History of Experts

Page 1. T M I H A N E N S A T D G I E E T S M U I E T G N E N T Article Reprint DESIGN MANAGEMENT JOURNAL How Design Becomes Strategic Birgit Helene Jevnaker, Associate Professor of Industrial Development, Norwegian School of Management BI, Department ...

"The 20th century can be described as the century of the expert. The emergence of the expert as a specific type of professionally qualified individual was a result of the growing scientification of economy, society and politics. In his public function, the expert always operates between a universalist understanding of science and the politically defined requirements of the nation state.

This volume examines the fate of the expert in Central Eastern Europe from the breakdown of the dynastic empires after World War I to the end of Communism. This multiethnic region with its turbulent tradition of statehood and changing political systems provides an ideal case to reveal the complex relationship between the transnational cooperation among experts on the one hand and their national orientation on the other."

The article investigates the imperial origins of international humanitarianism in the British and international relief mission to Russia during the famine of 1921–1922. The famine triggered the first large-scale international humanitarian mission beyond the scope of the European and American empires. Imperial expertise and knowledge became central to the British as well as international humanitarian response to relieve hungry Russia. From international coordination to national campaigns, British politicians and voluntary aid workers relied on imperial tools and thought. The British involvement in the relief mission to Russia thus provides a fresh perspective on the development of internationalist and nationalist humanitarian projects in the interwar period and their relationship to imperial legacies. Through humanitarian aid, Britain assumed a new role on a global stage. By retooling imperial expertise, humanitarian ethics became part of a project of global governance. Furthermore, with the advice of former colonial experts, a “mixed economy” of voluntary and state aid underlay the collaboration between voluntary and international agencies throughout the famine and after. The history of famine relief provides a case study in the emergence of humanitarian governance in the twentieth century.

In recent years the role of experts and their advising activity has attracted the attention of scholars from different domains of the social sciences (especially the sociology of knowledge and STS)*. In most cases, researchers consider the problem of expertise in terms of social conditions and institutional arrangements, pointing up the privileged epistemic position of experts against that of laics and the specific place of experts in social stratification of knowledge, to speak in the language of the phenomenological sociological tradition (Schutz 1964a; Sprondel 1979). In the social contexts the consideration of expertise may deal with such topics as the role of science in democratic societies, in particular knowledge-based societies, and the contributions of experts to social and political decision-making with the aim of making it more effective and efficient (Beck 1992; Stehr 1994, 2015). The multitude of expert activities and the variety of domains in which they are engaged make it possible to provide more general typologies of experts and expertise, which aim to cover the complicated subject matter of expertizing in various domains of social and political life of modern societies in particular. The expert questions may deal with such divergent questions as ecology and climate change as well as with structural/dynamic interpretation of different social and political systems, both totalitarian and democratic ones (Brown

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.

Les éloges prononcés à l’Académie royale des sciences fournissent des éléments précieux pour comprendre son fonctionnement à la  n de l’Ancien Régime. En e et, rédigés et lus publiquement par le Secrétaire perpétuel, porte-parole de l’institution, les éloges sont l’occasion de mettre en valeur le rôle des savants dans la société. Par conséquent, une lecture croisée de certains passages des éloges qu’on doit au marquis de Condorcet, le dernier Secrétaire, et de sources qui docu- mentent l’histoire sociale de l’Académie donne des résultats intéressants. Elle permet de constater que dans les éloges, le secrétaire signale et regrette la faible prise en compte des sciences dans l’appareil administratif, et va jusqu’à proposer un mode collectif du travail savant, sous forme de commissions d’experts, qui permettrait de mieux répondre aux besoins émanant de la société. Mais d’un autre côté, ce sont les pratiques traditionnelles de l’Académie elles-mêmes qui empêchent une telle mobilisation des Académiciens en tant qu’experts scienti-  ques, en particulier en raison d’une interdiction d’oeuvrer à des disciplines qui ne sont pas inscrites dans le Règlement. L’enquête montre en n, sur cette volonté de donner à l’expertise scienti que des académiciens une place et une légitimité institutionnelles, une convergence entre l’idéal décrit par Condorcet et une série d’essais contemporains de réforme de l’Académie autour de l’an 1785.

