Oftentimes, academic librarians are not fully conscious of the role that their libraries play in late-capitalist society or how they, as information professionals, help to perpetuate this role. Adopting a dialectical materialist perspective, Stephen Bales investigates the modern academic library as an institution and academic librarianship as a profession. The author examines the academic library's position as a culturally and historically situated producer and curator of knowledge and its instrumental role in driving social reproduction and the status quo. The book then considers the effect...