Experts:the knowledge and power of expertise

In this book, Stehr and Grundmann outline the theoretical significance and practical importance of the growing stratum of experts, counsellors and advisors in contemporary society, and claim that the growing spectrum of knowledge-based occupations has led to the pluralisation of expertise. As decision makers in organizations and private citizens, for various reasons, increasingly seek advice from experts, the authors examine the nature of expert activity, and suggest that the role of experts needs to be distinguised from other roles such as professionals, scientists, or intellectuals. Experts, they argue, perform knowledge based activities that mediate between the context of knowledge creation and application. Existing approaches tend to restrict the role of the expert to scientists, or to conflate the roles of professionals with experts. In avoiding such restrictions, this book sets out a framework to understanding the growing role of expertise in a better way. Experts provides thought-provoking discussion that will be of interest to postgraduate students and academics working within the fields of social theory, knowledge, and consumption.

The role of experts in policy making

As public policy issues increasingly have a technical aspect to them an interactive relationship has developed between science and policy. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the two aspects of this relationship: the influence of science on policy and the influence of policy implications on science. Most existing studies in this area treat only one or other of these aspects. Furthermore, they tend to provide interesting case study material but very little theoretical analysis. This thesis attempts to overcome these problems by dealing with both aspects of the interaction between science and policy and by providing theoretical models of this relationship. The thesis combines the theoretical development of these models with the analysis of three empirical case studies: the controversy in Britain over smoking and health; the application of educational psychology to the development of education policy in Britain; the controversy over the health effect of lead in the environment. The theoretical models are developed in Part 1. In Part 2 the empirical case studies are presented and in Part 3 the theoretical material is assessed in the light of these case studies. The main thesis of this study is that there is a fundamental mismatch between science and policy-making. Criticism is always essential in science. However, when science is involved in the policy process, either scientific claims are not subjected to a significant level of criticism or they are scrutinized so closely that no view achieves general consensus and conflicting advice results. In this situation, contrary to the traditional view, science can generate uncertainty. The role which science plays in the policy process is influenced by this level of criticism, by the context of political power and by the progress of an issue through the various stages of the policy process.

Knowledge elicitation and knowledge representation in a large domain with multiple experts

This paper describes the knowledge elicitation and knowledge representation aspects of a system being developed to help with the design and maintenance of relational data bases. The size algorithmic components. In addition, the domain contains multiple experts, but any given expert's knowledge of this large domain is only partial. The paper discusses the methods and techniques used for knowledge elicitation, which was based on a "broad and shallow" approach at first, moving to a "narrow and deep" one later, and describes the models used for knowledge representation, which were based on a layered "generic and variants" approach. © 1995.