History and Sociology of Expertise

In the large grey area between science and technology, specialisms emerge with associated specialists. But some specialisms remain ‘peripheral sciences’, never attaining the status of disciplines ensconced in universities, and their specialists do not become recognised professionals. A major social component of such side-lined sciences – one important grouping of techno-scientific workers – is the research-technology community. An important question concerning research-technology is to explain how the grouping survives without specialised disciplinary and professional affiliations. The case discussed illustrates the dynamics of one such community.

Das Problem der Expertokratie (Herrschaft der Experten) wirkt zunächst unscheinbar gegenüber dem öffentlichkeitswirksameren Diskurs über ‚Populismus'. Bei näherem Hinsehen zeigt sich jedoch ein enger Zusammenhang, wenn es sich nicht gar um zwei komplementäre Phänomene handelt: Der Aufstieg des Populismus kann auch als Antwort auf die ungebremste Macht von Experten verstanden werden. Als politisches Problem hat Expertokratie eine lange Geschichte, die auf die Anfänge der griechischen politischen Philosophie zurückgeht. Das Thema der Macht von Experten ruft die grundsätzliche Frage nach dem Wissen von politischen Dingen auf und verweist auf die Krise des politischen Wissens. Auf diese Weise konfrontiert es uns mit tiefgreifenden Herausforderungen für die Demokratie im 21. Jahrhundert.

This paper argues that, in order to take place, space and scale more seriously in the study of our discipline, we have to complement the pervasive understanding of geography as a tradition of thought or an extended conversation with an understanding of our discipline as a tradition of practice, in which the main focus is on the becoming of geographers. It is argued that the theme of 'what it takes to be a good geographer' is a fertile way to study this process of becoming. The four main advantages of this approach are illustrated empirically in the body of the argument by the author's reflections on his socializing within two very different geographical traditions.

This article discusses the impact of Pierre Bourdieu's social theorising on two related fields of debate, namely research about the evaluative practices of cultural critics, and research about the artistic legitimation of popular culture. More specifically, the article argues that the concept of field (Bourdieu 1993, 1996) makes it possible to investigate the ways in which criticism, as a cultural category, is struggled over by competing groups of experts and audiences. In this respect, field theory helps addressing criticism as a field in itself, rather than as an uncontested and uniform cultural institution.
The article will first contend that Bourdieu's attention to struggles over practices and classifications remains underappreciated in the sociological literature on critics. It will then argue that a field perspective may enhance the study of the institutional diversification of criticism within popular culture. This claim will be substantiated discussing some findings of the author's research about the rise of popular music criticism in 1970s Italy. The discussion will conclude considering the possibilities that field theory may open up for future research, particularly in relation to the impact of digital media on the institutions and practices of criticism.

Atomic energy developed from 1940 as a subject shrouded in secrecy. Identified successively as a crucial element in military strategy, national status and export aspirations, the research and development of atomic piles (nuclear chain-reactors) were nurtured at isolated installations. Like monastic orders, new national laboratories managed their specialist workers in occupational environments that were simultaneously cosseted and constrained, defining regional variants of a new state-managed discipline: reactor technology. This paper discusses the significance of security in defining the new subject in the USA, UK and Canada – wartime allies with similar political traditions but distinct trajectories in this field during the Cold War. The intellectual borders and content of the subject developed differently in each country, shaped under the umbrella of secrecy by disparate clusters of expertise, industrial traditions, and national goals. The nascent cadre was contained until the mid 1950s by classified publications and state-sponsored specialist courses. The early context of high security filtered its members and capped enduringly both their professional aspirations and public engagement.

What does it mean to be an expert? What sort of authority do experts really have? And what role should they play in today's society?

Addressing why ever larger segments of society are skeptical of what experts say, Expertise: A Philosophical Introduction reviews contemporary philosophical debates and introduces what an account of expertise needs to accomplish in order to be believed. Drawing on research from philosophers and sociologists, chapters explore widely held accounts of expertise and uncover their limitations, outlining a set of conceptual criteria a successful account of expertise should meet.