"ToC:

Forum
Pierre-Yves Saunier
Learning by Doing: Notes about the Making of the Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, S. 159-180.

Technological Innovation and Transnational Networks: Europe between the Wars

Martin Kohlrausch
Technologische Innovation und transnationale Netzwerke. Europa zwischen den Weltkriegen/Technological Innovation and Transnational Networks: Europe between the Wars, S. 181-195.

Johan Schot and Vincent Lagendijk
Technocratic Internationalism in the Interwar Years: Building Europe on Motorways and Electricity Networks, S. 196-218.

Albert Presas i Puig
Technological Transfer as a Political Weapon: Technological Relations between Germany and Spain from 1918 and the early 1950s, S. 218-236.

Katrin Steffen
Wissenschaftler in Bewegung. Aufstieg und Fall des Materialforschers Jan Czochralski zwischen den Weltkriegen, S. 237-261.

Alexander C.T. Geppert
Space Personae: Cosmopolitan Networks of Peripheral Knowledge, 1927-1957, S. 262-286.

Simon Ball
The Hidden Wiring: Networks, Firms and the Transfer of Electrolytic Refining Technology, S. 287-301."

The Telegraph Union, founded in 1865, was the first supranational organization to link different countries with the aim of regulating a public service. Its objectives were: technological standardization, a set of regulations and the adoption of uniform international tariffs. The paper aims to establish how the Telegraph Union influenced the technical standardization process of the international network in the second half of the XIX century.

Index Terms — Telegraph Union, Standardization, Telegraphy, Morse, Hughes, technicians, engineers.

The Cuban Revolution fundamentally changed the approach taken by the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc countries toward Latin America. When Fidel Castro took power, the Communist countries began to open embassies in Cuba and develop mutual relations. Along with the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia quickly normalized relations with the new regime and became one of the most active Eastern Bloc countries diplomatically, economically, and in the intelligence field. The Czechoslovak State Security Service (StB) took a leading role in building Cuban intelligence and strengthening the Castro regime. For more than a year, the Czechoslovaks pushed hard to build the relationship and provide assistance beyond what the Soviet Union was willing to countenance, which annoyed and frustrated, the Soviet KGB. Following the Bay of Pigs, during which the StB performed poorly, the Soviets began to reduce StB activities in Cuba. Based on recently declassified documents, this article explores Czechoslovakia’s neglected intelligence initiatives in Cuba and assesses them within the context of Eastern Bloc intelligence activities in the Global South during the Cold War.

Keywords: Cold War, Global South, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, intelligence, KGB, StB

https://doi.org/10.1080/07075332.2019.1692892

William Morton Wheeler (1865-1937), científico estadounidense que empleó los últimos
37 años de su vida estudiando a las hormigas, trabajó en cuestiones de colecta de espe -
címenes, su descripción, taxonomía y especialmente su conducta social. Esta disciplina, a
la que Wheeler llamó mirmecología, se desarrolló entre los años de 1880 y 1930 durante
una importante transformación producida en las ciencias biológicas americanas, que de-
vino en una diferenciación y consolidación de distintos campos de investigación. Dentro
de este proceso, emergió en el discurso de la biología una distinción entre dos formas
de hacer ciencia: la de los profesionales y la de los amateurs, constituyéndose como
una dicotomía que enfrentaba a dos estilos de traba -
jo científico. En este contexto interesa mostrar que
pensar en Wheeler como un experto permite obser-
var aspectos de su trabajo y del proceso de consoli-
dación de su disciplina que no son visibles cuando se
emplea la dicotomía profesional-amateur.

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.