The primacy of experts and expertise in current fields of public policy, governance and non-governmental organizations has accompanied increasing confusion on the foundations of their practices and the adequacy of their methods. Fields of Expertise clarifies the complex heritage of experts by exploring their relationship with legal, political and administrative powers from a comparative historical and interdisciplinary perspective. Specifically, the authors offer case studies on expert procedures in the two capital cities of Paris and London since 1600 in the essential areas of risk management, medical procedures, economic policy, and administrative reform. In doing so, they provide insight into the evolution of expert procedures while at the same time taking into consideration the interdisciplinary nature of scholarship on expertise drawn from Sociology, Science Studies and Political Science. The following articles thus challenge traditional views on the nature of expertise and provide a synthesis of the vast and disparate literature that has been written on the subject. Fields of Expertise’s international perspectives and multi-disciplinary grasp of the literature in political science, sociology, science studies and history will be useful to scholars and students alike in addressing this highly topical issue. The essays reference mainstream sources and widely-documented cases on experts and expertise, making it accessible to the general reader as well.

Technology and increasing levels of education have exposed people to more information than ever before. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Today, everyone knows everything: with only a quick trip through WebMD or Wikipedia, average citizens believe themselves to be on an equal intellectual footing with doctors and diplomats. All voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism. Tom Nichols' The Death of Expertise shows how this rejection of experts has occurred: the openness of the internet, the emergence of a customer satisfaction model in higher education, and the transformation of the news industry into a 24-hour entertainment machine, among other reasons. Paradoxically, the increasingly democratic dissemination of information, rather than producing an educated public, has instead created an army of ill-informed and angry citizens who denounce intellectual achievement. When ordinary citizens believe that no one knows more than anyone else, democratic institutions themselves are in danger of falling either to populism or to technocracy or, in the worst case, a combination of both. An update to the 2017breakout hit, the paperback edition of The Death of Expertise provides a new foreword to cover the alarming exacerbation of these trends in the aftermath of Donald Trump's election. Judging from events on the ground since it first published, The Death of Expertise issues a warning about the stability and survival of modern democracy in the Information Age that is even more important today.

It is often claimed that we live in an expert society, a society where more and more individuals take expert roles in increasingly narrow fields. In contrast to more traditional experts most of these new experts lack generally accepted mechanisms for the certification and legitimation of their expertise. This book focuses on these new as well as established experts and the efforts undertaken to secure and legitimate their expertise. We view these efforts as organizing attempts and study them on four different levels – the society, the market, the organization and the individual. Based on empirical studies on these four levels of analysis, The Organization of the Expert Society makes the argument that current organizing initiatives in the expert society are based in an objectifying view of expertise that risks concealing and downplaying key aspects of expertise. Well-intended organizing initiatives in the expert society thus run the risk of promoting ignorance rather than securing expertise. Focusing on a current, general and global phenomenon, the rise and organization of an expert society. The Organization of the Expert Society will be key reading for scholars, academics and policy makers in the management fields of Organizational Theory, Management Consulting, Organizations & Society, Critical Management Studies as well as the disciplines of Sociology, Political Science and Social Anthropology.

Every three years, worldwide forensics experts gather at the Interpol Forensic Science Symposium to exchange ideas and discuss scientific advances in the field of forensic science and criminal justice. Drawn from contributions made at the latest gathering in Lyon, France, Interpol's Forensic Science Review is a one-source reference providing a comp

This book forms a serious, in-depth study of the subject and proposes that e-learning is not simply a matter of 'digitizing' traditional materials, but involves a new approach, which must take into account pedagogical, technological and organizational features to form a well-designed education system.