Empty calories? A fragment on LIS white papers and the political sociology of LIS elites

Abstract

White papers - reports conveying research or recommendations on a complex issue - arrive in the inboxes of academic librarians, along with an obligation to monitor them if they can help one's library or university. They seem to invariably disappoint, the written equivalent of empty calories. This paper asks: is this true? If so, how so? And why? To answer, a selection method produced a modest subset of current, topical white papers to analyze - hence this article as a fragment on recent, topical white papers. A simple discourse analysis was performed to find if there was a broad pattern the documents followed, and if a more analysis was required. A clue as to why this pattern prevailed came from criticisms of prognostications about the current pandemic (as of this writing), leading to a return to the reports: who authored them, and how they are situated in political-sociological terms in LIS discourse? The concluding findings fit with earlier analyses, suggesting much about prestige in LIS and how that is maintained, how practices are (and are not) formulated - and what that has to do with the white papers.

Keywords: Elites; LIS think tanks; Pluralism; Political sociology; White papers.