Evans Sociology of Expertise

Sociology Compass 2/1 (2008): 281–298, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2007.00062.
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The Sociology of Expertise: The Distribution

of Social Fluency
Robert Evans*
Cardiff School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University
Abstract
Expert knowledge is an essential component of modern society. It is also a
potentially difficult topic for sociology because of the importance sociology attaches
to culture and context. The sociology of science has emphasised the continuity
between scientific expertise and more traditional forms of knowledge. Whilst this
suggests an increasing ‘democratisation of expertise’ is desirable, it also risks
erasing the idea of expertise itself. This might be particularly detrimental for
sociology as it restricts the role of sociological inquiry to examining how expert
status is attributed rather than understanding what expertise is. This paper
describes these developments and contrasts them with other approaches in which
expertise appears less important. It concludes by setting out a new approach
to expertise that respects the role of culture in generating knowledge but, by
stressing the importance of socialisation and experience, argues for a more
nuanced conception of expertise as both real and unequally distributed.
Introduction
Expertise is an important topic for sociology. The reason is that the social
constructivist perspective favoured in much contemporary sociology tends
to see all manner of characteristics – gender, ethnicity, identity and so on
– as the product of particular cultures and contexts. The sociology of
science and technology has shown that the same claims can also be made
about scientific knowledge, thus undermining the claim that science is a
unique and different form of expert knowledge (see, for example, Bloor
1976, Mulkay 1979, Collins 1992). The consequences of this are potentially
far reaching and controversial, as the polemics by Gross and Levitt (1994)
and Koertge (2000) demonstrate. Nevertheless, if the sociologists are correct,
and scientific knowledge is the property and product of particular social
groups, then the study of expertise, its legitimation and its use become
key topics for social science (see, for example, Epstein 1996; Gieryn 1999;
Irwin and Wynne 1996; Jasanoff 1990, 2005; Welsh 2000; Wynne 1982).
Moreover, to the extent that the recognition and use of expertise is
contingent on particular cultural contexts, then the possibility must exist
© 2008 The Author
Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
282 The Distribution of Social Fluency
that the outcome could have been different and sociological analysis opens
the door to a more critical debate about the ways in which knowledge
and power are interlinked.
While the sociological urge to deconstruct and contextualise has its
value, it also has a significant blind spot when dealing with expertise.
Constructivism invariably sees expertise as a relational attribution in
which you acquire the status of an expert by virtue of your position in a
network of social relations (Eriksson 2004; Gieryn 1999). This makes the
social science of expert status a primarily retrospective analysis that must
wait for the dust to settle before explaining how each group ended up
where they did. What this perspective does not provide is a position from
which the sociologist of expertise can intervene during the debate itself.
Instead, the conclusion drawn is that the attribution of expertise and
credibility emerge from a social process that invariably reflects the dominant
interests rather than those of the wider society. The normative prescription,
if there is one, is to give those currently marginalised a greater voice in
these debates (Nowotny et al. 2001; Wilsdon and Willis 2004).
This message has clearly been heard and is reflected in a range of
policy documents and initiatives stressing the importance of public
participation. In the UK, the most high-profile expression of this influence
was the GM Nation? debate held in 2003 (see Department of Trade and
Industry 2003; Horlick-Jones et al. 2007). Paradoxically, however, it is
this increase in participation that reveals the importance of retaining the
idea of expertise as something more than an attribution made by others.
For example, if (as is typically the case) widening participation is
predicated on the knowledge of lay citizens, then this knowledge must
be qualitatively different from the expertise held by subject specialists.
If this is not the case, then it is unclear what including the new
participants adds to the deliberations. This is not to say that one kind
of knowledge should be prioritised over the other, but it does suggest
that, in thinking about the role of different communities in relation to
complex or controversial policy issues, it is important to consider the
kinds of knowledge they can or cannot contribute.
In the remainder of this article, the rationale behind the constructivist
position is briefly outlined, drawing mainly on the science and technology
studies (STS) literature. By tracing the development of this perspective
and its move from laboratory sciences to more public settings, I show how
and why it makes sense to stress the cultural contingency of all knowledge,
including science, and why the boundaries between expert and non-expert
do not map neatly on to those of science and non-science. The implication
of STS is, therefore, that there is more expertise available than you might
think. Next, some alternatives to the knowledge-led focus of STS are
briefly considered in order to highlight that it is not necessary to see
expertise everywhere in order to explain how modern society works.
Finally, the article discusses some recent work in STS that distinguishes
© 2008 The Author Sociology Compass 2/1 (2008): 281–298, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2007.00062.x
The Distribution of Social Fluency 283
between different kinds of expertise and allows a more ‘upstream’ role for
the social scientist in the identification of expertise.
Expertise as practice and culture

