Abstract
After briefly examining how expert authority has been constructed through an “associative” perspective, which privileges institutional relationships, I argue for the complimentary adoption of an “enactive” perspective, which centers on how experts demonstrate and earn authority with individual clients and communities. I synthesize scholarship revealing the uses of communication in expert–client relationships to argue that an enactive perspective allows for the study of how experts use “reiterative multivocality” to demonstrate to clients that they possess expert knowledge that is tailored to their interests, stakes, and values. Reiterative multivocality is the process of reaffirming, in different voices and formats, terms and symbols considered centrally important by other experts at the time. It allows experts to communicate authoritativeness through reiterating signs that reflect the collective’s efforts to maintain authority in response to shifts in client expectations. I focus on the case of expert authoritativeness in medicine, examining how it is constructed and maintained. The article argues that authority is not rooted solely in institutions but is developed and maintained by individual experts and clients, and that the language and processes used in the construction of authoritativeness is of central importance to sociologists. I expand upon the implications of both perspectives for method.
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Notes
At first blush, it may appear that the enactive perspective can be compared with the work of conversation analysts and ethnomethodologists interested in features of sequential ordering that comprise the interactions with those we refer to as experts (e.g., Maynard 1991). This is because the interactional processes that underpin authoritativeness described in the enactive perspective, like reiterative multivocality, also attend to careful parsing of episodes of talk and silence. However, those who take an enactive perspective toward authoritativeness are hesitant to reduce an understanding of episodes of authoritativeness to primarily reflect qualities of an “autonomous” sequence of interactional “turns.” This unwillingness to focus on the autonomous sequence originates not only in the empirical challenge presented by identifying those turns in venues where incipient experts, such as interrogated students in a law-school classroom, are learning their craft (Mertz 2007: 35–37). It also stems from the recognition that the enactive perspective captures features of culture often obscured by a focus on sequence, and attends to features of linguistic expression that, in Silverstein’s (1997: 632) terms, “appeal to multiple scopes of inclusiveness of what one might term ‘context.’” To be sure, in drawing attention to the enactive perspective my intention is not to revive perennial debates about scholars’ ability to capture context in studying interaction, because I recognize that any shared agreement towards defining an interaction’s context itself is likely unattainable (Duranti and Goodwin 1992: 2). Here, in synthesizing studies of authoritativeness in terms of an enactive perspective, I am merely reaffirming, with Hanks (2018: Chap 9), the importance of attending to a broader social backdrop in interpreting interactional dimensions of the scene at hand (see also Menchik 2019).
Relationships with peers are indeed important for maintaining authority. The collective is not an inert entity, but is rather the product of a group of people who set standards and develop norms, such as those that would lead doctors to call a peer a "quack." It is however outside of the scope of this paper to take up in detail the important issue of relationships to peers.
I do not mean to exclude communication and signification through, for instance, advertising or professional publication. But the focus of this article is on relationships with clients.
On the topic of clienthood, the enactive perspective offers a different way to understand variation in responsiveness to clients. Bourdieu (1991b) suggested that science and scholarship is a field in which practitioners are clients. The enactive perspective helps us to understand responsiveness to "clients" as a question of meaning, and not just institutional positioning or field autonomy. I thank a reviewer for pointing this out.
The apt description of experts’ “bringing into being” a client’s relational state is from Craciun (2016, p. 379).
The semiosis done by professionals likely cannot be reducible to the form discussed in the most common interpretation of Peirce’s (1955) index, which involves a physical trace and the memory of the person for whom it serves as a sign (107). Recognizing the differences in use and occasional controversy around the terms “index” and “indexical” in the sociology literature, in this paper I follow Rappaport’s (1999) reading of Peirce to conceptualize an index as “a sign which is caused by, or is part of, or, possibly, in the extreme case, is identical with, that which it signifies… they are perceptible aspects of events or conditions signifying the presence or existance of imperceptible aspects of the same events or conditions” (55). And so, “a rash indicates (is an index of) measles… the weathervane indicates the wind’s direction, the Rolls Royce indicates the wealth of its owner… the March on Washington of November 15, 1970 indicated the size and social composition of opposition to the war in Vietnam” (55).
Because it is indexical, some would argue that Foucault’s (1978, 1985) genealogical approach, one which would imply the relevance of work on expert authority along the lines of Larson (1984), is consistent with a semiotic one. But it is also the case that Foucault’s genealogical work is in fact rooted in the rejection of ideas that discourses are “authored” by humans, and a focus on what stands behind discursive forms (Carr 2011).
A vast range of post-WWII scientific production involves client-like stakeholders such as foundations, companies, or the state, a form of dependence with a long history (Baritz 1960; Biagioli 1994; Mukerji 2014). Sociologists have implicitly agreed that it is possible to compare these expert occupations; we’ve drawn upon and advanced theories developed in studies of scientists in research on medicine (e.g., Timmermans and Berg 2003), economics (Fourcade 2009), and finance (MacKenzie 2001).
Legal work has been a focus of enactive analyses since Riesman’s (1951) comparison between law and magic, in which he argued that non-lawyers assume you can know more about the law than is ultimately possible (125).
Panofsky (2018) shows how such “images of strength” can operate to bolster fields mired in controversy.
This emphasis on the relationship of rhetoric to expert authority makes the perspective compatible with the formulation of Friedrich (1958, p. 35), who argued that the communication of authority has a relationship to reason and reasoning, and need not be demonstrated through rational discourse, but rather possesses “the potentiality of reasoned elaboration – [those speaking] are ‘worthy of acceptance’.”
These examples suggest that in some communities it is likely that efforts at expert authoritativeness may benefit from the kind of disidentification processes engaged by more marginalized groups (c.f., Muñoz 1999).
Collins and Evans (2007) have identified an interactional expertise gained by some speakers who learn to answer and ask informed questions about a topic. However, questions remain about how convincingly the speech patterns they have learned to emulate will operate as indexes that reference multiple memberships that are pervasive in doctor talk (e.g., as teacher, scientist, lab colleague, member of an invisible college), a process Goffman referred to as footing (1979).
Such catchphrases serve as ethno-metapragmatic labels (Silverstein 2003), acting as a kind of shorthand caption for a particular emerging transformation in the occupation that broadcasts, in an aspirational and advertising way, its continued relevance in light of cross-occupation competition for business. The aspirational quality of these catchphrases makes them a likely means through which new institutional formations are propelled.
In one experiment, respondents shown images of a physician in a white coat were statistically significantly more willing to behave in multiple ways reflecting acceptance of physician authority, specifically to share their social, sexual, and psychological problems, to describe a strong intention to trust that doctor, to comply with their recommendations, and return for follow-up (Rehman et al. 2005).
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Acknowledgements
For comments on the ideas presented here, I am grateful to Larry Busch, Kevin Elliott, Susan Gal, Laura Hirshfield, Dan Hirschman, Tania Jenkins, Joe Martin, Kelly Underman, Alexandra Vinson, Owen Whooley, and Suzanne Evans Wagner. This essay is dedicated to Michael Silverstein, for his support and inspiration as I developed many of these ideas.
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Menchik, D.A. Authority beyond institutions: the expert’s multivocal process of gaining and sustaining authoritativeness. Am J Cult Sociol 9, 490–517 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-020-00100-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-020-00100-3