For the last several years I have been musing a lot about words, particularly the way in which they construct ways of knowing – working to shape our assumptions and our actions. Recently attending a local library conference, I could not seem to escape one particularly problematic word.

Customer.

Language can both expand and contain our thinking. For example, accustomed to the rain of Vancouver, Canada, locals use various terms to describe that rain – drizzle, shower, downpour, spitting, sprinkle, misting, etc. For a Vancouverite, a “drizzle” is immediately understood to be a kind of rain that represents a grey, monotonous, and dreary day. Yet, it can also be something familiar and even reassuring. A “drizzle” captures a feeling and a knowing.

What knowing is available to us when we use the word customer? What underlying assumptions shape our use of the term and the way it is applied? What do we actually mean when we invoke this word and what messages does its use send to others, like those who support and use our libraries? What values are at work beneath its surface?

The lack of open debate about the term’s use, while troubling, is not surprising. Through “policy borrowing,”[i] libraries have normalized the use of corporate language while also shifting their role from collections to people. Shifting ideas around the role of libraries has taken place within the context of neoliberalism and corporatization where public institutions adopt managerial practices that are based consumer-market models.[ii] This has led to the re-imagining of libraries as organizations that must be “competitive” while supporting the interests of individuals who must also compete as consumers and producers.

Although community is also a concern for library workers, the privileging of individuals as market agents (customers) can generate a critical tension between “community” and “persons”. What is good for a community, may not be in the interest of individuals, as seen in the struggle for libraries to balance the interests of various community groups when making space available in room bookings (e.g. VPL room rental , TPL memorial service). On a daily basis, library workers must confront the material effects of a shrinking middle-class and the expanding needs of people who find themselves in economically and socially unstable situations. The term “customer” has a dehumanizing effect and does little to elevate the role of libraries within communities. It positions libraries within the competitive marketplace – a place where the public good and social responsibility cannot easily thrive (or, perhaps, exist at all).

“Customer service” has become the way libraries describe service. This form of service is constrained within the limits of capitalism and speaks to values associated with supporting the economy through production and consumption. As a dominant term that circulates at the highest levels of library decision-making, it frames policies, procedures, and general discourse around service, limiting our conception of how libraries can serve. It essentializes service by constructing it around temporary transactional experiences rather than experiences that are built on deep personal and community connections. Yet, by challenging things like customer sovereignty (a concept that frames the individual consumer as someone “whose preferences are to be privileged and catered to whenever possible,”[iii] enabling consumers to feel they have a hand in the development of the marketplace), libraries may find new ways to balance public interest.

While there has been some debate over the use of other terms like “patron” and “user,” [iv] the use of customer continues to dominate LIS literature. There is likely no single, universally recognized term to describe the people who use libraries, signalling that we should think more deeply about all the language we use, when we use it and why we use it. This is because in “recognizing that community is something that does not simply exist but instead must be built, recognizing that community is always complex, negotiated, multifarious, and recognizing the forces that are arrayed against the formation of community,”[v] we can reshape our services to better reflect contemporary social need.

Avoiding the use of “customer” may create new space for library workers to develop programs, services, and collections that shake loose the neoliberal agenda that underwrites the global socio-economic and environmental collapse that we may realistically face. Further, this kind of resistance may assist us in grappling with some of the conflict and discomfort that we experience in our daily practice, challenging efforts to deskill/deprofessionalize/devalue the work we do and the people we, in turn, serve. Such work can build solidarity in our institutions and in our communities so that we may “reconnect and recommit to a sense of the common good.”[vi]

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References

[i] Ball, S. J. (2016). Neoliberal education? Confronting the slouching beast. Policy Futures in Education, 14(8), 1046-1059. doi:10.1177/1478210316664259

[ii] Hutton, J. G., Leung, V., Mak, A. K. Y., &, R. J. V., & Watjatrakul, B. (2011). Students, Patients, Citizens, and Believers as “Customers”: A Cross-National Exploratory Study. Journal of Nonprofit & Public Sector Marketing, 23(1), 41-70. doi:10.1080/10495142.2011.548758

[iii] Brooks, A., & Wee, L. (2016). The Cultural Production of Consumption and Achievement. Cultural Politics, 12(2), 217-232. doi:10.1215/17432197-3592112 -p. 219.

[iv]E.g. Molaro, A. (2012, March 28). Just Whom Do We Serve? Patrons? Users? Clients? The name foreshadows the interaction. American Libraries. Retrieved from https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2012/03/28/just-whom-do-we-serve/;  Stauffer, S. M. (2012). “Patrons” Versus “Customers”. American Libraries, 43(5/6), 12-13. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/stable/23278069; Pundsack, K. (2015, March 2). Customers or Patrons? How You Look at Your Library’s Users Affects Customer Service. Public Libraries Online. Retrieved from http://publiclibrariesonline.org/2015/03/customers-or-patrons-how-you-look-at-your-librarys-users-affects-customer-service/

[v] Fitzpatrick, K. (2019). Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 13

[vi] Fitzpatrick, K. (2019). p. 13.