ABSTRACT
Among organizations employing large numbers of professionals, libraries are marked by a commonality of knowledge shared at all professional and administrative levels. Regardless of the degree of horizontal differentiation or departmentation within a library, all the professionals share a common body of training and expertise. Of course, different librarians in different departments may perform widely differing tasks. Nevertheless, those tasks generally are integral features of librarianship, and all the professionals in the library have had at least some grounding in them all during their training. For instance, not all librarians are catalogers, but all librarians are to an extent familiar with classification schemes and the mechanics of bibliographic description. Furthermore, they all make regular use of this knowledge to one degree or another. In this sense, libraries generally typify, with some variance, the professional organization described by Hall:
The organization of the professional departments tends to be rather “flat.” That is, the concept of equality among professionals (lawyers should be given equal status within a legal department) leads to little differentiation within a department. The model followed is collegial, which is characterized by a few formal distinctions or norms and by little in the way of formalized vertical or horizontal differentiation.