By providing suggestions for how a philosophy of expertise can inform practical disciplines such as politics, religion, and applied ethics, this timely introduction to a topic of pressing importance reveals what philosophical thinking about expertise can contribute to growing concerns about experts in the 21st century.

Table of contents
1. Introduction
2. What Experts Do
3. Building a Philosophy of Expertise
4. Truth-tracking Accounts
5. Performance-tracking Accounts
6. The Epistemic Facility Account
7. Expertise and Disagreement
8. The Limits of Expertise
Bibliography
Index

Hungary’s opening up to the world did not start with the disintegration
of the Eastern bloc, rather, it had begun as early as the 1960s.
By considering the example of Algerian-Hungarian relationships,
the present study investigates Hungary’s participation in globalization
from the 1960s to the 1980s. Hungarian-Algerian relations reveal
an increasing number and rate of contacts from the 1960s. What
common or differing motivations and standpoints led the Hungarian
partici-pants (decision makers, companies, individual experts) to build
these relationships during their activities linked to Algeria? To what
extent was this a form of anti-colonial solidarity or, at least, cooperation
against “the West,” and to what extent was it merely a matter of
business? In what ways and frameworks did the Hungarian experts
working in Algeria in the intersecting spaces of different cultures
interpret their own experiences? The study constats, that from the
mid-1960s to approximately the mid-1980s, Hungarian “intellectual
export” was beneficial for both parties. The basis of cooperation was not
opposition to the globalization of West-centered capitalism but rather
a common notion of modernization, the top-down led projects of
which received an export of experts from Hungary.

As reformas que provocaram a sistematização do ensino em termos nacionais a partir dos anos de 1930, assim como as que impuseram sua reorganização ao longo dos anos de 1990 são melhor entendidas quando vistas, pelo menos em parte, como resultado das lutas e acomodações que resultam da competição pela entrada de novas frações dos grupos dominantes nas posições de poder centrais, dando ensejo ao surgimento de reformadores de vários calibres e pretensões e ajudando a explicar tanto o desenrolar quanto os resultados das lutas em que se engajaram. Esse artigo mostra como o exame da trajetória social de Anísio Teixeira e Paulo Renato Souza nos ajuda a compreender o lugar que ocuparam nas lutas políticas em torno da educação escolar. Para explorar essa questão, mobilizamos dois eixos analíticos principais. Inicialmente, inspiradas pelos trabalhos de Bourdieu (2000) e, principalmente pela operacionalização de suas hipóteses na discussão sobre a militância proposta por Johanna Siméant (2001), examinamos as condições objetivas e subjetivas em que se deu a socialização dos dois indivíduos, focalizando principalmente as redes familiares e de sociabilidade em que estiveram inseridos e por onde puderam transitar. Relacionando suas trajetórias pessoais com a história social do seu grupo familiar, buscamos compreender a pulsão que demonstraram em investir na política e em fazer dela seu meio de vida principal. Em seguida, procuramos compreender como essas disposições puderam se traduzir numa ação efetiva de aproximação com o mundo da política e como lograram chegar a posições tão altas nesse campo. Trabalhamos, nesse eixo, com a ideia de processo, pensando a entrada na política como “uma atividade social e dinâmica” (Fillieule, 2001, p. 200). Nessa perspectiva, a entrada na política não é vista como um desdobramento automático de disposições individuais construídas ao longo da socialização, mas como o resultado, nunca definitivo, dos encontros, das interações, da participação em redes de relações de vários tipos – inclusive afetivas. A noção de campo político forjada por Pierre Bourdieu (2000) dirige essa dimensão da análise, permitindo conceituar o espaço social historicamente definido, isto é, concretizado em normas, modos de fazer, modos de pensar compartilhados em que se desenvolvem tais interações, concebidas como relações de aliança e concorrência. A partir daí podemos compreender como se dá, num determinado momento do tempo, a ação política coletivamente articulada.

