It is fairly well known that the field of business management can be susceptible to fads. Organizational scientists have studied the adoption of business approaches like management-by-objectives, total quality management (TQM), business process re-engineering, just-in-time manufacturing, scorecard methods, and others. Their work has led to an interesting body of literature about management innovations and organizational change.
One idea from this literature is that management innovations can morph from 
the original ideas of their founders. Over time TQM began to promote practices that quality gurus like W. Edwards Deming warned against, for instance, bestowing individual rewards for quality objectives accomplished. And sometimes organizations take liberties with the specifics of an innovation. They might
Dr. Deming decide to use only the components they’re most comfortable with or add their own idiosyncratic twists. [Read more...]
Applying management principles is so complex that what is called the same thing (whatever it might be called six sigma, lean manufacturing, TQM, evidenced based management…) in two companies are often incredibly different.
I don’t think it is really possible to use a title of a program to say an organization is managed well. I believe in Deming’s management ideas. But companies saying they are using those ideas is often not very close to the actual ideas. And I think that is true for whatever the management style is called.
So, based on your argument, can there even be such a thing as “evidence-based librarianship?”
You say that “[t]he function of evidence-based medicine is not to promote or commend physicians’ decisions, but rather to inform them. The practice has no agenda other than to help improve clinical decisions and patient health.” Could we modify this to say the following?:
“The function of evidence-based librarianship is not to promote or commend librarians’ decisions, but rather to inform them. The practice has no agenda other than to help improve decisions about library service delivery in order to meet patrons’ needs.”
Thanks for your comments, Kerry!
Based on the understanding of evidence-based medicine I’ve gained from exploratory reading in that area, its main function is to improve clinical decisions in order to improve patient health. So, certainly, your re-phrasing this to apply to libraries seems just fine. The point is that this EBM as an approach values impartiality. Underlying that I suppose is the value that patient welfare should be first, and that balanced and impartial views of potential treatment steps are a requirement. So, having a a bias or up-front agenda (whether this be favoring a particular treatment in EBM or ‘showing’ a library’s value in EBLIP) is not an impartial position.
As to whether ‘evidence-based librarianshop’ can ‘ever be’, Glen Holt, editor of Public Library Quarterly, has campaigning constantly to get librarianship to begin amassing a sound body of research-supported knowledge that can guide practice. So, I think EBLIP, by whatever label it might be known, needs to be a professional aim.
I suspect that library management and programming is not nearly as detailed and specific as health care. We many fewer client “types” than health care, I suspect. That is, our clientele cannot be segmented into categories analogous to the myriad of diagnoses/illnesses
the medicine has. Thus, our treatment protocols, if you will, will not be nearly as numerous.