According to positivist philosophies of science, scientific knowledge
should be prioritised over lay and other knowledges because the scientific
method minimises the effect of social concerns on its content and ensures
it corresponds most closely to reality. Constructivist social science questions
this claim, arguing that knowledge and beliefs are always produced and
validated within particular communities. From this perspective, science
remains on a par with other kinds of knowledge: it is a form of inter-
subjective agreement and not the ‘view from nowhere’ implied by
philosophical ideas of objectivity.
Applied to expertise, this interpretivist perspective has many similarities
to Thomas Kuhn’s idea of a scientific paradigm. A paradigm is the ‘time-
tested and group-licensed way of seeing’ (Kuhn 1970, 189) that scientists
acquire during their training. For the sociologist, therefore, becoming a
scientist means being socialised (i.e. trained) in the formal aspects of a
scientific discipline while, at the same time, acquiring the tacit social and
cultural knowledge needed to apply and use these facts in new contexts.
Acquiring other kinds of expertise, be it in natural language speaking
or orienteering, works in exactly the same way. Expertise is the result of
successful socialisation within a particular community, which gives a
sociological definition of expertise as social fluency within a form-of-life.
Or, to put it another way, expertise is the ability to act naturally and
appropriately in new and unexpected settings (for more on the idea of a
form-of-life, see Winch 1958/1988).
Expert citizens in action

It is important to realise that this definition makes no judgement about
the content of an expertise. For the sociologist, there is no epistemological
difference between expertise in astronomy and expertise in astrology. Both
are distinct communities of practice into which individuals can be socialised.
Where astronomy and astrology do differ, of course, is in the social status
granted to them by the wider society. Astronomy is a science and astrology
is not. While this particular example of boundary work is not that con-
tentious, there are other cases where the distinction between science and
non-science or, more pertinently, between valid and relevant expertise and
other beliefs, be they anecdotes, opinions or religion, is more contested.
It is in these cases that seeing expertise as the product of experience allows
the sociologist to make a distinctive contribution.
One particularly accessible example of the many studies informed by
this view is Irwin’s (1995) analysis of the treatment of UK farmworkers
by an expert (scientific) committee tasked with examining the safety of

an organo-phosphate herbicide. The committee concluded the chemical
was safe, so long as it was used properly. The farmworkers rejected this
conclusion. Their experience told them that it was not possible to use the
chemical ‘properly’ because the conditions needed for ‘safe use’ (e.g.
protective clothing) were not always available in the fields where they
worked. The sociological insight is that, even if the chemical was safe
under laboratory conditions, the transition to the farm setting, where the
farmworkers’ experience was much greater and more relevant, meant that
this conclusion no longer held. Unfortunately for the farmworkers, the
expert committee dismissed their experience as anecdotal or unreliable (a
classic piece of boundary work!) and the herbicide continued to be used.
This case provides a clear example of how seeing expertise as socially
based and culturally framed can be used to challenge conventional
hierarchies of knowledge and hence power. Once it is recognised that the
laboratory is important because it allows scientists a great deal of control,
it becomes clear that moving to a real life setting, such as a farm,
introduces new complexities that reduce this control and the certainty it
provides (Latour 1983). This is not to say that the science is no longer
relevant, but that it can no longer be assumed to be sufficient. Instead,
laboratory-based expertise needs to be complemented by the expertise of
those with experience of the settings in which it is to be applied (Grin
et al. 1997; Rip et al. 1995). Other examples, which confirm Irwin’s
analysis and the importance of experience-based expertise, can be found
in the nuclear and other industrial protests movements, where campaigners
routinely collect their own data on emissions and leaks in order to
challenge official claims and rhetoric (see, for example, Welsh 2000;
Yearley 2000).
The rise of the lay expert

