While the subject of expertise has been implicitly present across the social sciences for almost a century, it has emerged
as a distinctive topic of study in recent decades. Adjacent fields and disciplines have explored the nature and consequences
of expertise for democracy, security, and social trust. In organization scholarship, a focus on expertise is already visible
in discussions of specialization and division of labor, and the idea advanced by scientific management that forms of technical
expertise could be an organizing principle for industry. As organization studies evolved, expertise has been associated with
a range of processes such as organizational learning, knowledge sharing and management, coordination, innovation, control,
technology development, technology implementation, and technology use.
Many factors, such as artificial intelligence, climate change, populism, inequality, or hyper-specialization of work, have
recently converged to launch expertise as a topic of study with great explanatory potential. Nevertheless, this explosion
of interest in expertise has not been accompanied by any apparent sustained effort to coordinate knowledge production on this
topic. Perhaps because it touches on various conversations and intersects with various sub-fields, the exact questions for
scholars in organization studies and their role in this broader debate have not been worked out. As a result, how scholarly
insights on expertise overlap, complement, or even challenge each other is unclear. Therefore, much could be gained from more
coordination in the emerging collective discussion on the multiple facets of expertise in and around organizations. This is
the purpose of such a SWG.