The Rightful Place of Expertise

ABSTRACT

Expertise has come under attack not least since the Brexit vote in the UK and Donald Trump’s election as President of the United States. In this contribution, I will provide some conceptual clarification and suggest a new topology of expertise. I will also examine the historical roots of this challenge to expertise and its social context using a comparative lens. I will ask what it could mean to speak of the rightful place of expertise. I will try to provide an answer by looking more closely at different types of expertise. Expertise, it seems, has been used as an umbrella term for a variety of different knowledge-related activities. I will show that the role of the expert has to be differentiated from the role of the scientist, but also from the role of the specialist. Specialists have different tasks in comparison to experts which need to be emphasized. My argument will draw on the social and historical context of the critique of expertise, and discuss the challenge to the social sciences, especially STS. I will also relate different kinds of expertise to different kinds of problems which can be labelled ‘tame’ and ‘wicked’.

KEYWORDS:

• Experts
• decision making
• populism
• STS

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I would like to thank the participants at the workshop Expertise and Expert Knowledge held at University College Dublin on May 29–30, 2017 for stimulating discussions and Paul Nathanail, Dennis Smith, Haris Shekeris, Dan Sarewitz, Adam Standring for and anonymous reviewers comments on earlier versions of this paper.

2. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2009/01/21/president-barack-obamas-inaugural-address.

3. Thomas Piketty claims that since the 1970s-1980s, the left-wing vote ‘has gradually become associated with higher education voters, giving rise to what I propose to label a “multiple-elite” party system in the 2000s-2010s: high-education elites now vote for the “left”, while high- income/high-wealth elites still vote for the “right” (though less and less so). I.e. the “left” has become the party of the intellectual elite (Brahmin left), while the “right” can be viewed as the party of the business elite (Merchant right).’ (Piketty 2018, 3). See also Turner (2018) for a recent review of the literature.

4. For other examples from the US perspective, see James (1912) and Eisenhower (Leary 2011).

5. A similar tripartite classification was adopted in slightly modified form by Irwin (1995) and Jasanoff (1990) .

6. One could list all the great names in social theory to corroborate such a claim: in addition to Habermas theorists such as Giddens, Beck, Luhmann, or Baumann exemplify the point. Their usual reference is not an empirical polity but a general, abstract object. Social theorists with a historical bend do provide wealth of empirical references but are rarely comparative (e.g. Foucault).

7. Recent developments seem to cast doubt on the general validity of this statement. The financial crisis exemplifies the current state of affairs in which the technocracy did not ‘dope out’ the public before it became fully aware. Financial experts were as surprised as the allegedly uninformed public. We do have other prominent examples of such moments of surprise, such as the fall of the Communist bloc, the discovery of the ozone hole, Brexit, or the election of Donald Trump. Nevertheless, some ‘new populists’ see the intention on part of experts in ‘headquarters’ to develop their hidden plans, ‘doping out’ the public. The governor of the Bank of England was especially singled out in this regard with his alleged Brexit scaremongering.

8. It is beyond the scope of this article to examine Habermas’ theory in more detail. In this context it should be noted that he replaced the Old Frankfurt School criticism of Western rationalism with a view inspired by American pragmatism. Initially this was done through the distinction between system and lifeworld, where the system is the necessary (!) realm of instrumental rationality and efficiency and the lifeworld is the realm where meaningful interaction between citizens takes place (aka ‘communicative action’).

9. Robert Oppenheimer famously suggested that ‘there are formidable differences between the problems of science and those of practice. The method of science cannot be directly adapted to the solution of problems in politics and in man’s spiritual life.’ (cited in Shapin 2008, 70). Nevertheless, scientists often play along in settings where their opinion is used to provide scientific authority for a political decision. See also (Turner 2010, 253).

10. The typology acknowledges that these different roles are ideal types which in reality might be overlapping. The most hybridized role seems to be the medical practitioner. A doctor is a specialist who, building on their scientific training and experience deals with routine tasks and makes decisions for the patient. But she also provides advice to the patient where multiple treatment options exist, and where value conflicts emerge. Sometimes doctors also engage in public debates.

11. Contrast this to the recent experience of New Zealand’s science advisor: ‘Several ministries stated that their job was to design policy that met the minister’s requirements, not to advise on policy options on the basis of available evidence. Studies in Canada and Australia found similar results.’ (Gluckman 2014, 165). It is beyond the scope of this article to address the potential difference between the German civil service in the early 20th century and some Anglo-Saxon countries a century later.

12. There is overlap between specialists and professionals, but the former category is much wider, cf. Abbott (1988).

13. Richard Nelson’s (1977) metaphors of the moon and the ghetto point to a similar distinction.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Reiner Grundmann

Reiner Grundmann is Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the University of Nottingham (UK). He holds a first degree in Sociology (FU Berlin) and a PhD in Social and Political Sciences (EUI Florence). He has a long-standing interest in social theory, sustainability issues and global environmental problems. His current focus is the relation between knowledge and decision making. He has studied this link in the cases of ozone layer protection and climate change, looking at the public discourse in which scientific experts, lay audiences, decision makers and the mass media are crucially important. He has also published on the nature of expertise in contemporary societies and is involved in an interdisciplinary project on urban sustainability funded by the Leverhulme Trust.