Despite its radical appeal, emphasising that relevant expertise can be found
outside the scientific community is an essentially conservative critique of
the overreliance on science. The implication is simply that the expertise
of those with direct experience deserves more weight than it has traditionally
been given. It is also possible, however, to draw something more radical
from the same studies. In this view, the expertise of the disaffected groups
remains important but what is stressed is their status as citizens. These
non-scientist-but-nonetheless-knowledgeable participants are seen as being
both ‘specialists’, in the sense that they have expertise that is not ubiquitous,
and ‘ordinary’, in the sense that they represent ‘citizens’. This juxtaposition
is frequently captured in the idea (some would say, oxymoron) of a ‘lay
expert’ and the elision between ‘lay experts’ and ‘lay citizens’. The result
is the extension of the argument made above. Instead of the legitimate
participants in a controversy being limited to the new, more heterogeneous
group of experience-based experts, the legitimate participants become

citizens in general.
This extension of participation has some overlaps with the concept of
post-normal science of Functowicz and Ravetz (1993), which characterises
decision-making in conditions where the ‘traditional domination of “hard
facts” over “soft values” has been inverted’. In such circumstances:
Only a dialogue between all sides, in which scientific expertise takes its place
at the table with local and environmental concerns, can achieve creative
solutions to such problems, which can then be implemented and enforced.
(Functowicz and Ravetz 1993, 749–51)
While Functowicz and Ravetz clearly intend such arrangements to apply
only when either the uncertainty or stakes associated with a decision are
particularly high – the quote given above follows the example of the
predicted rise in sea level caused by global climate change – the constructivist
perspective favoured in the social studies of science extends it to con-
troversial science more generally. As expertise is contested so uncertainty
is increased and concerns about the future danger of any precedent that
is set may also be articulated. As this happens, a controversy may leave –
or be pushed from – the domain of normal science and enter the arena
of post-normal science where scientific expertise has much less authority
and the role of other social groups appears more relevant. In this sense,
the stakes and uncertainty implicated in a controversy, and who is a
legitimate participant in its resolution, are what the protagonists are trying
to establish by framing it one way rather than another. The implication
is that, as the limits of science and the validity of alternative sources of
expertise become increasingly salient, so, the ability to influence the
definition of the problem becomes a matter of democratic rather than
expert debate. As Wynne (2003, 411) puts it:
To the extent that public meanings and the imposition of problematic versions
of these by powerful scientific bodies is the issue, then the proper participants
are in principle every democratic citizen and not specific sub-populations
qualified by dint of specialist experience-based knowledge.
Participatory processes and the limits of expertise

There is now a considerable body of evidence suggesting that these ideas
are being accepted. In the UK and European Union, a range of recent
policy documents recognise the importance of soliciting opinions from
stakeholders, concerned citizens and the wider public (e.g. Council for
Science and Technology 2005; Gerold and Liberatore 2001; House of
Lords 2000; Office of Science and Technology 2002; Parliamentary Office
of Science and Technology 2001; Royal Commission for Environmental
Pollution 1998). In the USA, the practice is also well entrenched with
Jasanoff (2003, 397) reporting that in ‘regulatory decision-making, for
example, all federal agencies are required by law to engage the public at
least by offering notice of their proposed rules and seeking comment’.
As noted above, however, one unintended consequence of this emphasis
on public participation might be to reopen debates about expertise and
lay knowledge. While seeing expertise as social fluency shows the limits
of relying on science alone, it also highlights the limits of public partici-
pation. For example, if expertise is related to experience, then participation
can only be a mass exercise if the experiences that provide the expertise
required to participate are ubiquitous. Conversely, to the extent that
participants are expected to either have or develop some specialist expertise,
then participation cannot be a mass exercise. Seeing expertise as the
product of socialisation thus limits its distribution to particular groups
while also valuing the diversity of expertise available. The implication is
that participation, where it aims to address new and complex science, can
include large numbers of people only if it is fairly shallow. If considered
or informed lay opinion is required, however, small samples and long
time frames are required (Evans 2004; Evans and Plows 2007; Renn et al.
1993). One example of this tension is the jury trial, where lay citizens
are expected to make informed decisions about cases that often involve
complex and contested evidence. The assumption – now being challenged
in some financial cases – is that ordinary citizens can come to understand
the issues involved but that this will take time.
Alternative conceptions of expertise

