Toward A New Model of the Information Professions: Embracing Empowerment
Back to Roles of the New Information Professional NEXT presentation PREVIOUS presentation ALISE home	Mary Niles Maack University of California at Los Angeles In redefining the information professions for the 21st century, Maack stressed the need to consider the core values embraced by these fields and to examine the relationship of professionals to their clients and to other professions. Professions have typically based their legitimacy in such factors as employability and remuneration, general public perception, academic pronouncements, and self-definition. It is this last factor that Maack wants to see altered, especially in the information professions. Historically, professional knowledge truly is power. When a profession controls a body of knowledge to the exclusion of others, they create a heightened demand for their work. Fields like medicine and law use inaccessible terminology and disaster models to intimidate clients into acknowledging their expertise. Maack outlined a typology of professions that ranges from the least client-centered to the most client-centered fields: High authority professions that have a "must/should" relationship with the client: law, dentistry, medicine, clergy Product-oriented professions that have an indirect relationship with the client: urban planning, engineering, computer programming, architecture Empowering professions that share expertise in order to make the client more autonomous: education, library and information science, social work, physical therapy, psychology Maack would like to see a new understanding about these categories; they should not be regarded as a way to rank the value of a profession but as complements to each other. In fact, current public preferences show a desire to debunk "professionalism" that builds a mystique around a body of knowledge in order to control client access. Client-centered approaches are being adopted by professions in all categories. Information professionals need to embrace this new identity as an empowering profession and reject the more short-sighted label of "service workers." Service implies doing those things the client is not capable of doing for himself or herself; empowerment is a magnitude greater and describes a collaborative process that expands the client's abilities to gain knowledge, increase skills, and become more independent. The information professions can help break down the divide between esoteric knowledge and the client by empowering people to evaluate expert opinion and make balanced decisions. Maack reminded her audience that this is the very stuff of democracy. Maack presented her findings as a juried paper at the ALISE '97 conference. ....................................................................... Mary Niles Maack, Associate Professor University of California at Los Angeles Department of Library and Information Science 2320 Moore Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095 Phone: 310-206-9367 E-mail: mnmaack@ucla.edu Top of page || Next presentation || Previous presentation
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