Abstract/Summary

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.