The preceding discussion has argued that extensive socialisation is needed
for individuals to acquire expertise and that this creates a problem for
proponents of wider public participation in decision-making. If lay citizens
are not specialists, and specialists are only experts in some narrow domain,
then participatory institutions must allow significant time for learning to
take place. There are, however, other approaches that stress the value of
generalism rather than specialism and which suggest that specialist expertise
might be less important that it first appears.
Amateurism
If becoming an expert means becoming socialised into a specialist com-
munity, then becoming an expert means running the risk of becoming
blinkered in one’s outlook. In contrast, remaining an ‘amateur’ allows one
to avoid the narrow perspective of the single group, discipline or paradigm
and, potentially, to see the ‘bigger picture’. This defence of non-expertise
finds some support in Bijker’s (1995) theory of sociotechnical change in
which one of the theoretical concepts is ‘inclusion’ within a technical
frame. Individuals with a high degree of inclusion are highly socialised
into a particular paradigm, while those with a low degree of inclusion
lack this experience and/or commitment. Significantly, radical innovations

often come from those with lower degrees of inclusion because they are
more able to see things in a new or different way.
The value of difference also has some affinity with the ideas of boundary
objects (Starr and Griesemer 1989) and boundary shifters (Pinch and
Trocco 2002). Boundary objects are objects or techniques that can be
interpreted in different ways by different groups while remaining useful to
each. As such, they effectively reduce the expertise needed for successful
collaboration and, in the paradigm case, allow disparate communities to
work together despite the differences in their expertise, goals and interests.
A similar argument can also be made for the appointment of ‘generalist’
managers to oversee multi-disciplinary teams, as was once common in the
British Civil Service. By not identifying with a particular group, generalists
are better placed to create a shared definition of the problem (i.e. a
boundary object) or to mediate between different specialists (i.e. a boundary
shifter).
Low information rationality and the miserly citizen

If amateurism provides a way of dealing with competing sets of expert claims,
how are we to understand decision-making in the absence of information?
This problem is particularly acute for the political sphere where a disinter-
ested or uninformed public can undermine the legitimacy of democratic
institutions based on mass participation. Although many see this divide
between the info-rich and the info-poor as portending a dystopian future,
there are others who argue that individuals can make good decisions
on the basis of simple and widely available information. To give a simple
example, parents can make accurate inferences about academic standards
and school safety on the basis of simple indicators like how clean the
school is, whether there is graffiti on the walls, and whether or not there
are broken windows (Schneider et al. 1999, see also Kuklinski and Hurley
1994; Lupia and McCubbins 1998). In these situations, access to specialist
or technical expertise is not a barrier to good decision-making, implying
that the need for expertise to be everywhere has been overstated.
While this idea of ‘low information’ rationality (Popkin 1991) appears to
resonate with the valorisation of the lay expert criticised above, there is an
important difference. In the case of the lay expert, the inclusion of lay
citizens in decisions or debates assumes that there is some expertise being
used and applied. In contrast, the low information route highlights the
short cuts being taken. This is particularly apparent in the approaches to
political preference formation that take their lead from Mary Douglas’s
cultural theory, in which an individual’s position in the grid-group typology
provides an overarching framework through which events are filtered and
preferences formed. As a result, people who possess only ‘inches of facts’
are able to ‘generate miles of preferences’ because ‘they don’t actually have
to work all that hard’ (Wildavsky 1987, 8). This is not to say that these
judgements are always correct, or that they cannot be changed (Gastil and
Levine 2005; Lindeman 2002). It does, however, suggest that, by appealing
to cultural values, those in power have the potential to frame debates and
position themselves in ways that exploit this tendency rather than promote
dialogue. If this is the case, then the optimism of those who think there
are easy ways to make good decisions may turn out to be misplaced.
Categorising expertise: The periodic table of expertises

