; Rice 1997)? Can social power and personal characteristics such as gender and race really be bracketed out of the conversation (Fraser 1990)? Doesn’t the public sphere/private sphere binary inherently rest on gendered categories of sociality (Landes 1995)? Isn’t Habermas’s narrative of the public sphere classist and exclusionary (Negt and Kluge 1993)? There is no consensus on these issues, but these objections have resulted in a concept of the public sphere that is more nuanced and responsive to difference. The public sphere concept is still vital to understanding current political and social situations, and its importance will continue into the foreseeable future.

The Public Sphere in Library Studies Literature

Given the similarities that contemporary public libraries share with the media infrastructures of the early modern European public sphere, it is no surprise that authors in the library studies field have associated the public sphere with public libraries. Many articles, book chapters, and much gray literature associate the public sphere with public libraries, so it is clear that there is some relationship between public sphere sociality and public library organizations. Few works, however, unpack and explain in an explicit way what the connections are. In Widdersheim and Koizumi (2015), we identified a dozen English-language works in the library studies field that discuss in various detail how public libraries act as public spheres. The first work to make the connection was British sociologist Frank Webster (1995). The works are international in scope, including authors and studies from the U.S.A., U.K., Canada, Norway, and Denmark. Only one work is an empirical study (Aabø et al. 2010).

The first characteristic that public libraries are said to share with the public sphere is fulfillment of the three necessary and sufficient conditions: openness, common concern, and debate. For example, Buschman (2003, 120–21) maintains that libraries serve as “disseminators of rational, reasoned, and organized discourse, as a source of verifying or disputing claims, and as a space for the inclusion of alternative views of society and reality.” This speaks to the debate condition of public sphere sociality. In another instance, Webster (1995, 111–12) argues that in public libraries, “information is made available to everyone, access being guaranteed as without cost to individuals” and that service is provided “without prejudice against persons and without hidden motives.” This speaks to the openness condition. Likewise, Aabø et al. (2010, 17) find that “when public libraries organize meetings, they seldom invite participants adhering to a specific set of values. More often, they invite community members across such affiliations.” This speaks to how private actors can abstract out of their particular situations, or the common concern condition. This literature that associates the public sphere with public libraries – which pre-dates our recent work (Widdersheim and Koizumi 2015) – did not identify the three conditions together or explain in an explicit way how they were met. As seen in the examples mentioned above, it was not clear if all three conditions were fulfilled by public libraries at all times, or even at the same time in certain contexts. In contrast, in our study (Widdersheim and Koizumi 2015), therefore, we were particularly careful to identify cases where all three conditions were met. Public sphere sociality certainly does not explain all types of social interactions in public libraries, but public sphere conditions are met there in many instances.

Besides fulfillment of the three conditions, several studies in library literature identify how, like the early modern public sphere, public libraries support discussions about literature and politics. Like the newspapers, journals, pamphlets, books, and magazines that were printed in mass volumes following the printing revolution in early modern Europe, discussions in public libraries also take place in world-of-letters fora such as books, newspapers, and now the World Wide Web (Buschman 2003). Similarly, like the famous coffee houses, salons, and table societies Habermas mentioned, public libraries serve as both physical and virtual meeting places for lectures and discussions about issues of general import (McCook 2003; Aabø et al. 2010). Previous literature explains how the capacity of public libraries to facilitate these public sphere fora depends on the establishment and enforcement of public laws and rights, such as the right to free speech, and its corollary, the right to information (McCook 2003). The takeaway from these descriptions of the public sphere in public library literature is that public libraries serve as a part of the media infrastructure – along with journalism, printing, mass media and other fora – that sustains a public sphere commons where public sphere communication circulates (McCook 2003, 2004, 188–93).

A final point brought out in previous library literature is that public libraries do not just passively support public sphere discussion, but also actively shape it. Andersen and Skouvig (2006, 311) make this point when they explain that

the social and political structures and the spheres in society are the primary modes of knowledge organization; the organization and representation of texts in information systems are secondary. These organization activities are constituted by social and political discourses as they materialize in various texts and genres. But the organization and representation of texts in information systems are not passive forces in social and political communication. The activity contributes to a reconfiguration of this communication as it provides the possibility for documentation of previous debates, arguments, topics, and discussion, thereby actually contributing to the public sphere.

