The Organization of the Expert Society

Andreas werr, Staffan Furusten

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317365112
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

It is often claimed that we live in an expert society, a society where more and more individuals take expert roles in increasingly narrow fields. In contrast to more traditional experts most of these new experts lack generally accepted mechanisms for the certification and legitimation of their expertise. This book focuses on these new as well as established experts and the efforts undertaken to secure and legitimate their expertise. We view these efforts as organizing attempts and study them on four different levels – the society, the market, the organization and the individual.

Based on empirical studies on these four levels of analysis, The Organization of the Expert Society makes the argument that current organizing initiatives in the expert society are based in an objectifying view of expertise that risks concealing and downplaying key aspects of expertise. Well-intended organizing initiatives in the expert society thus run the risk of promoting ignorance rather than securing expertise.

Focusing on a current, general and global phenomenon, the rise and organization of an expert society. The Organization of the Expert Society will be key reading for scholars, academics and policy makers in the management fields of Organizational Theory, Management Consulting, Organizations & Society, Critical Management Studies as well as the disciplines of Sociology, Political Science and Social Anthropology.

1
The Contemporary Expert Society

Staffan Furusten and Andreas Werr

Telling Good from Bad Experts—A Key Challenge in the Expert Society

We are currently living in an expert society where we are constantly confronted with experts for everything. As individuals, we meet them in media where they provide cocksure analyses of the condition of the world, the world economy, security risks, who to blame when a corporation is not as profitable as expected during the last quarter, how to cook or how to lose weight. We also meet them through various forms of health apps in our smartphones, in fitness blogs, and at the gym where we are not expected to be able to make our own exercises, but need a personal trainer to guide us. To an increasing extent, we also see experts offering their expertise to corporations, governments, public organizations, associations, unions and political parties. They offer expert missions, and processes of assessments, auditing, ranking, certification, authorization, accreditation and standardization. We have experts giving advice, and assist organizations in matters of communication, recruitment, investment, brokerage, analysis, financial investment, intelligence, information, marketing, purchasing, education, sustainable development, staffing, PR, media relations and more. Whatever you do, wherever you turn, as an individual or member or manager of an organization there are experts—individuals with a legitimate claim of superior knowledge in a specific area—ready to guide and support you and as a responsible individual, citizen, organizational member or manager you are expected to relate to this increasing amount of expertise available.

In this book, we address the question what this proliferation of experts and expertise means for contemporary organizations and the people that lead them and work in them. We explore this phenomenon from the point of view of how organizational members navigate in this increasingly complex landscape of experts and expertise. How do they tell good expertise from bad and better experts from worse? How are different fields of contemporary experts organized in order to create a, from the view of the organizational members, desirable order in this landscape? Who are the organizers and what do they do? What kind of order(s) on these expert fields do the organizing attempts by different organizers create?

In this book we view the sorting of expertise as an act of organizing (Brunsson, Ahrne & Tamm Hallström, 2007) in that it provides structure to a field of expertise and thereby hierarchizes expertise not only into expertise vs non-expertise but also into better vs worse expertise. These acts of organizing may take different forms. Some forms of organizing are generally applicable, clear-cut and transparent, like when expert systems are based on the logic of professionalism. Other forms of organizing, however, are based on more tacit and local structures, like when organizations hire consultants for providing services such as organizational development, where experience-based trust and reputation are central organizing mechanisms.

In the cases when attempts of organizing are clear and transparent, represented by classic “professionalism” (e.g., medicine, law and auditing) it is relatively easy to pick an expert if you need one. There are regulations, institutionalized codes of conducts and demands of membership in associations for professionals where there are strict and transparent requirements for becoming a member of the expert community and keeping a membership. If you pick an expert accredited to represent one of these occupations, you can expect to get one that is highly qualified to perform in the expert role, at least formally! Of course, not all are equally good in solving all sorts of problems for all organizations in all situations, but you can be sure that they are representatives of areas of expertise that are strictly organized in terms of institutionalized standards for what sort of expert knowledge they need to master in order to play the role of the expert in practice.

