Exploring Expertise

Edited by Wendy Faulkner, James Fleck & Robin Williams
August 1998
Macmillan UK
ISBN: 0333632273
360 pages
$135.00 hardcover

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The growing social and economic significance of expertise is reflected in popular suggestions that we are moving into a post-industrial 'knowledge society'. The subject of expertise is becoming recognised in a range of scholarly disciplines ranging from science and technology, psychology, computing and artificial intelligence through to management and organisational behaviour. Exploring Expertise brings together some of these diverse understandings of the character and implications of expertise, and demonstrates through a set of empirical case studies how expertise means different things to different groups, how it is constructed differently in different settings, and the consequences of this process for relations between 'members' of the knowledge society and those 'on the outside'. The book includes case study material ranging from a hospital ward to a factory to a nuclear weapons facility.

Contents:
Issues and Perspectives; W. Faulkner, J. Fleck & R. Williams
On the Economics of Expertise; P. Saviotti
Gender, Expertise and Feminism; M. McNeil
How Can Expertise Be Defined?; R. Hoffman
Building Models of Expertise; N. Shadbolt
The Structure of Knowledge; H.M. Collins
Information Flow and the Nature of Expertise; J. Fleck
Knowledge Flows in Innovation; W. Faulkner
Trading Places: a Case Study of the Formation and Deployment of Computing Expertise; R. Procter & R. Williams
The Contribution of Tacit Knowledge to Innovation; J. Senker
Nuclear Weapons Experts; G. Spinardi
Management and the Hybridisation of Expertise in Network Design; J. Howells
'You'll Figure it Out Between You'; G. Hardstone
Automating Blood Pressure Measurements: The Division of Labour and the Transformation of Method; J. Hartland
The Certainty Trough; D. MacKenzie

Author Biographies:
WENDY FAULKNER is Senior Lecturer in the Science Studies Unit, Department of Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. JAMES FLECK is Professor of the Organisation of Industry and Commerce & Director of the Management School, University of Edinburgh. ROBIN WILLIAMS is Reader and Director of the Research Centre for Social Sciences, University of Edinburgh.

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