This final section returns to the idea of expertise as social fluency and
describes a new, more normative, approach to expertise that is being
developed in STS – the so-called ‘Third Wave of Science Studies’ or
Studies in Expertise and Experience (SEE). The SEE approach starts from
the sociological axiom that knowledge is acquired by socialisation – that
is, by participation in the life of a community. The importance attached
to tacit knowledge in what follows is directly related to this emphasis on
socialisation and apprenticeship as a mode of learning. Reading and other
forms of learning that rely on what has been made explicit are necessarily
blind to the tacit (i.e. unwritten and unarticulated) components of
knowledge. Socialisation matters, therefore, because it is the mechanism
by which tacit knowledge is gained (see, for example, Collins 1974, 1990;
Dreyfus 1972).
Starting from the idea of socialisation as the means of acquiring tacit
knowledge, becoming an expert can be thought of as the successful
outcome of a prolonged period of interaction within the relevant com-
munity. The acquisition of this expertise is revealed through the quality
of those interactions, as the experience of social science fieldwork illus-
trates. For example, imagine a research project that aims to investigate the
nature of scientific work in a particular field. At the start of the project,
the researcher may know very little about the science being researched
and will devote a lot of effort to understanding the relationships between
key ideas, institutions and actors – reading books, attending lectures and,
crucially, speaking to the scientists themselves. One way in which the
researcher’s growing expertise will become visible will be in their inter-
actions. Talk about the science being researched will change from simple
if rather stilted interviews to increasingly natural and engaged conversations
about the science involved.
Significantly, however, this increasing linguistic fluency need not be
accompanied by any equivalent gain in practical skills. Thus, for example,
it is unlikely that the social science researcher will ever take an active role
in the substantive research work of the science they study by, for example,
designing or running crucial experiments. Similarly, while the social
scientist would be expected to publish in his or her own discipline, to
publish papers in the field being researched would be unusual and would
certainly not be required in order to say the science being investigated was
properly understood. In other words, the social science researcher strives
to gain enough expertise to interact with the scientists but does not seek
the practical skills needed to contribute to their work.
These transitions are formalised in the threefold categorisation of
specialist expertise developed in the paper that launched SEE (Collins and
Evans 2002): no expertise (corresponding to the researcher at the start of
their project); interactional expertise (corresponding to the researcher at the
successful completion of their project); and contributory expertise (corre-
sponding to the practitioners of the community being researched). Beginning
to categorise expertise in this way leads to three observations about the
relationship between experience and expertise:
1. Acquiring expertise is neither all attribution nor a flip-flop process. There will
be a continuum of knowledge states, ranging from ignorance to com-
plete expertise, and individuals will move between these states as their
experiences change over time.
2. Different kinds of expertise can be distributed in different ways. If expertises
are linked to experiences, and experiences vary, then expertises must
have a distribution. Some sorts of experience (e.g. speaking a natural
language) will be so widely distributed as to make the expertise they
give rise to appear ubiquitous. Other kinds of experience (e.g. milking
cows or growing stem cells) will be restricted to such small groups
that the expertise they generate will be seen as esoteric, even if it is
epistemologically similar to the more ubiquitous expertises.
3. Making judgements in the absence of detailed expertise is not unusual. It is
impossible for everyone to be an expert in everything because it is
impossible to participate fully in all the relevant communities. As a
consequence, citizens are routinely asked to make choices that involve
choosing between competing expert communities in which they do
not participate. If these choices are not to be purely random, then
there must be a set of meta-expertises (i.e. expertises about expertise)
that can be used to inform these social judgements.
These observations form the basis of a more extensive categorisation of
expertise that builds on the three stage model of no expertise, interactional
expertise and contributory expertise outlined above. The most complete
form of this is explained at length elsewhere (Collins and Evans 2007) but
the key feature is a ‘Periodic Table of Expertises’ that distinguishes
between different kinds of expertise and shows their interrelationships.
The main features of the table are summarised in Table 1.
The top row reminds us of the ubiquitous expertises that every member
of a society must possess in order to live in it. Ubiquitous expertises are
important because the sociological model of expertise presumes a natural
language speaking community within individuals are socialised and where
expertise can be generated, held and shared. Without this row, the
Table 1 The Periodic Table of Expertises
© 2008 The Author

Ubiquitous expertises
Interactive Ability
Dispositions
Reflective Ability
Ubiquitous tacit knowledge Specialist tacit knowledge

Specialist

Expertises Beer-mat Popular Primary source Interactional Contributory
knowledge understanding knowledge expertise expertise
Polymorphic
Mimeomorphic
External Internal
Meta-
Expertises Ubiquitous Local Technical Downward Referred
discrimination discrimination connoisseurship discrimination expertise
Meta-criteria Credentials Experience Track-record
Source: Collins and Evans (2007).
Sociology Compass 2/1 (2008): 281–298, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2007.00062.x

