Specialists over generalists?: Examining discursive closures and openings in expert collaborations

ABSTRACT

Prior research on expert collaborations has focused on how specialists – experts with deep domain knowledge – work across disciplinary boundaries with other specialists, with much less attention paid to how generalists – experts with broader and connective knowledge – work alongside specialists. To address this gap, we examined collaborative work requiring expertise of generalists (regional planners) and specialists (civil engineers). Our interview data revealed that privileged values of specialist expertise (i.e., exclusivity, neutrality, and feasibility) could close interpretive possibilities of their collaboration and that generalists engaged in communicative expertise positioning to make their expertise work with that of specialists. We developed a grounded model of generalist-specialist collaboration theorizing how they used discursive closures and openings to accentuate gains from their different expertise.

KEYWORDS:

• Collaboration
• expertise
• knowledge work
• discursive closure
• discursive openings

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the study participants for their valuable time and candid reflections, as well as the editor and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on the manuscript.

Notes

1 We were intentional (and urge others) not to conceptualize generalists and specialists using deficit language – that is, generalists are not those who lack knowledge in specialists’ domains, and specialists are not those who lack knowledge in areas outside of their domain – because doing so devalues the individuals’ unique abilities and discredits their potential to generate values through collaborative integration of expertise.

2 Urban planning education is highly interdisciplinary and teaches varying levels of engineering knowledge to prepare individuals to connect technical and socio-political elements for a broad understanding of how regions develop. But planning education alone does not provide sufficient depths of knowledge for planners to pass certification exams and become engineers. For engineers to formally define themselves as planners, they need urban planning education to broaden their perspectives and become certified by the professional association; however, unlike engineering, certification is not a requirement for individuals to claim expertise in planning.

3 Interviewees used “generalist” and “specialist” when referring to the contrast between planners and engineers, but otherwise explained that varying degrees of specialization are possible within each profession (e.g., “In planning, some are more ‘generalist planners’ and some can be more focused on transportation”).

4 Various phases and aspects of the collaborative planning involve stakeholders external to planning agencies, including community groups and elected officials. While regional differences may exist, stakeholder inputs are usually gathered from meetings convened by planners. Thus, planners are positioned to represent stakeholders’ interests when collaborating with engineers to develop long-range plans.

5 Our recruitment of a similar number of planners and engineers does not mean that collaborative planning necessarily involves an equal amount of participation from each expert group. The ratio of planners and engineers in collaborative planning varies depending on factors such as the size of the region (e.g., smaller cities may only have one senior engineer rather than a dedicated division). This study was conducted in large metropolitan regions, where local and state agencies employed groups of planners and engineers that were comparable in size. Their work may involve other professionals (e.g., financial analysts and economists) also depending on the size, structure, and specific needs of each region’s planning process; but generally speaking, planners and engineers are the two largest groups of professionals driving this effort, and others may participate temporarily to provide support roles.

6 Sensitizing concepts are interpretive devices that serve as background ideas or lenses gleaned from qualitative scholars’ past experience or research, which offer frameworks for seeing and organizing data (Tracy, 2013).

7 According to Christensen et al. (2015), binding a project or an idea to existing frameworks make individuals or organizations blind to new and unexpected issues. On the contrary, a “license to critique” approach facilitates stimulating adaptive and innovative solutions. For instance, sustainability programs can take a license-to-critique approach by encouraging stakeholders to report on discrepancies between organizational talk and action. 

8 The sequential order of generalist-specialist collaboration is applicable to various contexts. For instance, in healthcare settings, emergency physicians are considered medical generalists with a broad understanding of how various illnesses manifest in the human body as well as how different units of a hospital are connected to one another. Because patients usually come to the emergency room without a clear understanding of which part of their body is experiencing issues (e.g., pain in the chest area), emergency physicians make comprehensive evaluations of patients’ symptoms and narratives before they contact specialized units for diagnosis. In this context, putting medical specialists in charge of the initial evaluation would not be an effective design choice because they would not have the breadth of experience to initiate or manage coordinated care for varying patient cases.

Additional information

Funding

This article is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation: [SES-1057148].

Notes on contributors

DaJung Woo

DaJung Woo (Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara) is an assistant professor in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. Her research examines communication practices enabling organizational socialization, cross-boundary collaboration, stakeholder engagement.

Casey S. Pierce

Casey S. Pierce (Ph.D., Northwestern University) is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Information. Her work examines the changing nature of work as it relates to technology, policy and knowledge sharing in organizations.

Jeffrey W. Treem

Jeffrey W. Treem (Ph.D., Northwestern University) is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies in the Moody College of Communication at The University of Texas at Austin. His work explores the relationship between communicative practices and social perceptions of expertise, primarily in organizational contexts.