The takeaway from this passage is that library systems and the public sphere exist in a reciprocal relationship and mutually influence one another. Public library systems might be thought of as situated in a social, historical, and political field with various interchanges that occur between the field and the system. Public libraries shape and are shaped by public sphere discourses.

A Model of the Public Sphere in Public Libraries

The above-listed literature about the public sphere and its relation to public libraries focuses primarily on the infrastructural components of public libraries – the media collections, services, and physical and virtual spaces they make available to private persons that facilitate public sphere communication. In our study, however, we found that this aspect, while central to any understanding of public libraries’ relationship to the public sphere, presents an incomplete picture of the public sphere/public library relationship. The public sphere, we found, also plays a significant role in regulating how this infrastructure works and sustaining it through time. We thus added two new dimensions to the picture besides the external-library public sphere or commons dimension: an intra-library public sphere or governance dimension and an inter-library public sphere or legitimation dimension. These three arenas of discourse are distinguished by their discourse themes. The commons arena is where private actors use the library for cultural and political purposes; the governance arena is where private actors interact with the library system to ensure that the system reflects public values and interests; and the legitimation arena is where the library system stimulates public sphere action to ensure its material survival. The public sphere, therefore, has a complex, tripartite relationship with public library systems.

Public libraries can be thought of as systems located within a socio-political field. Systems thinking is appropriate when imagining the public sphere because Habermas explicitly borrowed from systems thinkers such as Parson and Luhmann in his political and social theories (Habermas 1989b, 1996, 2006). Through their boundaries, library systems share communicative exchanges with private actor environments, media production systems, and political systems. The boundary areas between system and environment might be thought of as synapses where multiple signal interchanges occur. The three arenas of interchange are the three public sphere dimensions: commons, governance, and legitimation. These three public sphere dimensions are visualized in Figure 2 and explained in more detail below.

Figure 2:

The three public sphere arenas: governance, commons, and legitimation.

The governance dimension of the public sphere in public libraries is the communicative arena where library publics ensure that the system reflects public values and interests. This arena is composed of an array of channels or “sluices” (Habermas 1996; Peters 2008), including community fora, staff-society interchanges, and in-house meetings. In this arena, public opinion on the societal periphery circulates into the library system core where it affects decisions about library policies. Governance discourse is essential for ensuring that the system does not become distorted or biased. The governance arena overlaps with both the private actor environment and the library system.

The legitimation dimension of the public sphere in public libraries is the communicative arena where public opinion is mobilized by the library system in times of crisis or need. The legitimation arena ensures that the system is “created” and is “there” through time (Habermas 1989a, 201). Public libraries, it seems, are in perpetual crisis, so the legitimation arena is very active. Public libraries, perhaps because of their liminal status as not-quite-government and not-quite-non-profit, must be continuously legitimated and re-made. The library system, in this arena, acts as part of the public sphere in the sense that it pressures the political system for support. The library also stimulates private actors to mobilize on its behalf. Volunteers and friends of the library groups often campaign on behalf of public libraries. Legitimation arenas are essential for system maintenance. The legitimation arena, therefore, overlaps with the library system, private actor environment, and political system.

The commons dimension of the public sphere in public libraries is perhaps the most complex communicative arena in the library. It is here that the library system acts as an intermediary between private actors and the political system, private actors and media producers, and as a meeting place for private actors. The commons arena exists as it does as a result of the activities of the governance and legitimation arenas. Public library systems, therefore, insofar as they serve as infrastructure for a public sphere commons, depend on continued legitimation and governance by private actors in order to ensure that the commons arena meets the conditions of openness, common concern, and debate. In the commons arena, private actors discuss political, cultural, and literary issues concerning wider society. It is also in this dimension that private actors use library resources for political activism. The commons arena overlaps with the private actor environment, library system, media production system, and political system.

