Professions and expertise

(from the chapter) Begins by providing an overview of techniques employed in the cognitive task analysis of a novel expertise, and known obstacles to these techniques. These obstacles are then discussed in the context of a specific project--Project Nemo. The goal of Project Nemo was to analyze the knowledge and cognitive processes used by submarine approach officers (AOs) as they tried to localize an enemy submarine hiding in deep waters.

In a large room, on the third floor of an old woollen mill in the South West of England, nine architects spend most of their working lives, designing buildings and overseeing their construction. Asked where these come from, architects admit a kind of ignorance: ‘Total magic!’ as one puts it, ‘Something comes from nothing!’ Focusing on the everyday lives of architects, the book explores how buildings are assembled through an intimate and elusive choreography of people, materials, places, tools and ideas. Through these interactions, it asks and answers some questions of wider interest: What is the relationship between a working and a personal life? What is creativity? How is it possible to live truthfully in a world of contradiction and compromise?  What does it mean to claim to know with authority? Most basically but most fundamentally the book is concerned with the question of what it is like to be an architect, and what lessons others might learn from the example their experience provides. Amongst other things, these have to do with the nature of expert knowledge, design, creativity and the central but less celebrated arts of administration.

In 1963, the first issue of the journal Psychotherapy appeared. Responding to findings reported in a previous publication by Eysenck (1952), Strupp wrote of the “staggering research problems” (p. 2) confronting the field and the necessity of conducting “properly planned an executed experimental
studies” to resolve questions about the process and outcome of psychotherapy. Today, both the efficacy
and effectiveness of psychotherapy has been well established. Despite the consistent findings substantiating the field’s worth, a significant question remains the subject of debate: how does psychotherapy work? On this subject, debate continues to divide the profession. In this paper, a “way out” is proposed informed by research on the therapist’s contribution to treatment outcome and findings from studies on the acquisition of expertise.

THIS paper considers recent claims that education is being deprofession~ alised. It argues that judgements about the deprofessionalisation, or repro- fessionalisation, of education are made relative to different theories of pro- fessionalism and discusses the way different theories of professionalism encourage particular focuses on, and readings of, empirical data. The paper suggests that recent theoretical developments which see professionalism as discourse offer a way of rethinking professionalism and educational change as part of an ongoing politics of knowledge, power and social groups which plays out in relationships between state and civil society. The challenge is to see deprofessionalisation and reprofessionali- sation as part of an ongoing politics of knowledge. power and social organisation. and to consider the character and parameters of preferred reprofessionalisation that might be pursued through contemporary processes of educational change.

This research, conducted by the author when a Senior Researcher at Newcastle University, UK, was funded by a UK governance organisation to help them assess, integrate and improve their understanding of the governed population.

ABSTRACT: Governance organisations have been urged to develop more holistic evidence-based approaches with partners to better deal with issues affecting the governed population. This presupposes an understanding of the population, yet there has been little research work addressing how governance organisations come to understand their governed population, nor how this understanding can be improved upon within such organisations.

This case study examined in-depth how understanding of a governed population was developed within one UK local governance organisation and it explored how such understanding might be developed and improved through more holistic and evidence-based organisational learning within the organisation and its governance partnerships.

The research methodology involved placement within the governance organisation, participant observations on several projects and innovative initiatives, observations within, across, and outside the organisation, and also interviews with varied key stakeholders.

The study examined:

- stakeholder engagement and networks
- current and varied understandings of the population
- mechanisms actually used for developing understandings
- the influence of context on organisational learning

and analysed these to arrive at a recommendations to improve organisational understanding of the governed population.

In the case studied, significant strengths were found: including innovative past learning trials for development, extensive ongoing networking activities, and many varied and accumulating quantitative datasets available across partnerships.

However, entrenched organisational approaches and practices constrained the development of holistic evidence-based understanding, for instance: the absence of systematic maintained collective learning processes; weak recording and forgetting of understandings; methodological exclusion of stakeholders from the development of understanding; the relative neglect of qualitative data, explanations, investigations, interpretations, and reflexivity; and also implicit organisational acceptance of such limitations and low aspirations.

Nonetheless, untapped opportunities existed to enable change including: latent practitioner knowledge and innovative management champions, the desire for improvement and raised aspirations within learning networks, and the development potential of alterative learning approaches.

It was concluded that more holistic evidence-based understanding was possible, but required new learning approaches beyond those then in use in both local government or academia.   

Recommendations are made to utilise and develop improved organisational learning approaches trialed and reported in the case study.

