Resisting occupational burnout with a mature professional ethics
By John T. F. Burgess, Assistant Professor, School of Library and Information Studies, University of Alabama.
What should we — any member of the higher ed community — do now to ensure a healthy future for academic librarianship?
Being an academic librarian is intellectually and technically challenging work. It can be emotionally taxing as well and not just for those who work directly with patrons. While MLIS coursework prepares learners for those technical and intellectual challenges, less common are courses that foster skills needed to stand up to emotional challenges.
John T. F. Burgess, Assistant Professor, School of Library and Information Studies, University of Alabama.
This choice is particularly troubling since academic librarians are susceptible to occupational burnout at high rates. Recent research bears this out, as a large study of academic librarians in public services roles revealed that almost 50 percent reported experiencing occupational burnout, exceeding the value for any other profession in a comparable study. Awareness of burnout in LIS practice continues to rise, which is unsurprising given the extraordinary challenges created by the pandemic and administrative responses to it. As Ayala Pines and Elliot Aronson defined in their 1988 book on career burnout, occupational burnout is “a state of physical, emotional and mental exhaustion caused by long-term involvement in emotionally demanding situations” brought about by workplace conditions. In a 1998 journal article, Christina Maslach and Julia Goldberg add that it is marked by “feelings of frustration, anger, and cynicism; and a sense of ineffectiveness and failure”. Once one experiences burnout, it can take years to overcome its debilitating effects.
While chronic workplace stress is a major contributor to the development of occupational burnout, simply being under stress is not the main indicator of whether a person will develop burnout. Instead, worker disposition and expectations contribute to the development of burnout. As Pines explains in the 1993 Handbook of Stress, it specifically occurs in those who enter a career possessing, “high ideals, motivation, and commitment,” but then realize under conditions of chronic stress that a significant gap exists between their initial, idealized versions of that career and the everyday reality of their workplace. And as Herber Freudenberger and Geraldine Richelson explain, feelings of ineffectiveness rise, “whenever the expectation level is dramatically opposed to reality and the person persists in trying to reach that expectation” (Freudenberger & Richelson, 1980, p. 13).
Academic librarians operate at the intersection of high ideals and little direct reward for possessing those ideals, rendering them highly susceptible to burnout. Fobazi Ettarh aptly describes this phenomenon as vocational awe, the sense that to join the LIS profession is to answer a great calling in life. Ettarh draws a direct connection between rhetoric that reifies the mission of LIS professionals and the prevalence of occupational burnout. Her proposed remedies are to embrace an ethos of criticism to deconstruct the library as pristine institution, to focus LIS values on actual duties instead of on the aspirational transformation of society, and to reframe librarial work as labor for real people instead of service to some notion of the greater good.
If our professional values, as currently taught, truly make us more vulnerable to occupational burnout, then how we teach those values must change. As an ethicist and LIS educator, I see a lot of value in cultivating moral reasoning skills to make oneself less vulnerable to thwarted idealism. These are relatively simple techniques that promote ethical decision-making as a skill like any other. With just a little training, LIS professional values can cease being abstract, absolutist ideals and start being tools to help you set and implement library policy. The book that Emily Knox and I edited, Foundations of Information Ethics, provides a good summary of this approach).
Even without pursuing moral reasoning in depth, if I were to make one recommendation it would be this: Recognize that your professional ethics exist to serve you, to help you make the best decisions you can for yourself, your patrons, institution, and society. You are not beholden to them as an absolute, unchanging good. Ethics grow, change, and mature. This is why we revise and add to our ethical codes over time. So, the antidote to occupational burnout is not getting rid of our ideals, it is cultivating a nuanced, mutualistic, more mature relationship with them. While it should not be up to individual librarians to resist occupational burnout, I believe everyone can benefit from learning techniques to minimize the risk.
About
John T. F. Burgess is an Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama’s School of Library and Information Studies. His research focuses on moral reasoning and sustainability ethics for library and information science professionals. He teaches courses in areas of information ethics, academic librarianship and information literacy and is active in several information ethics and policy related special interest groups.
Related posts
This blog post is part of a series from librarian thought leaders sharing personal insights into the challenges and opportunities their profession faces. Read more.