expertises identified in the rest of the table could not exist. The second
row identifies some dispositions or personal qualities that are necessary for
gaining expertise but are not, in themselves, an ‘expertise’. For example,
in order to be socialised it is necessary to interact with other members of
that community and people who have good interpersonal skills may find
this easier than those who do not. Nevertheless, being ‘easy to get along
with’ does not make you an expert in anything in particular.
The next three rows are the most interesting. The row labelled specialist
expertise lists the different kinds of expertise that can be developed in a
substantive domain such as carpentry or chemistry. Starting at the left-hand
side, which is also the lowest level of expertise, the table identifies the first
level of specialist expertise as ‘beermat expertise’. This corresponds to
knowing the kinds of simple facts that might be put on the coasters
provided in bars. Knowing simple propositional statements is a kind of
expertise that might be useful in general knowledge quizzes but it is also
a limited one. The next level of expertise is popular understanding, which
refers to the kind of expertise that can be developed by reading popular
accounts of a particular domain. Unlike beermat knowledge, in which
facts are known but not interconnected, popular understandings begin to
link the different parts of the domain together. The next step up is primary
source knowledge. The difference here is that the literature being read is
no longer the simplified and popularised accounts produced for a general
audience but the specialised publications produced for the practitioners.
Finally, interactional and contributory expertise, which were defined
above, complete the categorisation. Moving along this ‘ladder’ of specialist
expertise, the key distinctions are between primary source knowledge,
interactional expertise and contributory expertise:
1. Primary source knowledge and interactional expertise. This marks the transition
from an expertise that relies on ubiquitous tacit knowledge to access
publicly available accounts of a domain (e.g. reading about a science)
to an expertise that also includes the specialist tacit knowledge that can
only be gained through interaction with the specific community (e.g.
doing qualitative research in a laboratory). The value of interactional
expertise is, therefore, that the primary source material can now be
read with the same discerning eye as a fully fledged contributory
expert. In contrast, the person with primary source knowledge lacks
the tacit skills needed to rate the significance of different publications.
The case of AIDS treatment in South Africa provides a particularly
significant example of the importance of getting these judgements
right (see Weinel 2007)
2. Interactional and contributory expertise. This corresponds to the distinction
between being able to talk fluently about a domain of expertise and
being able to contribute to it. Having contributory expertise signifies
that a person has both the conceptual and practical expertise held by
the group; interactional expertise signifies that they posses only the
former (for more on interactional expertise, see Collins 2004). The
distinction is made clear in the difference between a social scientist
who understands the life world of the practising scientist but who has
not contributed to that science. Although much social science fieldwork
is implicitly based on the idea of interactional expertise, it is rarely tested.
The one exception, however, is an imitation game involving gravitational
wave physics and sociologist of science, Harry Collins (see Collins
et al. 2006; Giles 2006). In the experiment, Collins and a gravitational
wave physicist provided answers to a set of questions developed by
another gravitational wave physicist. A series of gravitational wave
physicists were then shown the two sets of answers and asked if they
could tell which answers came from Collins and which from the physicist.
The result was that the physicists were unable to identify Collins, demon-
strating that he could reproduce the discourse of the physics community
even if he could not take part in its practical, experimental work.
The distinction between polymorphic and mimeomorphic actions,
which appears beneath the row of specialist expertises, refers to the extent
to which actions – in this case, expertises – can be mimicked by machines.
Where they can be reproduced in this way, such actions are said to be
mimeomorphic. Where they rely on an understanding of tacit social rules
and cannot, therefore, be reproduced by machines, they are said to be
polymorphic. The distinction is not particularly important in this context,
although it might be the case that in science, for example, the aim is to
render initially polymorphic expertises mimeomorphic and, hence, replicable
by others (see Collins and Kusch 1998).
The next row of the table contains the different kinds of meta-expertise.
Unlike the specialist expertises, meta-expertises are not transitive so that
having one does not imply having the ones below. On the other hand, as
with the specialist expertises, there is a distinction between meta-expertises
that use ubiquitous tacit knowledge and those that use tacit knowledge
acquired through some specialised training. These differences can be
explained as follows:
1. External meta-expertises. These are judgements about trust or reliability
that are based on widely shared or ubiquitous tacit knowledge (e.g.
look, demeanour, past reputation of similar organisations). The idea of
local discrimination reminds us that some communities will have dealt
with a particular expertise or organisation before (e.g. because they live
near a particular industrial site) and that these experiences will shape
their views even in the absence of any significant substantive expertise
(e.g. previous promises may have been broken).
2. Internal meta-expertise. This category contains those judgements – technical
connoisseurship, downward discrimination and referred expertise – that
require the person who exercises them to have some appreciation of the
criteria used by the experts they judge. Connoisseurship refers to

