Vocational awe describes the set of ideas, values, and assumptions librarians have about themselves and the profession that result in notions that libraries as institutions are inherently good, sacred notions, and therefore beyond critique. I argue that the concept of vocational awe directly correlates to problems within librarianship like burnout and low salary. This article aims to describe the phenomenon and its effects on library philosophies and practices so that they may be recognized and deconstructed.

—Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves

I challenge the notion that many have taken as axiomatic that libraries are inherently good and democratic [emphasis mine], and that librarians, by virtue of working in a library, are responsible for this “good” work. This sets up an expectation that any failure of libraries is largely the fault of individuals failing to live up to the ideals of the profession, rather than understanding that the library as an institution is fundamentally flawed. [emphasis mine]

& further down:

By the very nature of librarianship being an institution, it privileges those who fall within the status quo. Therefore librarians who do exist outside librarianship’s center can often more clearly see the disparities between the espoused values and the reality of library work. But because vocational awe refuses to acknowledge the library as a flawed institution [emphasis mine], when people of color and other marginalized librarians speak out, their accounts are often discounted or erased. Recently, Lesley Williams of Evanston, Illinois, made headlines for being fired from her library due to comments (on her personal social media accounts), illustrating the hypocritical actions of her library in regards to the lack of equitable access to information. Although she was advocating for the core library value of equitable access, similar to that of the “Connecticut Four,” her actions were regarded as unprofessional.

Ironically, this focus on the way-s in which librarians et al are “victimised” by our professional context, while disregarding the aspect of “vocational awe” which is meant to critique all the ways in which members of “vocational” professions will close ranks & lock shields against any kind of analysis that does not accept those institutions as always-already perfect, could be considered an example of vocational awe!

If libraries are sacred spaces, then it stands to reason that its workers are priests. As detailed above, the earliest librarians were also priests and viewed their work as a service to God and their fellow man. Out of five hundred librarians surveyed, ninety-five percent said the service orientation of the profession motivated them to become librarians. Another study found that the satisfaction derived by serving people is what new librarians thrive on. Similarly, many Christians describe their religious faith as “serving God,” and to do so requires a life spent in service. Christians often reference Mark 10:45 to describe the gravity of a call to service: “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Considering their conjoined history, it should come as no surprise that librarians, just like monks and priests, are often imagined as nobly impoverished as they work selflessly for the community and God’s sake.

We are advocating for ourselves & our rights as workers while emphasising, ceaselessly & with great insistence, all the “selfless” ways in which we “serve” our community & how our “self-sacrificing” “passion” for our “mission” makes us “easy to exploit”. We are not advocating for ourselves by pointing out that a library is just a workplace, that being a librarian is just a job, & that if my cousin who works at an insurance company isn’t expected to buy work materials with her own money, to put in unpaid overtime as a matter of course, to accept that her vacation days are basically a fiction, to see her duties inflate constantly with no acknowledgment or compensation, to cobble together part-time positions for the whole of her career, etc, then it shouldn’t be expected of us either & really shouldn’t be expected of anyone. We are not deconstructing the outlooks that underlie vocational awe, we are reifying them.

What makes us “worthy” of advocacy & of protection are, specifically, our willingness to “sacrifice” ourselves for others & for the “good” of the community. This marks us as “exceptional”, “different” from “other” workers who are “different” from us because they are not motivated by “passion” (which like, for “passion” read “vocation”), & makes us unable to identify all the points of contact between our experiences on the job & that of a lot of other people in service positions. Our experiences of “exploitation” (quotes here because good gd, we do in fact have a white-collar job indoors & I think there is something a little obscene sometimes about the ways in which our profession discusses our issues when our offices are cleaned by like undocumented women of colour to whom most of us never even talk & with whom most of us feel no particular solidarity as workers) are not unique & are in fact common across many public-facing industries such as food service or retail - would you believe me if I told you how much overlap there is between my professional experiences as a librarian & that of friends who work the floor at Starbucks or at Aldi? A lot of the manipulative & coercive tactics their bosses use to make them accept job creep, excessive & haphazard scheduling, danger on the job, overmonitoring & micromanagement, but also the pressures they encounter when they take sick days or vacation days, etc are carbon copies of what I’ve seen happen to me & others within libraries. Bosses are bosses are bosses, whether your profession is one that is typically treated as a “vocation” within public discourse or not; it is not true that the ways in which we are mistreated are completely & wholly unique to us. When we accept this framing, we are essentially positioning librarianship as “set apart” from other professions, libraries as completely distinct from any other type of workplace & as wholly unique among them, & ourselves as essentially different from other workers, in exactly the way that “vocational awe” as a concept intends to critique!

As I mentioned earlier, vocational awe ties into the phenomena of job creep and undercompensation in librarianship due to the professional norms of service-oriented and self-sacrificing workplaces. But creating professional norms around self-sacrifice and underpay self-selects those who can become librarians. If the expectation built into entry-level library jobs includes experience, often voluntary, in a library, then there are class barriers built into the profession. Those who are unable to work for free due to financial instability are then forced to either take out loans to cover expenses accrued or switch careers entirely. Librarians with a lot of family responsibilities are unable to work long nights and weekends. Librarians with disabilities are unable to make librarianship a whole-self career.

