Abstract
In this article I explore attributions of credibility, important to designations of ‘expertise’, within the area of DNA patenting. I define ‘credibility’ as a relationship of recognition people establish to other actors. Through repeated interviews, interspersed with the provision of information, I have identified two different ways in which respondents position themselves in relation other actors as a way of assessing their credibility: when assuming a ‘partisan position’, they explicitly draw on ideological convictions; when assuming a ‘hierarchical position’, the ranking of credibility depends on how informed and objective others are perceived to be. The positions embody different roles for the respondents as ‘citizens’ and as ‘lay persons’, respectively; that is, they indicate the possession of contrasting ideas about their own relevance in policy matters. This raises the question of how to interpret the fact that people disqualify themselves from policy making, seeing themselves as incompetent. Challenging current conflict-focused models in the public understanding of science (PUS) literature, I argue that the hierarchical position can be interpreted as a broader desire for consensus. In the patent area, I show that paying attention to the hierarchical position is crucial to understanding why an industry representative is regarded by some to be a credible ‘expert’. The study sheds light on the ‘public understanding of expertise’ more broadly, and within the bioeconomic field in particular.
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Notes
1 I use the concept ‘the silent majority’ to denote the part of the public that has remained uninvolved in the matter of DNA patenting. This need not imply that they are in fact ‘silent’ as testified by the increasing use of public consultation (e.g. Gottweis et al., 2008).
2 This extremely brief sketch of cPUS and tPUS is bound to stereotype the traditions; I do this for analytic purposes so as to bring out some common ontological assumptions, attention to which may help us see where our explanations have limited explanatory power. This, I return to in the discussion. For a more elaborate discussion of the contrast between cPUS and tPUS, see e.g. Horst (2003).
3 To those who find the definition of ‘expertise’ in terms of who gets to define an issue in public a somewhat tendentious redefinition of the concept, I partly agree: even when the account of a phenomenon (say, the risk of pesticides) given by a faction of ‘experts’ does not become the favoured one, we would still consider them to be ‘experts’—indeed, this will be a point in what follows. But reserving the concept for this meaning may nonetheless serve analytic purposes in foregrounding certain aspects of the formation of ‘expertise’.
4 I am, however, sympathetic to the idea of a normative definition of ‘expertise’, i.e. of what should count as ‘expertise’ in isolation from its definition in public (cf. Collins and Evans, 2002; Evans and Collins, 2008), but this is not the focus here.
5 Clearly, the provision of information about genetics is underpinned by the assumption that people are ‘deficient’, but does not thereby reproduce the ‘deficit model’ (understood as the assumption that attitudes informed by certain ‘facts’ are necessarily more politically valid) because respondents (1) are allowed to openly reflect on and contextualize the information and (2) are not told what conclusions to draw from the information. Thus, while risking framing the genetics issue, it was mainly intended as a vocabulary for reading about the regulation of biotech patenting.
6 The symmetry, however, was not perfect in two respects: two were individuals and the others were organizations. The latter authored their own texts, whereas the former were interviewed as a basis of accessible texts. This may have led to these being the preferred references. Nevertheless, in terms of credibility, they were treated on an equal footing.
7 Given the range of concerns expressed later in the interviews, it was somewhat puzzling to hear this respondent's impression that the provision of information, at the previous session, had in effect made the respondents ‘realize that it is quite secure’.
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Acknowledgements
I thank Klaus Høyer for his never-ending comments and help in improving the manuscript. I also thank Henriette Langstrup for very useful inputs to the conceptualization of the article. Finally, I thank Maja Horst for her comments on an earlier version.
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Andreasen, M. Who's Credible? Expressions of Consensus and Conflict in Focus Groups about DNA Patenting. BioSocieties 4, 25–43 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1017/S1745855209006413
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1745855209006413