judgements that reflect an understanding of the conventions in a
particular domain. For example, a connoisseur of wine would typically
be familiar with the conventions and techniques of wine-making even
though he or she might not be a wine-maker him- or herself. In the
case of science, connoisseurship might refer to recognising the need for
a control group in a clinical trial. Downward discrimination applies
most readily to relatively settled areas of knowledge and refers to the
ability to identify a mistake. In this case, the idea is that simply that it
is possible for someone with relatively little expertise to discount claims
made by someone with recognisably less expertise. Finally, referred
expertise highlights the ability to use experience in one domain to
make judgements about another. The most detailed example (Collins
and Sanders 2007) refers to the way managers of large, multi-disciplinary
science projects use their own experiences as bench scientists to make
judgements about the competing claims made by the different disciplinary
experts whose efforts they must coordinate. In this case, knowing what
it is to ‘do’ an experiment or ‘solve’ a problem allows the manager to
set realistic targets and recognise the ‘good enough’.
The final row of the table identifies some criteria that might be used
for identifying or choosing between experts. The least powerful criteria
are qualifications because they exclude expertise based on experience.
Track record is slightly better but also undervalues experience and is
unavailable in any genuinely novel setting. Instead, given the emphasis on
understanding expertise as social fluency, the best indicator of expertise is
experience and the more extensive and recent it is the better.
A new research agenda: Mapping expertise

While the initial formulation of this approach has had its critics ( Jasanoff
2003; Rip 2003; Wynne 2003; see Collins and Evans 2003 for a reply),
the usefulness of distinguishing between different kinds of expert has been
appreciated by others (see, for example, Gorman 2002; and the papers
collected in Collins 2007). Readers will have to judge the value of the
approach for themselves, but if it is accepted that it is impossible for
everyone to be an expert about everything, then some form of categorisa-
tion that identifies who is and is not an expert in any particular case is
needed. For example, if deliberative or participatory models are to include
ordinary citizens in the oversight and regulation of science, then some way
of distinguishing lay and expert participants is needed. In particular, the
inclusion of lay participants cannot be justified or sought on the basis of
any specialist expertise: by definition, the typical citizen must know very
little about any esoteric field. Instead, lay participation must be warranted
via the idea of meta-expertise, particularly ubiquitous discrimination,
which uses more generic social knowledge and skills to put political and
moral preferences into action (Evans and Plows 2007). In this way, under-
standing the social nature of expertise and its unequal distribution works
not simply to privilege scientific expertise but also to provide a rationale
for the inclusion of lay citizens when a more ‘disinterested’ perspective is
required. If this is the case, then the ‘Periodic Table of Expertises’ suggests
two lines of research that can be pursued in addition to the more
traditional deconstruction of how expert status gets attributed. These are:
1. The categorisation of expertise. Do the categories identified in the periodic
table make sense? The distinctions between primary source knowledge,
interactional expertise and contributory expertise seem robust (Collins
et al. 2006; Collins, 2007) but need further research if they are to be
fully understood. Similarly, the idea of meta-expertise seems to follow
quite directly from the recognition that the practical logistics of social
life must mean that most people are not experts about most things.
That said, while referred expertise has been the subject of some anal-
ysis the potentially far more common categories of ubiquitous and
local discrimination remain in need of further investigation and research.
2. Case studies and experiments in participation. As participatory decision-making
and consultation exercises are taking place in many countries and on
many different topics, the possibility of evaluating different kinds of
participatory processes is becoming a reality (see Rowe and Frewer
2004, 2005). One approach is to analyse the extent to which individual
events succeed in realising their stated ambitions of, for example, giv-
ing a voice to lay citizens. In such cases, researchers might ask whether
those identified as lay participants were genuinely able to contribute
to the debate, or whether those identified as experts listened to the
discussion as opposed to framing it (for a recent example, see Kerr
et al. 2007). Another approach would to focus instead on the ideas that
informed the design of the process itself and examine how the kinds
of expertise they invoked or generated matched the questions they
claimed to answer. For example, how have different participatory
approaches conceptualised and operationalised the idea of lay or expert
participants? What difference has this made to their conduct and out-
come? Do different processes suit different kinds of problem? How
much participation (and by whom and for how long) is actually necessary?
What are the practical implications of making such events routine?
Given the relatively novelty of the SEE approach, it is difficult to argue
which, if any, of these different research approaches should be prioritised.
Evaluating existing participatory mechanisms with a view to improving
their conduct is undoubtedly worthwhile, even if it the difficulties of
breaking conventional modes of attribution and the power relations they
encode are substantial. On the other hand, challenging the foundation of
those attributions by asking broader questions about what being an expert
or non-expert might mean is also important. After all, if ideas really do

