Facing up to face value: Communication, difference, and the turn to expertise

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

On its face, it sounds awkward: Just as the field of communication studies began to coalesce around professional interests (e.g., Miller 1998; Cheney and Ashcraft 2007), professionalization was declared a dying industry. Late to the party, or so it seemed. Yet the subsequent turn to expertise is far more welcoming to communication inquiry than the sociology of professions (e.g., Evans 2008; Eyal and Pok 2011). This turn reframes expertise as a relational—and, specifically, communicative—network that can thrive beyond professional jurisdictions (Kuhn and Rennstam 2016). Countering the focus on exclusivity in research on professionalization, the turn promised to be ‘inclusive of all who can make viable claims to expertise’, regardless of their professional status (Eyal 2013: 898). As yet, this remains an aspiration. With some adjustment, it might be realized. This paper holds out hope.

The shift toward expertise usefully acknowledges that knowhow has a life of its own, which well exceeds its relationship with any professionals who would try to own it. However, by severing the interests of expertise from that of experts, the turn underestimates the extent to which expertise is invested in the practitioners with whom it is aligned (Ashcraft 2013).

In this paper, I make the case that expertise retains a keen interest in experts even when it eludes their possession. This interest can be recuperated through sustained attention to ‘face value’, or the ways in which presumptions about the nature and worth of knowledge arise through economies of difference. I propose modifying the turn to expertise accordingly and cultivating inquiry responsive to this adjustment.

The case unfolds in five parts that successively (1) retrace an unsuccessful professional bid for communication, (2) introduce the sociology of expertise and (3) translate its communicative potential, (4) identify a major obstacle to that promise and, finally, (5) propose a way forward.

COMMUNICATION GOES PROFESSIONAL: A JURISDICTION BID, THWARTED?

In 2007, George Cheney and I published a paper in Communication Theory, ‘Considering “the professional” in communication studies’ (Cheney and Ashcraft 2007). Really, we were hoping to start something, or bring an emerging set of interests together.

We used ‘the professional’ to encompass phenomena captured by such concepts as professions, professionalization, and professional (noun and modifier). We wrote in a moment when the relationships among these things seemed to be in flux. Professions in the conventional sense were said to be declining, whereas claims to professional status were proliferating—almost as if any line of work could professionalize, and anybody could be a professional, if they just so behaved.

Put another way, the professional seemed to be losing institutional security as it gained performative power, one form of materiality receding as another emerged. The professions, formally established and tightly regulated, were giving way to a distributed and aspirational presence, more like professionish. The quest to professionalize was morphing, from a method of producing value through controlled exclusivity into a generalized imperative for all. This is not to say that the professions were becoming more inclusive, as in open to everyone or demographically diversifying. Rather, the obligation to ‘be professional’—that is, to perform professionalism—was becoming more inclusive, as in broadly compulsory.

Where was this omnipresence headed? When just about everyone is called to professionalize, can a once-coveted distinction remain distinguished? Will the value of the professional, once founded on exclusivity, erode from accessibility and imitation, from overuse?

Communication studies were poised to deliver novel answers, we thought. So we presented the situation as a communicative phenomenon, in a spirit similar to the current special issue. Instead of treating the professional as a taken-for-granted background, we proposed to make it an explicit, expansive, and contested register of analysis. Let’s examine its many permutations, performances, and politics! Better yet, let’s make it a shared object of intradisciplinary inquiry, assembling perspectives from organizational, rhetorical, interpersonal, language and social interaction, as well as media and cultural studies. And what if this opens a portal to interdisciplinary exchange too? Imagine that: Communication meets the sociology of professions, with the potential side perk of boosting our disciplinary visibility!

As hinted by the exclamation points, ours was no detached curiosity. We owned our stake in the professional, not simply as communication scholars with stuff to say about it, but also as organizational subjects increasingly compelled to do it. After all, higher ed was undergoing neoliberal intensification, the wheels of our own professionalization spinning ever faster. Why not proceed, then, with awareness that scholarship on the professional is invariably caught up in the apparatus of which it speaks? I’ve long believed that much can be learned from paying close attention to this fact (e.g., Ashcraft 2017, 2018).

Looking back, it’s clear that we were pursuing a self-conscious professional project for communication studies—a ‘jurisdiction contest’ over intellectual terrain, which sought to advance disciplinary interests by formulating new boundaries of expertise (Abbott 1988). The turf we tried to stake out went something like this: Communication is a heterogeneous field uniquely attuned to performative practices. As such, it is better equipped than traditional sociological analysis to understand the historical present of the professional, namely, as a fundamentally communicative process in which the very act of knowledge production is implicated.

Essentially, George and I wagered that communication studies could further professionalize by studying the professional in this distinctive, reflexive manner. Doing the professional by knowing ‘it’, knowing by doing, and opening these layers of performativity into a new consciousness of the phenomenon.

So much for that dream. No sooner did we step into the arena than sociology declared ‘game over’. Shortly after our hopeful paper, the sociology of professions was pronounced dead or, at least, dormant (Eyal and Pok 2011). In its place came a new sociological enterprise that promised to revive it by adapting to the times. Enter the sociology of expertise, which addressed the shifting material status of the professional I just described. And just like that—with a reformulation of sociological domain—the playing field shifted beneath our feet. Another jurisdiction bid lost, you might think, the field of communication benched before it gets a chance to play. Well, not necessarily.

In what follows, I drop our earlier interest in disciplinary jurisdiction, arguing instead that the sociology of expertise is a welcome turn, conducive to communicative analysis of the professional (e.g., Treem and Leonardi 2016), provided it learns to confront a ghost of professions past that haunts it. Ultimately, I propose a friendly amendment to help this happen across disciplinary boundaries.