This tripartite model is a complex picture of the public sphere in public libraries, but it is not yet complete. More effort is still needed to work out the details about how the public sphere and private sphere intersect in public libraries, or to understand the relationships between the public sphere, public library systems, and state authority. Interactions between private actors and public library systems are by no means uncomplicated – distortions and interferences do occur. More work is therefore needed to identify and resolve these communication breakdowns to ensure that public library systems can be governed, legitimated, and used by private actors in ways that align with public sphere ideals.

Public Sphere Theory and Its Relevance to Libraries

Given the model sketched out above, it might be asked how it is relevant to current issues and concerns of public libraries internationally, and why the model offers a useful explanatory framework and strategic agenda for the library profession. One of the most significant benefits of the model is that it offers a solution to a perennial problem that public libraries face: the problem of purpose. Public libraries have a long and chequered past, but in order to remain relevant institutions, they cannot be thought of as regulators of ignorant and disorderly immigrants (Harris 1973), warehouses of consumerist products (Stevenson 2012), disseminators of propaganda and military training during global war (Wiegand 1989), or stockpiles of knowledge “ammunition” to be used against Cold War foes (Wiener 1950). Nor are public libraries merely free Internet cafes or infotainment suppliers (Buschman 2003). Repositioning public libraries as public sphere stewards is a helpful way to articulate the value of public librarianship and to uncover what practicing librarians know but can’t explain: the larger social and political impact of what they do.

The tripartite model acts as an explanatory framework for the profession in the following ways. The macro-level concerns of public libraries can be explained using the three public sphere dimensions. The three arenas in the model are both empirical and normative concerns for libraries. The governance dimension of the public sphere brings to the fore how libraries are responsive to their communities, how they act as “dynamic,” “open-ended systems” according to Shera’s (1970, 91–92) vision. Shared governance is a seemingly universal feature of public libraries’ everyday operations and their strategic planning processes.

The legitimation dimension of the public sphere brings out something that librarians always encounter – their need to advocate for their profession, both to private actors and business allies, local associations and partners, local municipal authorities, state legislators, and federal representatives. Unlike schools and hospitals, libraries may not be considered “critical” infrastructure, and they may therefore not seem necessary or inevitable fixtures in society, especially given their perceived redundancy with respect to Internet use.

The commons dimension of the public sphere represents free speech, intellectual freedom, the right to information, and diversity – all values that public librarians identify with. Public libraries are political sites where activism happens (Chow 2011). Public libraries have often been associated with democratic practices (Hafner 1993; Buschman 2003, 2012), but the dimensions of the public sphere in public libraries clarify where and in what ways these processes happen – how libraries are democratically governed and legitimated, and how use of the commons promotes public sphere communication about societal issues.

The public sphere model functions as a useful explanatory framework for what public library practitioners do, but the model also maps out potential research areas for public library researchers. In this way, the model acts as a strategic agenda for researchers and practitioners, often the same people. The commons, governance, and legitimation dimensions are useful ways of organizing social justice research about libraries. Research using a public sphere lens might explore the discourse quality, distortions, and blockages in each of the three arenas. In the governance arena, for example, research can focus on to what degree library populations are represented in system decision-making. This research might study through what means equitable representation occurs. Research about the legitimation dimension might focus on how libraries obtain library support in non-biased and non-coercive ways such that the commons dimension remains undistorted. For instance, how is it possible to maintain both corporate sponsorship and unbiased service activities? Finally, commons research might focus on what kinds of public sphere interactions occur there. Public sphere research projects might focus on the boundaries or edges of the system where systems and their publics intersect.

Many library studies have already done research in these three areas, so a public sphere model is a useful framework for making connections between seemingly disparate studies. Adkins and Hussey (2006), for example, explored to what extent the values and interests of Latina/Latino college students are reflected in library systems in the US, thus touching on the governance dimension. Evjen (2015) explored how public library systems have been legitimated financially and politically in Norway, Denmark, and the UK, thus touching on the legitimation dimension. Aabø and Audunson (2012, 144–45) surveyed how public libraries in Norway are used for exchanging political information, thus touching on the commons dimension.

