13587: Expertise In and Around Organizations: Who Are the Experts?

Expertise has significant consequences for important individual, organizational, and institutional outcomes. Inspired by a diverse set of inspirations across social and behavioral sciences and the humanities, organizational scholars have considered expertise as a cognitive capacity, an attribute of social actors, or a situated enactment, just to give a few examples. However, this research often ignores, downplays, or backgrounds the question, ‘who are the experts?’. This question would be important to address for several reasons. First, while many workplaces are statistically becoming more diverse, expert work is still rife with discrimination and exclusion, potentially falling short of letting everyone’s expertise flourish. Second, as varieties of expert work become more complex due to new technologies and organizational forms, new needs of technical skill and coordination have given rise to new occupational groups often different from the professions often studied by scholars of expertise. Finally, the so-called crisis of expertise has raised even broader questions about who can take part in various democratic processes and what kinds of new organizational arrangements might be needed to restore broader public trust in experts’ work and decision-making. Altogether, by critically examining the practices of expertise in and around organizations, our PDW focuses on how management and organization scholars can study expertise in and around organizations while linking to important questions of inclusion, actorhood, and recognition, and further contribute to organization and management theory and management scholarship more broadly. We will stimulate discussion and reflection on these issues through presentations and a panel discussion. Through roundtables, we will both new and existing members of this scholarly community to engage with the question ‘Who are the experts?’, and throughout the program, build community around the study of expertise in and around organizations.