Many experts in the contemporary expert society are, however, not organized in these ways and some describe them as “new” or “entrepreneurial” professions (Reed, 1996; Svensson, 2006; Nordegraaf, 2007) where attributes of professionalism will emerge gradually over time. Still, it has also been argued that some fields of expertise are not entrepreneurial in this meaning, where other modes of organizing, such as commercialism (the legitimation as an expert derives from the ability to sell one’s expertise on the market) are more pronounced in practice (Furusten & Werr, 2005, 2009; Furusten, 2009, 2013). In this book, we focus on these types of experts. They are increasing in number and in the knowledge areas they represent, and they are hired in more situations, which also means that they have become potentially more influential in forming social contexts and defining what is relevant information to base decisions on. This is taking place globally and in all sorts of organizational settings, such as business firms, governments, schools, public authorities, municipalities, sports clubs, unions, cooperatives and political parties. These types of experts are given more power in contemporary society, but compared to the more strictly organized professions, there is no formal system for authorization, no formal scrutiny of their practices and no transparency in what their expertise consists of and what they have to do in order to earn their status as experts. In these situations, other modes of organizing expertise are at play—modes that have received less attention in previous research.

These modes of organizing will be explored by studying the organizing of a number of rising forms of expertise. The book contains studies of management consultants, certification bodies, investment bankers, marketing consultants, architects, auditors, lawyers, CSR-consultants and experts in management of modern expert organizations, including the public sector. We will study market conditions for these types of experts, expert organizations where these types of experts work and characteristics of different fields of expertise. By doing so, we aim to develop theory for the organization of rising forms of expertise in contemporary society.

Why a Study of the Organization of Expertise in the Contemporary Expert Society Is Needed

We see three main reasons for why the organizing of expertise in the contemporary expert society needs scrutiny.

First, we see signs of an ongoing turn, where the established knowledge production systems, and the systems for educating, training and controlling professionals are under challenge. University produced science and scientists, as well as governmentally authorized professionalism are today questioned ways to organize what is experienced as relevant expertise and supply of relevant experts. The contemporary expert society offers a number of alternative and supposedly more immediate practically relevant ways for this. This, we believe, increases uncertainty among decision-makers in organizations about trusting their own knowing, who to listen to when societal challenges and solutions are problematized, when to turn to an expert and most important of all, what expert to turn to for assistance or guidance.

Second, there is an increasing lack of transparency in how the expertise these experts represent is built up and about the paths they have beaten in order to reach the expert position. There are no requirements of a special education or formal authorization, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to get visibility and control over what kind of expertise the new representatives of expertise convey. This creates challenges to decision-makers in organizations when trying to understand what all these experts “out there” represent, and how trustworthy their expertise really is.

Third, in more and more situations there are reasons to pose questions such as “who controls the contemporary expert?” and “how can we trust these people?” Experts in the classical sense (such as physicians and lawyers) often have close ties to science as well as strong professions to ensure and protect these ties. They are subject to the norms and control within these systems on a daily basis. Those that do not follow the scientific ethic and professional codes will lose both credibility as a representative for science and formal professional legitimation. Within the traditional professions, expertise and the way it is exercised is continuously monitored and reviewed. Among contemporary experts, these processes are largely implicit, if they exist at all, leaving the question of who has the right to perform in the role of the expert to the market i.e. those that manage to sell their services are the ones that can claim expertise. This, we believe, creates uncertainty among decision-makers in organizations, an uncertainty that triggers organizing processes aimed at resolving this.