Non-academically trained practitioners of early modern veterinary medicine are still commonly described in decidedly unflattering terms; their practices often conceived of as folkloristic or otherwise static and unchanging. This article examines a group of such veterinary practitioners in the county of Flanders, known as cow masters. It argues that the medicine they practised was theoretically sophisticated and in line with contemporary mainstream medicine, while they made use of a variety of newly available chemical and exotic remedies. It is postulated that these newer remedies augmented the market for specialised practitioners, which has important implications for the history of medicine as a whole.

Canada, as one of the three Allied nations collaborating on atomic energy development during the Second World War, had an early start in applying its new knowledge and defining a new profession. Owing to postwar secrecy and distinct national aims for the field, nuclear engineering was shaped uniquely by the Canadian context. Alone among the postwar powers, Canadian exploration of atomic energy eschewed military applications; the occupation emerged within a governmental monopoly; the intellectual content of the discipline was influenced by its early practitioners, administrators, scarce resources, and university niches; and a self-recognized profession coalesced later than did its American and British counterparts. This paper argues that the history of the emergence of Canadian nuclear engineers exemplifies unusually strong shaping of technical expertise by political and cultural context.

Between 1942 and the late 1950s, atomic piles (nuclear chain-reactors) were industrialized, initially to generate plutonium for the first atomic weapons and later to serve as copious sources of neutrons, radioisotopes and electrical power. These facilities entrained a new breed of engineering specialist adept at designing, operating and maintaining them. From the beginning, large companies supplied the engineering labor for this new technology, and played an important role in defining the nature of their nuclear expertise. In the USA, the most influential company of the period was DuPont, which assumed responsibility for the first plutonium production reactors at Oak Ridge TN and Hanford WA between 1942-6, and of the postwar production facilities at Savannah River SC 1950-87. This paper explores the transition of authority from so-called “atomic scientists” to nuclear engineers at these sites, and the role played by DuPont in consolidating this new technical profession.

The nuclear engineer emerged as a new form of recognised technical professional between 1940 and the early 1960s as nuclear fission, the chain reaction and their applications were explored. The institutionalization of nuclear engineering channelled into new national laboratories and corporate design offices during the decade after the war, and hurried into academic venues thereafter proved unusually dependent on government definition and support. This paper contrasts the distinct histories of the new discipline in the USA and UK (and, more briefly, Canada). In the segregated and influential environments of institutional laboratories and factories, historical actors such as physicist Walter Zinn in the USA and industrial chemist Christopher Hinton in the UK proved influential in shaping the roles and perceptions of nuclear specialists. More broadly, I argue that the State-managed implantation of the new subject within further and higher education curricula was shaped strongly by distinct political and economic contexts in which secrecy, postwar prestige and differing industrial cultures were decisive factors.

Scientiae Conference, Amsterdam, 9-12 June 2021 (Zoom)

In 1682, the institutions of the city of Marseille asked the main “fontanier,” Joseph Chaulier, to report on all the fountains in the French city. Following its expansion under Louis XIV (1666) and its transformation into a free-port (1669), Marseille’s population and trade were booming, calling for a reorganisation of the water provisioning system. This paper will take into account Chaulier’s survey—and his later notebook (1694)—as documents revealing invisible hierarchies of technical and material expertise and practitioners, as well as the “water geographies” and political economy of late seventeenth-century Marseille.