We are reinforcing those norms when we focus exclusively on how much we sacrifice for our communities & how “passionate” we are about our jobs as the primary reason why our communities should care about what happens to us - when the reality is, what would actually help us is an ability to see & recognise all the ways in which we are not unique, in which even within industries that are not identified as relying on “altruism” & “creativity” (which like, if you think there’s no altruism or creativity in working retail or in like industrial soldering or whatever I’ve got news for you, but that’s a different topic - who is marked as having a “creative” or “altruistic” job in our discourse? why is the power plant maintenance worker who gets up time & time again in the middle of the night to solve complex, urgent industrial problems with no standard solutions, using his hands & his intellect & his imagination, & this so that people will have continuous uninterrupted access to electricity, not considered to have a “creative” or “altruistic” profession within those discussions?), workers are exploited in ways that will be familiar & recognisable to us. We cannot use vocational awe as a conceptual delimiter between professions because that actually defeats the purpose of vocational awe as a framework. We are accepting & perpetuating the idea that we are markedly & measurably “different” from other workers, & we render ourselves unable to analyse the institutions we are a part of as perfectible structures which are not ontologically good or even ontologically different from other workplaces but which are, rather, just workplaces, with bosses & employees, & where exploitation will occur along lines and through tactics that are familiar to many, many people across a whole gamut of professions.

I think the essential conclusion is this quote:

It is no accident that librarianship is dominated by white women. Not only were white woman assumed to have the innate characteristics necessary to be effective library workers due to their true womanhood, characteristics which include missionary-mindedness, servility, and altruism and spiritual superiority and piety, but libraries have continually been “complicit in the production and maintenance of white privilege.” These white women librarians in public libraries during the turn-of-the-century U.S. participated in selective immigrant assimilation and Americanization programs, projects “whose purpose was to inculcate European ethnics into whiteness”.

There are real labor problems here. Base pay is often insulting. Customer tips carry too much of the burden. Workers need better protections, more transparent algorithms, protection from arbitrary deactivation, and actual recourse when the app or a customer screws them over. Car-dependent delivery is also an environmental and infrastructural problem, though in a denser city I’d still be doing this work; I’d just be doing it by bike.

But when people talk about delivery work, I rarely see them talk to actual delivery workers. I see a lot of abstract arguments about convenience, consumer decadence, “hustle culture,” and internalized neoliberalism. Meanwhile, when I’m out working and waiting in restaurants for orders, the other Dashers I meet are usually people who only speak Spanish, people who read as neurodivergent, visibly physically disabled people, or some combination of the above.

I have not met this mythical Disco Elysium poor ultraliberal hustlegrinder-wannabe people seem to be arguing with. Maybe that archetype exists somewhere. If it exists among any kind of gig worker, it would probably be rideshare drivers. But most of what I see looks less like “rise and grind” and more like “this is one of the few forms of work available to people who need flexibility, low barriers to entry, limited managerial surveillance, or a way to work around language barriers, disability, burnout, chronic illnesses and injuries with symptoms that come and go unpredictably, caregiving, résumé gaps, or discrimination.”

That does not make the current system good. It means the current system is filling a real gap that a lot of supposedly better systems do not even acknowledge.

As a disabled person who is burnout-prone and demand-sensitive, contracting as a delivery driver has given me an unprecedented level of financial flexibility. I can work when I have capacity. I can stop when I’m deteriorating. I can build my day around my actual body instead of being trapped under a manager who thinks “reliable” means “able to perform the same way every day no matter what.” That matters. It does not cancel out the exploitation, but it is also not fake just because it is politically inconvenient.

And delivery itself is not some inherently decadent evil. Sometimes people live alone. Sometimes they are sick. Sometimes they are disabled, exhausted, overwhelmed, grieving, overloaded, or recovering from something else - perhaps the stress and fatigue induced by their own job. Sometimes they need medicine, groceries, or a meal that will actually unplug their sinuses instead of whatever generic community-care slop someone thinks they should be grateful for. Humans are allowed to need specificity. “Food” is not the same as “the food I can actually eat right now.”

A serious labor critique would ask how to make delivery work safer, better-paid, less tip-dependent, less car-dependent, less algorithmically punitive, and less precarious. It would ask what kinds of flexible, accessible work should exist for people who cannot thrive in conventional employment. It would ask how cities could support bike delivery, worker cooperatives, public infrastructure, and real protections without simply replacing one bad system with a moral sermon about how nobody should ever want takeout.

But a lot of the discourse does not do that. It treats convenience itself as suspicious. It treats wanting flexible work as false consciousness. It treats the needs of disabled people, immigrants, and other people who can't fit into traditional employment structures as details to be swept aside in favor of a cleaner political image.