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Knowledge is a socially constructed reality based on facts, values and beliefs, with close associations with what we regard as true and valid and what appears to cause and explain what. Individual or collective, expert or novice, people know that and what they know through handling and analysing information. Information searches (informal, as conversations, formal, like reference enquiries) reveal and depend on frames of knowledge in participants. It is important for information intermediaries to recognise the cognitive style of the enquirer.

Knowledge structures exist in various forms. Subject disciplines exemplify them and are characterised by substantive and procedural patterns of knowledge and methodological strategies. Ways of knowing and coming to know also exemplify them, and these are characterised by cognitive styles and factors like valuation and intentionality. Multi‐disciplinary subjects such as management in libraries and information services are typified by multi‐ordinacy in knowledge structures and multi‐paradigmacy among experts and practitioners. A research exercise was devised to elicit views of management from such experts and practitioners. In response to propositional statements about management, inferences about the conceptual underlays of practising library managers can arguably be made to illuminate decision making and the process of self‐concept management.