It is argued that the case study findings, conclusions, and recommendations may be applicable to other similar local governance organisations and partnerships that seek to better understand local populations, services and interventions.

The work was also submitted for, and awarded, an MPhil (at Newcastle University, supervised by Prof. Patsy Healy)

The purpose of present study was to investigate monitoring pressure on decision making and relate it to decision specific reinvestment. Subjects were 25 expert Ping-Pong players in which they performed a Ping-Pong simulated decision making task using option generation method under two conditions of low and monitoring pressure. Also, the Persian version of decision specific reinvestment scale and competitive sport anxiety inventory-2 were used. Results of multivariate analysis of variance with repeated measure revealed that pressure had a significant effect on cognitive anxiety (P≤0.05). Also, the results revealed that there were significant differences between some decision-making variables including first option quality, dynamic inconsistency and generation time under low and monitoring pressure (P≤0.05). Decision reinvestment only could predict the first option quality changes. Thus coaches and athletes are offered to have knowledge about the different pressure conditions and expert athletes to avoid the self-focus intentions under pressure.

Little empirical research exists about highly effective psychotherapists, and none about the factors that mediate the acquisition and maintenance of superior performance (e.g., Ericsson, 1996; Ericsson, 2006; Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Romer, 1993). In the full sample, a three-level multilevel modeling (Level 1: clients, Level 2: therapists; Level 3: organization types) of practitioner outcomes was used to examine the contribution of the therapist to treatment effectiveness. Consistent with prior research, in the full sample (n = 69 therapists; n = 4580 clients) found that therapist effects explained 5.1% of the variance in outcome, after adjusting for initial severity. Therapist gender, caseload, and age were not found to be significant predictors. In a subsample of therapists, the relationship between outcome and therapist demographic variables, professional development activities and work practices was analyzed (n= 17 therapists, n = 1632 clients). Therapist characteristics (e.g., years of experience, gender, age, profession, highest qualification, caseload, and degree of theoretical integration) did not significantly predict client-reported outcomes. Consistent with the literature on expertise and expert performance, the amount of time spent targeted at improving therapeutic skills was a significant predictor of client outcomes. Further, highly effective therapists indicated requiring more effort in reviewing therapy recordings alone than the rest of the cohort. Caveats and implications for clinical practice, continuing professional development, and training are discussed.

At the beginning of the XXI century, human societies are entering a period of "late modernity" characterized by new forms of trust and risk, untransparent social situations and economic, political and cultural globalization. These processes are associated with the presence of abstract systems that surround people and which require support of people with expertise in the fields which include transport, telecommunications, finance, security, media, energy. At the same time, it is noted that the expertise cult is born and specialists not only meet the identified needs, but also produce new, thus contributing to the development of a culture of narcissism. Article aims to explain the characteristics of expert systems and cultural narcissism, experts role as a participant in social change, model types and kinds of experts with their arcane in to ontological and epistemological structures of the social world. I also highlight the problems associated with the suppression of restrictions in to the access of expertise knowledge.
**
Wraz z początkiem XXI wieku społeczeństwa ludzkie wchodzą w okres „późnej nowoczesności” cechujący się nowymi formami zaufania i ryzyka, nieprzejrzystością sytuacji społecznych oraz postępującą globalizacją ekonomiczną, polityczną i kulturową. Procesy te wiążą się z obecnością systemów abstrakcyjnych, które otaczają ludzi i do funkcjonowania wymagają wsparcia osób z wiedzą specjalistyczną z zakresu m.in. transportu, telekomunikacji, finansów, bezpieczeństwa, mediów, energetyki. Jednocześnie zauważa się, iż rodzi się kult ekspertyzy a specjaliści nie tylko zaspokajają rozpoznane potrzeby, ale też wytwarzają nowe, przyczyniając się tym samym do rozwoju kultury narcyzmu. Artykuł ma na celu przybliżenie specyfiki systemów eksperckich i narcyzmu kulturowego, roli eksperta jako uczestnika przemian społecznych, modelowych typów ekspertów i rodzajów ich wtajemniczeń w struktury ontologiczne i epistemologiczne świata społecznego oraz zwrócenie uwagi na problemy związane ze znoszeniem ograniczeń dostępu do wiedzy specjalistycznej.

This thesis is a critically-oriented study of how knowledge and authority are legitimated in the discursive structure of popular management books. Some key textual and contextual properties of these texts are investigated in a corpus of over a hundred texts, representing a selection of highly influential works in this field according to emic criteria.

