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Sub-theme 08: [SWG] Expertise: Professions and Beyond

Convenors:
Daisy Chung
City, University of London, United Kingdom
Pauli Pakarinen
Aalto University, Finland
Ruthanne Huising
ESSEC Business School, France

Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

For much of the 20th century professions were studied as the primary means through which expertise was structured and institutionalized. However, significant technological and societal changes in this century challenge established notions of what constitutes expertise, where it is located, and how it is adjudicated and evaluated. Further, scientific knowledge and the abstract expertise of professions may be losing standing in matters of public concern. Although organizations and institutions have evolved to depend on myriad experts, collective trust in the conventional abstract, rationalist approaches is in decline.
 
These changes have opened up realms of social problems to a plurality of incommensurable yet competing forms of expertise. The boundary between those historically considered experts and others is dissolving, as participation in inference and interventions is extended independent of the informational and analytical bases of inference and interventions. Increasingly, expertise is made manifest through interactions among a range of actors and elements, including humans, non-human species, machines and technologies, rules and institutional arrangements, and organizational processes.
 
This sub-theme convenes empirical and theoretical work about this expanded ecology of expertise. We invite submissions that address fundamental questions about how expertise is organized, produced, performed, verified and recognized.

  • Going beyond substantive, relational, and tacit expertise, what other forms of expertise are observed in professions, organizations, and institutions?

  • Through what processes is expertise generated, applied, and recognized? How are these processes shaped by technology, organizations, and institutions?

  • How are the ways expertise is claimed, recognized, and verified changing?

  • What methodologies and research contexts will enable us to expand knowledge of expertise?

  • How is our understanding of the division of expert labor changing to include previously discounted actors and interactions?

  • What are the consequences of changing forms and instantiations of expertise for professions, organizations, and society?

We welcome realist and relativist examinations, and both empirical and theoretical examinations of expertise.
 

Daisy Chung is a Senior Lecturer in Management at Bayes Business School, City, University of London, United Kingdom. She studies occupational communities, authority and expertise, jurisdictional shifts, and field-level organizations such as industry and trade associations using qualitative, inductive methods. Daisy’s research has been published in ‘Administrative Science Quarterly’, ‘Organization Science’, ‘Research in the Sociology of Organizations’, and ‘Journal of Management Inquiry’.
Pauli Pakarinen is an Academy Research Fellow at the Department of Management Studies, Aalto University, Finland. His research interests lie at the intersection of work, expertise, and professions. He uses qualitative and archival methods to examine professions and their work in complex settings saturated with information, technology, and interdependencies, such as simulation rooms, central banks, and tech companies. Pauli’s research has been published in the ‘Journal of Management Studies’ and in ‘Research in the Sociology of Organizations’.
Ruthanne Huising is a Professor of Management at the Department of Management, ESSEC Business School, France. She studies professions and expertise in the context of technological, organizational, and institutional change. Ruthanne’s research has been published in ‘Administrative Science Quarterly’, ‘Organization Science’, and ‘Regulation & Governance’.