Pedro Monteiro, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Kasper Trolle Elmholdt, Aalborg University, Denmark
Samantha Ortiz Casillas, NOVA School of Business and Economics, Portugal
Anastasia Sergeeva, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Ruthanne Huising, ESSEC, France
The Standing Working Group (SWG) 08 aims to provide a platform for advancing the growing interest in expertise within organization studies. It highlights the increasing significance of expertise for theory, policy, and practice across this field and its neighboring ones. Expertise lies at the intersection of multiple research communities in organization studies and beyond, representing an evolution of earlier discussions on topics such as knowledge and organizations. Aligned with EGOS’ commitment to intellectual plurality and social inclusion, the SWG is guided by an ethos that values scholarly discovery as a collective endeavor. Its goal is not to promote any specific theoretical approach or conceptual framework but to foster the development of research on expertise and its intersections with areas such as work, technology, occupations, organizational structure and design, inequality, and prosocial issues.
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.
More specifically, this SWG pursues the following objectives:
Establish a platform for scholars to meet and share expertise-related research.
Enhance understanding of how expertise shapes and is shaped by organizational dynamics.
Promote cross-pollinating discussions across (sub)-fields and help coordinate discovery.
Foster a diverse and inclusive scholarly community interested in expertise.
Disseminate research through events and publications.
The scope of the various sub-themes has been selected to enable the exploration of some of the critical facets of expertise
and its organizational constituents. Yet, while the sub-themes at EGOS Colloquia are organized to enable discussions on the
potential distinctions or complementarities with nearby areas of studies, the main aim is to advance research on expertise
in the traditions of organization studies.
Specifically, the topics of SWG’s 08 sub-themes at the next four EGOS Colloquia are the following:
Expertise and Technology in Flux: Empirical Studies (2025)
Expertise: Professions and Beyond (2026)
Expertise and Organizational Structure (2027)
Expertise and Social Challenges (2028)
Pedro Monteiro is an Assistant Professor at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. His academic work explores how organizations develop, recognize,
and integrate expertise as well as the functioning and dilemmas of bureaucratic organization. Pedro has co-convened an EGOS
sub-theme in 2019 and sub-plenaries in 2024.
Kasper Trolle Elmholdt is an Associate Professor of Organization Studies at Aalborg University, Denmark. His research focuses on the intersections
of expertise, technology, work, and organization. Kasper attended EGOS Colloquia since 2014 and has co-convened a sub-theme
in 2023.
Samantha Ortiz Casillas is an Assistant Professor at Nova School of Business and Economics, Portugal. She studies work, expertise, and organization
in the contexts of public administration, public policy, and political collective action. Samantha has co-organized a sub-plenary
at EGOS Colloquia 2022 and 2024.
Anastasia Sergeeva is an Associate Professor at the KIN Center for Digital Innovation, School of Business and Economics, Vrije Universiteit
Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her research interests include technology-mediated organizational change, the transformation of
expert work, and the emergence of new forms of organizing due to digital technologies.
Ruthanne Huising is a Professor of Management and Organizations at ESSEC Business School, France. As an ethnographer of work and organizations,
she studies how organizations negotiate external pressures – most often regulatory change – and the implications of these
changes for professional control and expertise. Ruthanne has co-convened a sub-theme at EGOS Colloquia 2019 and 2020.