Over the last decades, language in the public sector has changed due to influence from New public management. In this thesis, I seek to investigate librarians’ attitudes towards a more businesslike way of speaking about libraries, referred to here as management-speak. For this purpose, I’ve used a modified version of the matched guise technique. A magazine article on libraries was altered so that one version contained more management-speak and the other one less. 500 randomly chosen Swedish librarians were asked to rate one of the two versions on a five point Osgood-scale. Statistical analysis of their answers shows that while respondents who read the version containing less management-speak rated it more favorably, the difference was small and not statistically significant. These results would suggest that librarians in general may not hold any particularly strong attitudes, positive or negative, towards management-speak. However, librarians who graduated in the eighties or later and librarians who do not hold a managerial position are more likely to perceive the writer as younger when she uses more management-speak, while research librarians will probably see the writer as more trustworthy when the management-speak is toned down.
Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:hb-20258 |
Date | January 2011 |
Creators | Öman, Viktor |
Publisher | Högskolan i Borås, Institutionen Biblioteks- och informationsvetenskap / Bibliotekshögskolan, University of Borås/Swedish School of Library and Information Science (SSLIS) |
Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
Language | Swedish |
Detected Language | English |
Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
Format | application/pdf |
Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
Relation | Magisteruppsats i biblioteks- och informationsvetenskap vid institutionen Biblioteks- och informationsvetenskap, 1654-0247 ; 2010:52 |
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