Five empirical studies assess different aspects of their structure, with a special attention to their role in the construction of authorial and reader personas: the nature of management book titles, that sets the pragmatic key for the understanding of these texts; the use of metadiscourse to set and answer genre expectations, shedding light on the reciprocal expectations of authors and readers; exemplification patterns, showing how persuasive texts can be deployed without developing general arguments; the use of narratives of personal experience to establish authorial credibility; and the strategic deployment of presuppositions to mobilize readers' affects and convictions in highly-charged topics.

The purpose of these studies is to provide a discursively-based account of the typical persuasive devices used by writers in popular management, illuminating the epistemic characteristics of the discipline. The analyses show the highly idiosyncratic character of popular management writing, that cannot be assimilated either to academic criteria nor to popularisation genres. The positioning of writers regarding their texts, their themes and their audience is understood as an expression of their position within the field of management, where several interests and sets of practitioners coincide. Its relation to the well-established ideological character of the
discipline is discussed, as is the value of textually-oriented discourse analysis for the critique of such ideologies.

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.

Critical pragmatism must face the unsolved problem of grounding ethical practice. Contemporary conceptions of ethics such as discourse ethics and neo-contractarian ethics do not appear to be grounded in a sufficiently pragmatic notion of practice. They suffer from serious problems of application and thus can hardly be said to respond to the needs of professionals and decision makers. A main reason lies in the tendency of these approaches to focus more on the requirements of ethical universalization than on those of doing justice to particular contexts of action, at the expense of practicality and relevance to practitioners. If this diagnosis is not entirely mistaken, a major methodological challenge for professional and business ethics consists in finding a new balance between ethical universalism and ethical contextualism. A reformulation of the pragmatic maxim (the methodological core principle of American pragmatism) in terms of systematic boundary critique (the methodological core principle of the author’s work on critical systems thinking and reflective professional practice) may provide a framework to this end, "critical pragmatism."

Adaptive expertise allows individuals to perform at a high level in the face of changing job tasks and work methods, setting it apart from routine expertise. Given the increased need for flexibility in the workplace, adaptive expertise is increasingly important for today's graduates and professionals. This review investigates which individual and environmental factors distinguish adaptive expertise from routine expertise and thus provides insights into how to facilitate adaptive expertise and its development. Key differences between routine and adaptive expertise are related to knowledge representation, cognitive and analogical problem solving abilities, and past experiences. Learning and working environments, which give individuals the responsibility to develop their own solution strategy and have supportive superiors benefit adaptive expertise. The results of our review also indicate that there is little consensus on the degree of adaptation adaptive expertise provides and the characteristics of a novel situation.

How can we develop competence in research and professional practice? This essay tries to answer the question from the perspective of critical systems thinking, that is, through an approach that aims to promote reflective research and practice. The paper is written for research students and practitioners in different professional fields. It addresses them in a direct and personal way.

Note: This article is a considerably expanded version of the Lincoln School of Management Working Paper No. 22 of June 1998 (also available in this site).
A further-expanded and updated version was prepared for Ulrich's Bimonthly, July-August 2017 (Vol. 15, No. 4, 28 August 2017) and is equally available in the Academia.edu site, see Section "Philosophy for Professionals – on Good practice," entry "Ulrich, W. (2017)".

Systemic triangulation is an extension of the conventional concept of triangulation in science, that is, of the use of multiple methods and data sources. It draws on the author's work on critical systems heuristics and its methodological core principle of boundary critique, so as to systematically uncover the anatomy of selectivity of claims to knowledge, rationality, and improvement, particularly in the applied disciplines. The underlying imagery is explained in terms of the author's "eternal triangle of boundary critique."

Abstract:
In recent years, a dominant discourse has emerged asserting that humanitarian work has become a dangerous profession. In response to growing insecurity in the field, humanitarian organizations have come to develop new security policies to better protect humanitarian staff and infrastructures. Drawing from Andrew Abbott’s historical sociology of professions and Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory of power, this thesis proposes an international political sociology of the professionalization of humanitarian security. To address the shortcomings of normative-functionalist explanations and poststructuralist critiques of humanitarian security, this thesis examines the conditions of possibility fostering the emergence of a microcosm of humanitarian security professionals. As a consequence of this seemingly insignificant transformation in the division of humanitarian labor, humanitarian organizations now classify some of world’s neediest populations as beyond the limits of reasonable sacrifice. In the production of this exclusion, humanitarian actors reconstruct “populations in need” as “dangerous populations.” By weighing the cost of the loss of a “humanitarian life” against the potential value of saving the lives of needy others, humanitarian actors contribute to the intensification of global divides in their quest for a common humanity. In sum, the imposition of security as a humanitarian logic of practice is analyzed as a driving force of the inversion of the humanitarian imperative to save lives and act in defense of a shared humanity. While contributing to debates on humanitarian security, this thesis also contributes to the study of international organizations, security, and transnational power elites.