These three reasons to engage in a scrutiny of the organizing of expertise in the contemporary expert society are founded on an obscurity in its organization. Compared to experts and expertise that we associate with occupations organized according to a classical professional logic (Freidson, 2001/2007) several conditions and processes for the demarcation between experts and non-experts are missing. The organization of the development of expertise as well as how the work of experts is conducted, and the monitoring and insurance that reasonable considerations are made, follows different paths in the contemporary expert society. This, in itself, calls for research and reflection on its organization. To conclude that many of the contemporary experts do not live up to the norms of the classical professions and thus denounce them as non-experts has been one approach in these investigations (e.g., Kieser, 2002). The current book, however takes a different approach in its aim to understand how order in the contemporary expert society is shaped. While the literature on professions has taken its viewpoint from the perspective of the experts and their struggles to organize and strive for legitimation, we approach the organization of the expert society from the other end, from the view of those confronted by this expertise. Thus the experts may struggle to create a kind of order among experts and their expertise to distinguish what they see as the good ones from the bad, and government may support these attempts by creating structures for authorization or offer education programs (or both), but this intended order emphasized by the experts themselves and governments may not necessarily be the kind of order the users experience or prefer. Moreover, different groups of experts may also compete on representing the best and most trustworthy expert system. Users of expert services live in such crossroads on a daily basis, and our viewpoint in this book is to look upon the contemporary expert society from their position, asking the question “how is it possible to navigate when there are so many experts pointing out different directions”?

Organizing Experts when No One Is in Charge

In the modern society it is deemed rational to have confidence in experts representing abstract systems of expertise, i.e. systems where we trust that others know more about various things then we do ourselves (Giddens, 1990). Giddens suggests that when we, for example, purchase a holiday with flights included, we trust that actors such as travel agents, airplane engineers, airplane constructors, pilots, airhostesses, airport staff and states know what they are doing. The layman has very limited knowledge and competencies in the fields in which these experts work, and it would require a lot of time and effort if each and every one should develop competence within each and every field of practice, to enable them to ensure and monitor the competencies of the various experts. To develop relationships based on individual trust with all the people carrying out the various jobs enabling us to have our vacation would also be problematic. Rather, we trust that the respective expert systems for each occupation has developed the mechanisms necessary for it to regulate itself, or that states and associations for various professions, when required, control that the organization of each expert system is solid and the experts representing them are trustworthy. Previous research on the organization of experts promotes professionalism as the most appropriate and desired ordering logic. Still, critical studies on professionalism argue that the power of professions to monopolize knowledge provision in a knowledge field has decreased. As a consequence, it is argued that there is a risk for de-professionalization (e.g., Burrell, 1996). Moreover, other studies emphasize that expert services are increasingly provided by professional service firms, and that these are a specific kind of organizations for which a new organization theory has to be developed because traditional organization theories are based on observations of organizations in industry or the public sector (Greenwood, Suddaby & McDougald, 2006). Lately, we have also seen studies that bring attention to the practice of experts today, where they argue for a need to see contemporary professional work as organized according to hybrid logics of professionalism where, e.g., expertise in management and a professional occupation such as medicine tend to be combined in practice (e.g., Nordegraaf, 2007, 2015). We will in the following discuss in what way these four approaches to professionalism contribute to the understanding of how experts in contemporary society are organized.

Professionalism

In the literature on professions, expert knowledge is seen as something specifically developed and monitored by the professionals themselves (Freidson, 2001/2007). Classical examples are the organization of occupations suc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• 1 The Contemporary Expert Society
• 2 Experts without Rules—Scrutinizing the Unregulated Free Zone of the Management Consultants
• 3 Watchdog or Business Partner? The Dual Role of Certification Auditors
• 4 Stock Analysts—Experts of the Financial Sector
• 5 As Flies around Goodies—The Rise of Experts and Services in the Emerging Field of CSR and Sustainability
• 6 On Experts in Marketing: Who’s in the Driver’s Seat and What’s Love Got to Do with It?
• 7 Organizing Counter-Expertise: Critical Professional Communities in Transnational Governance
• 8 Disembedding Expertise—The Shift from Relational to Formalized Purchasing Practices
• 9 Organizing Expertise through Improvising
• 10 Expertise in the Selection of Employees
• 11 Expressions of Expertise
• 12 Career Factory and Expert House—Two Development Environments for Experts
• 13 Organizing Expertise in the Professional Service Firm—Meritocracy in Theory and Practice
• 14 Leading Those Who Know Best
• 15 Organizing in the Contemporary Expert Society—Organizers, Organizing Attempts and Emerging Orders
• Index