matter, then recasting the concept of expertise holds out the possibility of
changing the ways in which expert status can be claimed, attributed and
denied.
Conclusions
Expertise is central to modern life. Understanding expertise as the product
of successful socialisation demonstrates both the utility of expertise and its
weakness. Experts may be the best people to decide certain esoteric
matters of fact but they are not necessarily the best people to make value
judgements about the utilisation of that knowledge. The reason is, of
course, that the intensive socialisation necessary to develop the expertise
needed to participate in such a specialist community makes it difficult for
such experts to be truly independent. In contrast, lay citizens cannot be
experts in this way. Nevertheless, this apparent weakness may be their
strength. Precisely because lay citizens are not members of specialist expert
communities they may, paradoxically, be the best placed to make the
crucial judgements about what should be done with the products of such
expert debate. The sociological understanding of expertise is, therefore, a
central concern for modern societies. As liberal democracies struggle to
find the correct balance between expert and citizen perspectives, under-
standing what expertise is, how it is developed and how it is used remains
as important as ever.
Acknowledgement
The author is grateful to the two referees and the members of the Centre
for the Study of Knowledge Expertise and Science for their helpful com-
ments on previous versions of this article. Any errors or inaccuracies that
remain are, of course, the responsibility of the author.
Short Biography
Robert Evans is a sociologist of science and technology with a particular
interest in how scientific knowledge is made and used. His research centres
on the use of scientific and other expertise in policy-making and the nature
and value of public participation in such decisions. He has published on
these topics in several leading journals, including Social Studies of Science
and Public Understanding of Science. Together with Professor Harry Collins
he is the co-author of Rethinking Expertise (University of Chicago Press, 2007),
which sets out a new sociological theory of expertise and related research
program: Studies in Expertise and Experience. His current research
contributes to this work by critically addressing the role of the qualitative
researcher in deliberative settings and through the development of the
imitation game as a research method. Before joining the Cardiff School

of Social Sciences, where he is currently a senior lecturer in sociology and
a member of the Centre for the Study of Knowledge Expertise and
Science, Evans was a postdoctoral research assistant in the Centre for
Urban Technology at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. His interest
in the sociology of science stems from his time at the University of Bath
– the home of the original Science Studies Centre – where he obtained
a BSc in Sociology and Psychology, an MSc in Social Research Methods
and a PhD in the Sociology of Science.
Note
* Correspondence address: Centre for the Study of Knowledge, Expertise and Science,
Cardiff School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Cardiff CF10 3WT, UK. Email:
evansrj1@cardiff.ac.uk.
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Sociology Compass 2/1 (2008): 281–298, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2007.00062.

The Sociology of Expertise: The Distribution

Expertise as practice and culture

Expert citizens in action

by an expert (scientific) committee tasked with examining the safety of

The rise of the lay expert

group of experience-based experts, the legitimate participants become

Participatory processes and the limits of expertise

Alternative conceptions of expertise

lack this experience and/or commitment. Significantly, radical innovations

Low information rationality and the miserly citizen

Categorising expertise: The periodic table of expertises

© 2008 The Author

Ubiquitous tacit knowledge Specialist tacit knowledge

Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

knowledge understanding knowledge expertise expertise

Meta-criteria Credentials Experience Track-record

Source: Collins and Evans (2007).

Sociology Compass 2/1 (2008): 281–298, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2007.00062.x

criteria used by the experts they judge. Connoisseurship refers to

A new research agenda: Mapping expertise

or non-expert might mean is also important. After all, if ideas really do

imitation game as a research method. Before joining the Cardiff School

© 2008 The Author Sociology Compass 2/1 (2008): 281–298, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2007.00062.x

© 2008 The Author Sociology Compass 2/1 (2008): 281–298, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2007.00062.x

© 2008 The Author Sociology Compass 2/1 (2008): 281–298, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2007.00062.x

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