This paper outlines a theoretical and conceptual account for the analysis of contemporary ethical or ‘bioethical’ expertise. The substantive focus is on the academic discipline of bioethics - understood as a ‘practical’ or ‘applied’ ethics - and its relationship to medicine. I draw intellectual inspiration from the sociology of science and make use of research into the idea of ‘expertise’ per se. In so doing I am attempting to move the debate beyond the limitations placed upon it by philosophical or meta-ethical analysis and develop a perspective than can be used to address the sociological reality of ethical expertise, particularly in relation to the influence of bioethics. To do so I offer the terms ethos and eidos in order to provide a basic conceptual framework for the sociological analysis of ‘morality’ and ‘ethics.’ I then turn to an exegesis of Collins and Evans’ account of ubiquitous, contributory and interactional expertise and situate these topics in relation to applied ethics and medical practice. My account suggests a particular understanding of the kinds of relationships that the normative branches of bioethics should seek to foster with the social fields it endeavors to not only comment upon but also influence.

Title: The sex of expertise. Gender regimes and the dynamics of inequality in management consulting.
At the intersection of the theoretical frameworks of economic sociology and the sociology of gender, this study focuses on gender regimes and the dynamics of gender inequality in French management consulting. It exposes the combination of processes that actively contribute to produce gender and draws on the following empirical research: a long-running ethnographical study of a national employers’ association and of three consulting firms; a quantitative study involving 23 firms and 1637 employees (women and men); life stories, and an archival study of historical sources.
Contemporary gender regimes in management consulting are first analyzed as the result of a socio historical process, during which the modeling of a masculine ethos and of male professional norms are intertwined with an accelerating feminization of the labor force. Appearing with the first Taylorist engineers, after the First World War, the ideal model of the expert, one defined by his technical know-how contributes to gender segregation in the labor market up until the beginning of the 1990s — even as the management consulting market undergoes an unprecedented expansion.
This research also underlines how, on a meso sociological scale, the division of labor and power and contemporary gender inequalities variously structure consulting firms. Local gender regimes in the studied consultancies fall within three main models: contention, focused segregation, and banalization. The capitalistic instability that characterizes much of management consulting, and various forms of hold-up on the profits of corporations make the perspective of progress towards greater equality uncertain.
The interactional processes that consulting inherently implies also contribute to produce gender: relational work with clients, which puts into play body techniques, exposes women consultants to specific difficulties, forcing them into forms of passing in order to embody the “ legitimate” expert.
Drawing on resources stemming from their primary socialization in particular, women consultants negotiate their gender identity during their professional career, adopting different sets of strategies, from adaptation to transgression, to attempt to “undo” gender. In realizing that their sex may be a stigma, and in experiencing the different forms of discrimination that it entails, they engage in “moral careers” and sometimes enter forms of collectives.

Key words: gender – management consulting – sexual division of labor – expertise – relational work – embodiment – inequalities – careers

Au croisement de la sociologie économique, de la sociologie du travail et de la sociologie du genre, cette thèse entend contribuer à éclairer certains des mécanismes contemporains de production et de renégociation des inégalités, en particulier des inégalités de sexe. Elle étudie un espace professionnel et marchand, au prisme de sa féminisation et y analyse les régimes de genre – systèmes dynamiques d’inégalités. Pour mettre au jour l’articulation des processus qui participent à ces régimes, elle s’appuie sur un important protocole d’enquête, alliant méthodes quantitatives et qualitatives : une enquête auprès de 1637 consultant-e-s, une longue ethnographie d’une organisation patronale et de plusieurs cabinets de conseil, associées à un corpus de 76 entretiens biographiques et de sources écrites (archives et production indigène).
L’analyse met en lumière trois résultats majeurs. Les régimes de genre contemporains dans le conseil en management résultent tout d’abord d’un processus socio historique où se combinent structuration des normes professionnelles selon un ethos viril et ouverture croissante à une main d’œuvre féminine. L’enquête permet ensuite de dégager, à l’échelle méso sociologique, la division horizontale et verticale du travail et la structure contemporaine des inégalités, différenciée selon les firmes, qui se répartissent selon trois types idéaux de régimes de genre – contention, ségrégation ciblée ou banalisation. Ce sont enfin les processus interactionnels, impliqués dans la production des biens singuliers que sont les conseils, qui produisent le genre. Le travail relationnel avec les clients, qui met en jeu des techniques du corps, expose les consultantes à des difficultés spécifiques, pour incarner l’expert légitime.
La thèse souligne toutefois la dimension dynamique des régimes de genre et la variété des stratégies  déployées par les consultantes dans le cours de leur carrière, pour s’accommoder, transgresser ou tenter de dépasser le genre.

