Call for Papers | Expertise: Professions and Beyond
For much of the 20th century professions were studied as the primary means through which expertise was structured and institutionalized. However, significant technological and societal changes in this century challenge established notions of what constitutes expertise, where it is located, and how it is adjudicated and evaluated. Further, scientific knowledge and the abstract expertise of professions may be losing standing in matters of public concern. Although organizations and institutions have evolved to depend on myriad experts, collective trust in the conventional abstract, rationalist approaches is in decline.
These changes have opened up realms of social problems to a plurality of incommensurable yet competing forms of expertise. The boundary between those historically considered experts and others is dissolving, as participation in inference and interventions is extended independent of the informational and analytical bases of inference and interventions. Increasingly, expertise is made manifest through interactions among a range of actors and elements, including humans, non-human species, machines and technologies, rules and institutional arrangements, and organizational processes.
This sub-theme convenes empirical and theoretical work about this expanded ecology of expertise. We invite submissions that address fundamental questions about how expertise is organized, produced, performed, verified and recognized.
- Going beyond substantive, relational, and tacit expertise, what other forms of expertise are observed in professions, organizations, and institutions?
- Through what processes is expertise generated, applied, and recognized? How are these processes shaped by technology, organizations, and institutions?
- How are the ways expertise is claimed, recognized, and verified changing?
- What methodologies and research contexts will enable us to expand knowledge of expertise?
- How is our understanding of the division of expert labor changing to include previously discounted actors and interactions?
- What are the consequences of changing forms and instantiations of expertise for professions, organizations, and society?
We welcome realist and relativist examinations, and both empirical and theoretical examinations of expertise.
Sub-theme is a part of the standing working group Expertise in and around Organizations.
Learn more and submit a short paper (≈ 3,000 words) by January 7th (CET 12:00), 2026 via http://tinyurl.com/EGOS2026
Convenors:
Daisy Chung | City, University of London
Ruthanne Huising | ESSEC Business School
Pauli Pakarinen | Aalto University
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Pauli Pakarinen
Aalto University
Espoo
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