Résumé :
Ces dernières années, un discours dominant a émergé affirmant que le travail humanitaire est devenu une profession dangereuse. Face à l’insécurité croissante sur les terrains d’opérations, les organisations humanitaires ont développé de nouvelles politiques de sécurité afin de mieux protéger le personnel humanitaire et les infrastructures. En se fondant sur la sociologie historique des professions d’Abbott, ainsi que sur la théorie sociale du pouvoir de Bourdieu, cette thèse propose une sociologie politique internationale de la professionnalisation de la sécurité humanitaire. Afin de combler les lacunes des explications fonctionnalistes-normatives et des critiques poststructuralistes de la sécurité humanitaire, ce travail examine les conditions de possibilités à l’émergence d’un microcosme de professionnels de la sécurité humanitaire. Du fait de cette transformation, insignifiante au premier abord, de la division du travail humanitaire, les organisations humanitaires considèrent désormais que certaines des populations mondiales les plus nécessiteuses se trouvent au-delà des limites raisonnables du sacrifice. En comparant le coût de la perte d’une « vie d’humanitaire » à la valeur potentielle du sauvetage des vies de nécessiteux, les acteurs humanitaires, dans leur quête d’une humanité commune, participent de ce fait à l’intensification des inégalités mondiales. Les humanitaires ne contentent plus seulement d’assister et d’atténuer la souffrance de lointains étrangers, mais ils contribuent aussi à redéfinir la notion de « populations dans le besoin », en les étiquetant comme « populations dangereuses ». Ainsi, la mise en place imposée de la sécurité comme sens pratique de l’humanitaire inverse les impératifs humanitaires fondés sur le sauvetage des vies et sur la défense d’une humanité partagée. Tout en contribuant aux débats sur la sécurité humanitaire, cette thèse participe également à faire avancer les études sur les élites de pouvoir transnationales, sur la sécurité et sur les organisations internationales.

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.

Can systems thinking remedy the difficulties of ecological thinking? A discussion of the need for a new, critically normative concept of ecology, and at the same time an introduction to critical systems heuristics (CSH) as a framework for reflective practice.

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

This  thesis is centred around the analysis of how the different groups of specialist experts that make up theoretical physics at large communicate and transmit knowledge between themselves. The analysis is carried out using two sociological frameworks: the Studies in Expertise and Experience (SEE) approach by Collins & Evans (2007), and mechanisms of sociological and institutional trust in the general sociology of science literature. I argue that the communication process is carried out in two ways: through interactional expertise that is based on deep comprehension when the interaction is between micro-cultures that are sociologically closely connected, and through lower forms of knowledge relying on trust for the micro-cultures that are sociologically far apart. Because Collins & Evans’ framework is strongly based on processes of transmission of tacit knowledge, an analysis of the importance of tacit knowledge in physics is carried out to support the thesis. Speciđc types of tacit knowledge are closely examined to understand how they shape theoretical physics practice. I argue that ‘physical intuition’, one of the guiding principles of all theoretical activity, is infact a type of tacit knowledge — somatic tacit knowledge — that is familiar to both philosophers and sociologists within the academic literature. ăe end result is a description of physics that highlights the importance of sociological mechanisms to hold the discipline together, and that permit knowledge to flow from the empirical to the theoretical poles of physics practice, and vice versa. The thesis is supported by unstructured interview material and by the author’s prolonged interaction within theoretical physics professional circles.

