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Understanding and managing expertise

  • Chapter
The Management of Expertise

Part of the book series: Management, Work and Organisations ((MWO))

Abstract

Expertise has traditionally been viewed as the near exclusive property of professional groups. The sweeping technological and institutional changes outlined in the Introduction, however, have begun to unravel the nexus that connects the social appropriation of knowledge to professional jurisdictions. Yet the gradual unlocking of expertise from professional control does not mean that it has taken on the ambient, free-floating form of pure knowledge. Although expertise is now more widely distributed and more contingently deployed than before, the same kind of questions that were addressed by the professional model — what counts as expertise, and how do groups acquire it? — remain valid. What is different is that answering these questions means casting our conceptual net even wider to take in not only professionalism but also more diffuse and coincidental formations of knowledge and social relations.

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Authors
  1. Harry Scarbrough
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Warwick Business School, UK

    Harry Scarbrough (Lecturer in Industrial Relations and Organizational Behaviour) (Lecturer in Industrial Relations and Organizational Behaviour)

Copyright information

© 1996 Gibson Burrell

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Cite this chapter

Scarbrough, H. (1996). Understanding and managing expertise. In: Scarbrough, H. (eds) The Management of Expertise. Management, Work and Organisations. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24394-5_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24394-5_2

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-0-333-56870-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-349-24394-5

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