Plowing in Rocky Land: Organizational Culture,Managed Change,and Quality Improvement in Selected Romanian Post-Communist Libraries

Romanian libraries have had a rich heritage of collecting and preserving materials in the domains of national and foreign history, literature, art, and science. During the communist regime they served as propaganda tools for the government's Marxist ideology. In post-communist Romania, there is a desire among some librarians to promote change from a system of limited access to information to a more open system that focuses on quality improvement of library services, operations, and organization. In their efforts to overcome the communist legacy to libraries in their country, some Romanian librarians—with local resources and support from international agencies—are implementing western managerial styles and services. This case study reflects the results, assessments, and recommendations from a survey conducted at a workshop of selected Romanian librarians in August 1998. Considerations for the implementation of needed changes are also included.     

The transition from sensory-motor behaviour to symbolic activity

Pre-verbal, sensory-motor intelligence progresses to where the child needs some kind of representation for further cognitive progress and where his cognitive structures make such representation possible. Observational research shows that early symbolic behaviour occurs only after objects have been endowed with certain physical and conventional properties and after certain kinds of creative organizational behaviour have appeared. The beginnings of language can be studied as part of representational behaviour and may show such object-and subject-oriented duality in lexical and syntactic components.

---

Résumé L'intelligence pré-verbale, sensori-motrice, progresse jusqu'au point où une représentation devient nécessaire pour que le développement cognitif puisse continuer, et où la structure cognitive rend possible l'avènement de la fonction symbolique. Des recherches montrent que des conduites symboliques s'installent après l'attribution aux objets de certaines propriétés physiques et conventionnelles et l'apparition d'activités organisatrices. Le langage se présente comme une des manifestations de la fonction symbolique et peut refléter une orientation bipolaire (vers les objets ou vers le sujet) dans ses composantes lexiques et syntaxiques.