Time, New Public Management, and Canadian Academic Librarians’ Scholarship and Service

Abstract

Time is a critical factor in the success of librarians’ scholarship. Shared perceptions of organizational time enable, regulate, and constrain performance. Under the values and practices of New Public Management (NPM), intended to increase accountability and efficiency in the public sector, time in the university has become accelerated, intensifed, fragmented, and commodifed. Feminist and anti-colonial scholars remind us of the differentiated temporal impacts of NPM on women and other minorities in higher education, yet to date, its impact on the feminized profession of librarianship has not been examined. Using data from semi-structured interviews with 24 librarians working in Canadian U15 public research-intensive universities, the present article seeks to address this gap by exploring the impact of neoliberal timescapes on librarians’ scholarship and professional-service activities. Findings indicate that time is an important mechanism through which neoliberal governmentality is enacted. Being a “successful” researcher is largely dependent on intrinsic motivation and self-regulation. Trying to work with, rather than against, neoliberal timescapes facilitates research. Results also suggest that conficting organizational timescapes may exist between library directors and librarians, and that, as researchers, Canadian academic librarians are being held accountable to ambiguous performance standards and impracticable timescapes.