In the 1960s Switzerland started to build the world's largest system of civil defense shelters. Ever since, the tiny country has represented the gold standard for bunker design and technology, attracting worldwide interest amongst scientists, political elites, and private consumers. This essay examines the development, forms, and global reach of Swiss bunker expertise. It emphasizes the knowledge transfer and the networks of cooperation with West Germany and the United States upon which the career of Swiss bunker research was founded. At the same time, attention is drawn to the translation processes by which knowledge was locally adapted and technoscientific expertise was gained, strategically diffused, and marketed, thereby securing Swiss predominance in the field. In sum, the present study of Swiss bunker expertise showcases the often-ridiculed civil defense programs of the atomic age as a fertile ground for historians of cold war science and technology, allowing us to reveal a whole range of relevant and detailed engagements with nuclear practices and technology apart from completed atomic bombs. The essay also makes a case for exploring cold war scientific and technological achievements in a transnational frame while not losing sight of local conditions, national and economic interests, and narratives.

Fifteen technology scholars from China, France, Spain, the UK, and the US collaborated on a letter published in slightly different form in Science on September 4, 2015. The letter argues that the special section Science published on July 17 was heavily biased toward advocates of rapid development of Artificial Intelligence. We also argue that the technology is being pushed mainly by relatively young, white and east Asian males who are utterly unrepresentative of humanity, and that it is both wiser and more just to proceed slowly while institutional innovation creates processes for a much wider deliberation about the upsides and downsides of AI.

Behind the headlines of our time stands an unobtrusive army of science advisors. Panels of scientific, medical, and engineering experts evaluate the safety of the food we eat, the drugs we take, and the cars we drive. But despite the enormous influence of science advice, its authority is often problematic, and struggles over expert advice are thus a crucial aspect of contemporary politics. Science on Stage is a theoretically informed and empirically grounded study of the social process through which the credibility of expert advice is produced, challenged, and sustained.

This is the first book to explore the environmental foundation of the Scottish Enlightenment. Such a perspective sheds new light on one of the great problems of social and economic theory: what are the causes and limits of economic development? The first part of the book recounts how natural historians turned Highland Scotland into a practical laboratory and internal frontier after 1745. They sought to make northern Scotland into a cornucopia by transforming local ecosystems, soils, and even the climate itself. They also promoted maximum population growth by advocating a new standard of minimal subsistence based on spade husbandry. But these projects provoked political controversy as well as unintended social consequences. The second section shows how conservative and liberal improvers clashed over the fit between the environment and the social order. Adam Smith’s defense of free markets presumed an ideal order of self-regulating natural systems whereas his critics stressed the need for human expertise and government to regulate fragile environments. These two rival ecologies of development have left a deep mark on the history of capitalism and conservationism. The final part of the book charts the collapse of the improvement schemes in the north. Now the region became the stage for a political debate about the physical limits to growth, feeding new fears of overpopulation, coal exhaustion and the stationary state. Enlightenment’s Frontier thus excavates the idealized vision of nature in Adam Smith’s defense of free markets and also reveals how the Scottish Enlightenment helped give birth to modern environmentalism.