Drawing on research on decision-making, expertise, and cognitive psychology, we make a case for cognitive, relational reflection to improve mediators’ decision-making and mediation outcomes. We propose that automatic, intuitive decisions may dominate mediators’ judgment in dynamic, fast-paced, and uncertain typical mediation circumstances and may result in overlooking essential issues. Despite their automatic unconscious nature, intuitive judgments could improve. We propose that their quality could increase by conscious structured reflective practice. This activation of an interplay between conscious and unconscious processes could benefit a range of intangible social-psychological outcomes that have been mostly ignored in mediation, including parties’ feelings about themselves, relational matters, and process-related issues. The nature of cognitive processing underpinning unconscious decisions is reviewed to support these propositions and to show that learning and other conscious activities play a pivotal role in improving automated decisions. Reflective Practice offers an opportunity to address the two conditions suggested by Kahneman and Klein (2009) for improving the quality of intuitive judgments: 1) An environment that provides constant exposure to regularly repeated cues, and 2) an opportunity for learning the environment. Examples from a study on mediators’ work conducted a few years ago support the positive potential of reflective professional development. Research conducted in management and medicine is also discussed to support the use of structured reflection. The goal is to improve mediators’ decision-making and mediation outcomes by providing mediators with a structured tool to improve their practice. An example of one of the four SRI—Structured Reflective Instrument dimensions, a reflective tool developed by Peleg-Baker is provided in the Appendix.

Current comprehension models recognize the role of prior topic-specific knowledge in the processing of general and specialized discourse (e.g. Gernsbacher 1990; Johnson-Laird 1983; Kintsch 1988). In interpreting, there is widespread consensus that interpreters work better when they prepare in advance. However, research on how preparation affects interpreting has encountered such methodological challenges as high variability and the need for appropriately sensitive measures and tasks (Gile 2005). This article reports an experimental study to assess the effect of advance preparation on simultaneous interpreting of specialized speeches, comparing seven professional interpreters and sixteen interpreting students. All participants did two simultaneous interpretations, into Spanish (their ‘A’ language) from English, of presentations from scientific congresses: one with preparation materials provided half an hour beforehand, the other without preparation. Each source text contained both ‘n...

Current comprehension models recognize the role of prior topic-specific knowledge in the processing of general and specialized discourse (e.g. Gernsbacher 1990; Johnson-Laird 1983; Kintsch 1988). In interpreting, there is widespread consensus that interpreters work better when they prepare in advance. However, research on how preparation affects interpreting has encountered such methodological challenges as high variability and the need for appropriately sensitive measures and tasks (Gile 2005). This article reports an experimental study to assess the effect of advance preparation on simultaneous interpreting of specialized speeches, comparing seven professional interpreters and sixteen interpreting students. All participants did two simultaneous interpretations, into Spanish (their ‘A’ language) from English, of presentations from scientific congresses: one with preparation materials provided half an hour beforehand, the other without preparation. Each source text contained both ‘n...

Current comprehension models recognize the role of prior topic-specific knowledge in the processing of general and specialized discourse (e.g. Gernsbacher 1990; Johnson-Laird 1983; Kintsch 1988). In interpreting, there is widespread consensus that interpreters work better when they prepare in advance. However, research on how preparation affects interpreting has encountered such methodological challenges as high variability and the need for appropriately sensitive measures and tasks (Gile 2005). This article reports an experimental study to assess the effect of advance preparation on simultaneous interpreting of specialized speeches, comparing seven professional interpreters and sixteen interpreting students. All participants did two simultaneous interpretations, into Spanish (their ‘A’ language) from English, of presentations from scientific congresses: one with preparation materials provided half an hour beforehand, the other without preparation. Each source text contained both ‘n...

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.

"This article explores the cultural contexts in which three-dimensional imaging has been developed, disseminated and used. It surveys the diverse technologies and intellectual domains that have contributed to spatial imaging, and argues that it is an important example of an interdisciplinary subject. Over the past century-and-a-half, specialists from distinct fields have devised explanations and systems for the experience of 3-D imagery. Successive audiences have found these visual experiences compelling, adapting quickly to new technical possibilities and seeking new ones. These complementary interests, and their distinct perspectives, have co-evolved in lock-step. A driver for this evolution is visual culture, which has grown to value and demand the spectacular. As a result, professional and popular engagements with 3-D have had periods of both popularity and indifference, and cultural consensus has proven to be ephemeral.
"

This article develops a classificatory framework for analyzing advocacy group strategy in S&T policy domains — an area of increasing citizen activism since the 1960s. In such domains, activists may be locked out by what I call the 'expertise barrier', which blocks those lacking specialized knowledge from full participation. This article argues that activists' strategies to break through the expertise barrier can be classified into four categories: deploying established expertise, introducing new kinds of facts, introducing new policy-making logics, and attacking bureaucratic rules. It suggests further that focusing research on these four categories can facilitate hypothesis generation and future avenues of inquiry, including comparison among advocacy challenges in diverse technical domains. To illustrate this framework, I present examples from activism in two areas: breast cancer research and patents on life forms.

