Expertise, Communication, and Organizing

Expertise is an intriguing construct. Though it is highly desired, it is commonly characterized by exclusivity or being something esoteric making it both seemingly difficult to acquire and understand. This opaqueness surrounding the nature of expertise in organizational contexts is coupled with greater demands for specialized work and employees’ increased reliance on communication technologies to complete tasks - trends that further complicate the evaluation of workers’ knowledge and abilities. This volume draws upon original works, from scholars of diverse backgrounds, to explore how recent changes in the structure of organizational life have altered the nature of expertise. Specifically, this book aims to challenge the perspective that organizational expertise exists to be recognized and utilized, and offers an alternative lens that views expertise as emergent and constituted in communication among organizing actors. Examining the intersection of communication and expertise, within and across different contexts of organizing, offers new insights into the discursive, material, and structural influences that contribute to an understanding of expertise. This book offers a comprehensive view of organizational expertise by presenting theoretical frameworks for the study of expertise, providing reviews of how the study of expertise has evolved, applying perspectives on expertise to different domains of organizational practice, and presenting new directions for the study of the intersection of expertise, communication, and organizing. The result is a treatment that considers expertise in diverse forms and across a variety of contexts of organizing, and in doing so provides valuable content to researchers from multiple disciplinary backgrounds.