The building or enactment of expertise in context: what the performative turn in the social sciences may add to expertise research in construction management

Abstract

Expertise tends to be seen as something people possess: one needs to have the knowledge, skills and competences to be able to do a job well, preferably better than others, under various conditions. In practice not all objectively relevant knowledge and expertise gets endorsed as such. In multi-party settings different forms of expertise tend to compete with one another. The latter is certainly true for the construction sector in which parties with different backgrounds, stakes and interests work together in order to create or maintain buildings and infrastructural works. Existing knowledge and expertise need to be performed in order to get treated as relevant to the interactional business at hand by the people one collaborates with. Whose expertise is treated as most salient may differ across interaction settings that make up the different phases of a project. So far, however, what expertise is treated as relevant when in the day-to-day management of construction projects and the effects thereof have been understudied. The argument put forward is that expertise research informed by the performative turn in the social sciences may enrich the construction management research agenda. Performative studies tend to further insight in what expertise ends up to being treated as relevant when in actual practice, e.g. by researching how various expertises are discursively positioned relative to one another in multi-party settings. Insight into how and when existing expertise counts may be of help in developing strategies to ensure that expertise that is considered relevant but is underused in practice may be optimally deployed in the future. General directions are provided for how expertise may be researched from a performative perspective in construction.

Keywords:

• Enactment of expertise
• performative turn
• researching expertise.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Leentje Volker for her feedback on a draft version of this paper. An earlier version of this paper was written when I was employed by Technical University Delft, Faculty of Architecture, Chair Public Commissioning in the Built Environment, the Netherlands. The paper is also partly inspired by my PhD Research I conducted at Wageningen University (and completed in 2014).

Notes

1. See Potter (1996) for a similar argument outside the construction sector.

2. See Freidson (1994) for the emergence and development of professions as a relevant concept and category in relation to expertise.

3. At least in Western countries higher education is generally valued more than practical training.

4. It is widely known that expertise is partly context dependent. Despite this, research generally relies on traditional conceptualizations of expertise as abstracted from their context and as a personal trait neglecting the contextual nature of expertise (Alexander et al., 2006).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Karen Mogendorff

Karen Mogendorff has a background in communication science, social anthropology and discursive psychology. She has a special interest in accessibility, disability and methodology.