Expertise is a key currency in today’s knowledge economy. Yet as experts increasingly move across work contexts, how expertise translates across contexts is less well understood. Here, we examine how a shift in context—which reorders the relative attention experts pay to distinct types of audiences—redefines what it means to be an expert. Our study’s setting is an established expertise in the creative industry: puppet manipulation. Through an examination of U.S. puppeteers’ move from stage to screen (i.e., film and television), we show that, although the two settings call on mostly similar techniques, puppeteers on stage ground their claims to expertise in a dialogue with spectators and view expertise as achieving believability; by contrast, puppeteers on screen invoke the need to deliver on cue when dealing with producers, directors, and co-workers and view expertise as achieving task mastery. When moving between stage and screen, puppeteers therefore prioritize the needs of certain audiences over others’ and gradually reshape their own views of expertise. Our findings embed the nature of expertise in experts’ ordering of types of audiences to attend to and provide insights for explaining how expertise can shift and become co-opted by workplaces.

A widely held view of science assumes that theory is fundamental not only to basic or "pure" research, in which the aim is theory, but also to applied science and expertise, in which the aim is practice. In this second part of my reflections on critical pragmatism, I question this prevalent view of science from the perspective of critical pragmatism and its concern for reflective practice.

The contemporary notion of professional competence is not grounded in an adequate notion of civil society. Professional practice tends to put citizens in a situation of incompetence, even when it is supposed to serve them. In a civil society, this is not an acceptable state of affairs.

Professional practice and the practice of citizenship need to be understood in such a way that professionals and citizens can meet as equals, though not necessarily as equally skilled individuals. Methodologically speaking, this is possible if we can show that there exists a common core of competencies that both sides can contribute to reflective practice.

This essay finds such a core competence in the new concept of critically systemic thinking. The author introduces some of its basic ideas and explains why they might become the source of a new critical competence for citizens as well as for professionals.

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.

We live in a culture controlled by experts.  However, the most important thing for any expert is to maintain his or her expert status.  Authorities must defend their position or they are no longer authorities.  They do this by keeping the public dependent, ignorant, and confused, and by opposing new information and paradigms which may threaten their power. 

If the search for truth and knowledge is to achieve more than a new patent or other financial goal, if it is to ever break free of its current blinders and ignorance and biases, we need to reject authoritarianism in science and medicine.

This paper is prompted by the call for submissions to the Rudd government's 2020 Summit in April 2008. It analyses the impacts of vocational education and training (VET) reform on the VET workforce in order to identify strategies that might inform an agenda to build the workforce capacity to support economic and social innovation. The paper argues that VET reforms disturb VET teachers' and managers' work. Uncertainties in working life, plus top down reforms and funding constraints, drive innovations. Yet these are often unsustainable because new initiatives-identities cannot compete with established identities in the competition for recognition and resources. The effect runs counter to government efforts aimed at engineering change in VET. This model of reform is not followed by other countries, which recognise and deploy teaching expertise in productive ways to build capacities for innovation amongst young and older workercitizens. The paper concludes with pointers towards an alternative model for Australia.

Based on the inaugural Suzanne McConnell Memorial Lecture, this article focuses on the theme of action in complex contexts. The following topics are covered: the author's approach to this theme and the steps needed to progress from analysis of context to new debates and practical action; the changing context of ALBE; and opportunities for action.

From the point of view of the theory of predicate logic, it is not possible to decide for any text whether it describes a function of a given program or not. For this reason, expert systems are not transparent. Their function has to be explained by an expert or within a working context. The same reason holds for relevance: We cannot decide for any topic (written down) whether it can be addressed by the expert systems. Most questions of relevance have to be decided before using an expert system. Therefore, in a changing world, expert systems run into the dilemma of (only) specific relevance vs. general incompleteness; they can be complete only within a narrow descriptive frame of reality. Then, even the remaining relevance might rapidly disappear.

The importance of theory makes it understandable why mainstream science theory tends to assume that knowledge is either theoretical or is no knowledge at all. There is, it appears, virtually no meaningful research without and beyond theoretical conjectures and claims. This notion of a primacy of theory in research has become so prevalent in contemporary research practice that it is almost taken for granted nowadays.Taking the example of Karl R. Popper's "critical rationalism," which furnishes the dominating model of theoretically based science today, this third article in the "Reflections on Critical Pragmatism" series uncovers the persisting fundamentalist assumptions of such an understanding of science and the difficulties it causes in the practice of resarch..