Many private collections became the foundation of public museums. Despite clear and evident trends in the history of private musical-instrument collecting, a closer look uncovers a diversity of individual and personal visions. In the new museum context, the objects took on a different meaning; this paper acknowledges a crisis that resulted, and confronts how museums are changing as a result, including de-emphasizing the value of collections and expertise in light of new demands that prioritize service to society. This paper considers the inward–outward shift and developments in collecting and exhibiting objects, such as interactivity, new narratives, and public engagement. Further, it explores selected aspects of key crucial issues for the mission of musical-instrument museums, including education, provenance and documentation, that are closely intertwined with our understanding of the value of our collections today. This paper encourages reflection about how our ideas of the value of collections have changed over time, and how current demands may impact the value and preservation of this cultural heritage.

In: Proceedings of the conference 'Private Passion – Public Challenge. Collecting Musical Instruments Then and Now', Dominik von Roth and Linda Escherich, eds. Publication of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg. Heidelberg: arthistoricum.net (2018).

Sean Johnston has written a timely and much needed book about the history of holography—a “high‐tech” science that emerged in the mid‐1960s out of the shadows of Cold War secrecy to fascinate the wider scientific community and the general public. Using tiny ...

Holography, the technology of three-dimensional imaging, has repeatedly been reconceptualised by new communities. Conceived in 1947 as a means of improving electron microscopy, holography was revitalized in the early 1960s by engineer-scientists at classified laboratories. The invention promoted the transformation of a would-be discipline (optical engineering) and spawned limited artist-scientist collaborations. However, a separate artisanal community promoted a distinct countercultural form of holography via a revolutionary technology: the sandbox optical table. Their tools, sponsorship, products, literature and engagement with wider culture differentiated the communities, which instituted a limited ‘technological trade’. The subject strikingly illustrates the co-evolution of new technology along with highly dissimilar user groups, neither of which fostered the secure establishment of a profession or discipline. The case generalises the concept of 'research-technologists' and 'peripheral science', and extends the ideas of Langdon Winner by demonstrating how the political dimensions of a technology can be important but evanescent in the growth of technical communities.

This paper explores the confrontation of physical and contextual factors involved in the emergence of the subject of color measurement, which stabilized in essentially its present form during the interwar period. The contentions surrounding the specialty had both a national and a disciplinary dimension. German dominance was curtailed by American and British contributions after World War I. Particularly in America, communities of physicists and psychologists had different commitments to divergent views of nature and human perception. They therefore had to negotiate a compromise between their desire for a quantitative system of description and the perceived complexity and human-centeredness of color judgement. These debates were played out not in the laboratory but rather in institutionalized encounters on standards committees. Groups such as this constitute a relatively unexplored historiographic and social site of investigation. The heterogeneity of such committees, and their products, highlight the problems of identifying and following such ephemeral historical 'actors'.

What does it mean to be an expert? What sort of authority do experts really have? And what role should they play in today's society? Addressing why ever larger segments of society are skeptical of what experts say, Expertise: A Philosophical Introduction reviews contemporary philosophical debates and introduces what an account of expertise needs to accomplish in order to be believed. Drawing on research from philosophers and sociologists, chapters explore widely held accounts of expertise and uncover their limitations, outlining a set of conceptual criteria a successful account of expertise should meet. By providing suggestions for how a philosophy of expertise can inform practical disciplines such as politics, religion, and applied ethics, this timely introduction to a topic of pressing importance reveals what philosophical thinking about expertise can contribute to growing concerns about experts in the 21st century. Table of contents 1. Introduction 2. What Experts Do 3. Building a Philosophy of Expertise 4. Truth-tracking Accounts 5. Performance-tracking Accounts 6. The Epistemic Facility Account 7. Expertise and Disagreement 8. The Limits of Expertise Bibliography Index