When library research is viewed through the model above, the commons dimension has been a very active research area, especially regarding perceived distortions of it. Recent critical research focuses on what might be called the “mobilization” of the commons arena by commercial interests. Mobilization, a term borrowed from Robins and Webster (1988, 1999), has a double entendre here: in the first, just as farmers and peasants of the traditional agricultural commons were mobilized for factory work in the nineteenth century (Gaudemar 1979), so, too, are today’s users of intellectual commons such as public libraries activated for surplus work. More and more, public libraries have become test beds for commercial products (Stevenson 2012). Moreover, the commons arena has become manipulated and colonized by commercial interests (Buschman 2003). The second sense of mobilization is that this digital labor is often facilitated by mobile electronic devices such as tablets, e-readers, smartphones. Patrons’ digital labors are harvested through library intermediaries (Widdersheim 2014). Mobilization of public library commons raises concerns for privacy and surveillance, especially in light of the release of US National Security Administration documents by Edward Snowden.

The dimensions of governance, legitimation, and commons within a public sphere framework are further valuable to the library profession because they serve as “crosswalks” between the library studies field and other disciplines. These crosswalks show how library studies are not a self-contained, parochial field, but one in conversation with other fields. This alone is a relevant issue for library studies, which often seems cordoned off from other fields. The best example of potential cross-pollination is evident in the commons dimension whose central metaphor connects with developments in law, economics, and environmental studies. Elinor Ostrom, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, led research in the governance of common-pool resources, such as fisheries, groundwater basins, forests, and irrigation institutions (Ostrom 1991). The metaphor of the commons has encouraged research in various other domains, such as intellectual property (Boyle 2008), information (Benkler 2000), culture (Madison et al. 2010), and infrastructure (Frischmann 2012). Libraries have already been positioned as a type of common-pool resource management system, or a knowledge commons (Hesse and Ostrom 2007). It is, therefore, not a leap to consider what public libraries do as maintenance and stewardship of the public sphere commons. This connection yields a new explanatory framework for what librarians do. The public sphere model and the dimension of the commons focuses research on the governance, legitimation, and utilization of these common resources. Reframing public librarianship as a type of civic stewardship, I believe, is an attractive way to articulate the value of public libraries.

There is one more argument for the value and relevance of a public sphere framework for public libraries: the possibility that public libraries’ relationship to the public sphere makes them distinctive social objects. Because of their complex relationships with the public sphere, public libraries exemplify an alternative, successful model of sustainability. Is it possible that the ways public libraries have related to the public sphere make them attractive for study in their own right? It is well-known, for example, that private, for-profit firms have short lifespans. Innosight (2012, 2), for example, finds that for private firms in the S&P 500, the “61-year tenure for average firm in 1958 narrowed to 25 years in 1980 – to 18 years now.” By contrast, many public library systems in the U.S. and abroad have existed for 100+ years. There are more public libraries in America than McDonalds (Wiegand 1999). Could the ubiquity, longevity, and sustained support of public libraries be because of their skilled relationships with the public sphere? In the wake of the global economic recession of 2008, both public and private organizations still struggle to identify characteristics of sustainable organizations, and public libraries may lend valuable insights in this regard. It seems possible that public sphere arenas of public libraries are relevant areas of study because they illustrate how sustainable organizations work.

Conclusion

The public sphere in public libraries is an emerging research area still in its infancy. The model and arenas presented in this essay are based largely on research in the field conducted by Widdersheim and Koizumi (2015), and the model has yet to be thoroughly discussed in the academic and professional community. There are potential problems and limitations of the model, including considerations of what the model leaves out and leaves unexpressed. No model of public libraries can aspire to comprehensiveness, and inevitably models emphasize certain characteristics and ignore others. Such gaps and silences must be recognized. Nevertheless, a public sphere approach to public libraries offers several benefits to the library profession. The model engages well with several pressing problems facing public libraries. The public libraries and the public sphere are already latent international research interests, a public sphere framework has already invited global connections and collaborations with researchers and practitioners in the U.S., UK, Canada, Denmark, Norway, Germany, and Japan. Future directions in this research area include articulating the connections between library systems and state authority, and identifying where public and private spheres intersect and conflict.