Theorizing about practice 4
Reading Bill Crowley’s Spanning the Theory-Practice Divide in Library & Information Science, which has garnered surprisingly few citations in the five years since its publication by Scarecrow (four book reviews were all I could find in Web of Science). His points about the critical importance of theory to faculty careers and the critical lack of importance of theory in library practice are well-taken, his “cultural pragmatism” oriented glossary of terms such as “intellectual predestination” is unusual, and his Levels 1, 2, and 3 of interaction in research on tacit knowledge are about to be very useful to me. I suspect that the chapter on “theory and revelation” may have put some people off (on both sides of this particular “fence”), but, again, since I’m one of the few people that I know of who is fascinated by things like the role of the mandatum in Catholic institutions, this was actually one of my favorite chapters. Crowley is obviously unafraid of taking on both sacred cows and shibboleths: this isn’t his tenure year!