Während der Meiji-Zeit (1868-1912) heuerte die japanische Regierung hunderte wissenschaftliche Experten aus Europa und den USA an, die mit ihren Fachkenntnissen der planmäßigen Modernisierung Japans assistierten. Die Studie weist erstmals nach, dass Vertreter verschiedener Regierungen zahlreiche der westlichen Berater, Ingenieure und Professoren in japanischem Dienst inoffiziell für diplomatische Strategien im Rahmen des informellen Imperialismus in Japan und Ostasien einspannten. Mit der informellen Beauftragung der Experten und einer gezielten Trennung von diplomatischer Rhetorik und Praxis nutzten imperiale Akteure die wissenschaftliche Autorität der Experten, um politische Glaubwürdigkeit und Legitimität herzustellen. Die auf einem neuen Wissenschaftsdiskurs grundierenden Imageressourcen der wissenschaftlichen Neutralität, Objektivität und Glaubwürdigkeit halfen Imperialagenten (Diplomaten, Händler etc.) dabei, das gegenseitige Misstrauen abzufedern und die Handlungsspielräume macht- und wirtschaftspolitischer Agenden auszudehnen. Die wissenschaftlichen Experten werden dabei als transnationale Agenten imperialen Einflusstrebens zwischen Wissenschaftsideal und Opportunität profiliert. So zeichnet die Studie neuartige diplomatische Methoden in den internationalen Beziehungen in Ostasien vor und um 1900 nach, in denen Imperialagenten die neuen Einflussfaktoren der Öffentlichkeit und Wissenschaft strategisch einbezogen.


The study explores ways in which diplomatic strategies within the unequal treaty system between Meiji Japan and Western powers were enhanced by employing the informal agency of foreign experts in the service of the Meiji government. Before Japan was able to revise the unequal treaties in the 1890s, international intercourse within the treaty system was conditioned by policies of informal imperialism, wherein the entanglement of multilateral national interests and an atmosphere of hidden agendas restricted diplomatic scopes to act.
The study analyses how imperial agents increased diplomatic dialogue and responsivity by making use of the social capital of high-ranking oyatoi gaikokujin (lit.: hired foreigners). Instrumentalising the expert-oyatoi's specialised knowledge and, moreover, their scientific image of being detached from the political sphere enabled officials to gather informal intelligence, to hide unofficial impacts, and thus to promote national interests, be it to secure lucrative commercial contracts on the part of the British and German government, or to implement diplomatic press strategies on the part of the Meiji government.
By seeking to understand the political preconditioning of access to knowledge within the context of informal imperialism, the study is concerned with the strategic value of scientific image and representation, and thereby elaborates on the informal agency of oyatoi, which has not yet been sufficiently investigated.

This paper analyzes the activities, members, and effects of an inter-American expert network for the diffusion of psychometric knowledge, specifically of standardized aptitude testing for university admission in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s. Within the framework of educational transfer studies, the role of international, nongovernmental, and philanthropic organizations is examined. It is argued that circulation of psychometric knowledge and technologies led to a new governing regime for learning and learners. The paper discusses the effect of convergence and Americanization, in the context of US-promoted “Alliance for Progress,” but also of divergence and resistance.

Between the 1940s and 90s, successive generations of nuclear specialists found themselves defined by conflicts. Their new expertise drew on both high physics and engineering heuristics.  Their evolving jobs were defined alternately by the corporate industrial cultures of chemistry and of electrical engineering.  And, despite the exuberance of the atomic age, their professional status and collective authority vacillated.  Veiled by security, their new knowledge was guarded in national laboratories. Unlike their predecessors, the disciplinary borders, occupational roles and public status of nuclear engineers were defined largely by the State.
As power generation developed as the principal application, nuclear engineers populated more stable job categories as designers and operators of reactors.  But as ill-defined and often faceless experts, these practitioners’ characteristics became subsumed by those of corporate sponsors. In latter decades, these expert practitioners were delineated more often by accidents than by achievements.
This paper examines factors shaping technical identity and argues that, as members of a perpetually ‘in-between’ or ‘Goldilocks’ profession, nuclear engineers had remarkably limited influence in defining their own identity.  Based on archival and oral history research in the UK, USA and Canada and comparisons with earlier national studies, the history of their emergence can be characterised as transnational and yet largely transcending politics at the national scale.