This effort can be usefully framed in the terms of George and my original analysis. We began that paper by drawing three key dimensions of the professional from a long history of sociological study: (1) divisions of labor that define ‘modern’ society, (2) claims to exclusive expertise for a particular class of people, and (3) normative-ethical claims regarding values and standards of practice. On reflection, I have a fuller sense of how we were doing (or performing) these dimensions in the act of discussing them. Essentially, we prioritized the first two and subordinated the third. That is, we led with a jurisdiction bid for communication studies and, secondarily, advanced a normative-ethical claim that difference—relations like race, gender, and sexuality—should play a more central role in such study. In this paper, I back away from any claim to exclusive disciplinary expertise and lead instead with a normative-ethical imperative to probe difference across disciplined borders.

Put in the strongest terms, there can be no expertise on expertise until those claiming to produce it—mainly scholars—face up to the quiet yet indispensable role of difference in creating expertise as we know it. This is not your typical call for ‘inclusion’, to diversify the professions by broadening who gets to practice some form of expertise or another. While important, inclusivity of this kind is also superficial. Gliding on the surface, it neglects the very thing that guarantees its eventual failure. The fact is that expertise comes with preferred practitioners already baked in; indeed, it needs them in order to be legible. Mine is thus a call to stop deferring what has long been proven, that knowhow becomes discernible as expertise largely by association with some practitioners and dissociation from others.

This holds as true for scholarly expertise as it does for any other form. Perhaps grasping this at some instinctive level, scholars of expertise across disciplines ritually deflect the role of difference, as if admitting it would deflate the value of our own knowhow by exposing expertise as an emperor disrobed. I argue that this is a risk worth taking. Without it, we cannot understand the emperor’s rise to power, which—as we are about to see—is exactly the point of turning away from the professional and toward expertise. In this sense, the paper appeals to a higher normative-ethical standard for the scholarly practice of knowing expertise. Until we finally grapple with the deeper ways that difference matters, the study of expertise cannot hope to become ‘inclusive of all who can make viable claims to expertise’ (Eyal 2013: 898).

GAME-CHANGER: A SOCIOLOGY OF EXPERTISE BEYOND THE GRIP OF EXPERTS

To start, let’s process the turn to expertise. What shortcomings in the sociology of professions (hereafter, SP) prompted the call for a sociology of expertise (SE), and what does this shift entail?

SE had been around for a while (see Evans 2008), but it was Eyal and Pok (2011) who proposed a full-fledged endeavor to replace SP, which they deposed as the relic of a vanishing social order. Their initial formulation unseated SP’s outmoded view of expertise as the property of experts endowed by institutions. Formal professionalization is no longer the primary path to expertise, they observed. These days, expertise finds reach and influence not so much through jurisdictional claims (i.e., boundary-marking) as by occupying the spaces between fields (i.e., boundary-spanning). Whereas professions close expertise through monopoly and autonomy, expertise today is more open, expanding through generosity and co-production.

Further iterations of SE (e.g., Eyal and Buchholz 2010; Eyal and Hart 2010; Eyal 2013; Eyal and Pok 2015) dialed back on the ‘old vs. new’ binary, softening the case that SE should supplant SP into a relation of complementarity. Abridged, the production of expertise simply requires a different mode of analysis than the production of experts. These separate tracks—SE for the former, SP for the latter—can proceed in parallel, although expertise increasingly operates beyond as well as without the professional trappings of modernization. Read: The production of experts is becoming a minor arena; for the real action, go to the production of expertise.

For Eyal and colleagues, the main problem with SP is not that it sidelines expertise. Rather, it prioritizes the production of experts and, thus, regards expertise entirely from their point of view. For example, SP conceives of expertise in terms of knowledge abstraction and codification, as well as credentialing and licensing systems that regulate knowledge access and application. Expertise is thereby reduced to a professionalization strategy, an institutional achievement necessary to secure the entitlement of an exclusive group of experts. SP sets the goalposts like so: Align a problematic task with a given field of knowledge, elevate that knowledge to the enviable status known as expertise, control access to said expertise and, thereby, guarantee the precious right of a few to carry it. Because the production of experts is the point, their monopoly and autonomy become operating principles. In SP, then, expertise belongs to professionals, who could not be experts without it.

In contrast, SE disentangles expertise from the expert, prying it loose from professional hands. SE proceeds from the observation that ‘the social consequences of psychology (read expertise) are not the same as the social consequences of psychologists (read experts)’ (Rose 1992: 356). Expertise and experts cannot be collapsed like two sides of one coin, for there is more to the former than its service to the latter. Expertise is a real thing (the question is what kind of thing—more on this momentarily) that arises from relational histories and practices, which precede and exceed professional actors and their institutional armor. Expertise, in other words, has a life of its own. It should be analytically distinguished from experts, not only because it increasingly operates outside professional jurisdiction, but also because the two require different modes of attention even when they are enmeshed.

Boiled down, SP is an inquiry focused on experts, which asks who is authorized to control a task and how their purview is achieved, whereas SE is an inquiry trained on what experts know and do. SE asks: What all is involved in building capacity to accomplish a task better and faster? How is an expert statement or performance assembled in a way that withstands trial? What activity makes ‘superior and speedy execution’ possible (Eyal 2013: 871)? SP would answer these questions possessively, by pointing to professionals and ‘their’ skills. Refusing this circular habit, SE looks beyond—or really, before—the individual expert, to the wider web of actions that empower them to act as such.

In this sense, SE could be called a ‘pre-individual’ mode of analysis (see Ashcraft 2020). It investigates what enables the apparent host of expertise—the individual expert—to appear as such: an autonomous agent. SE zooms out the analytical lens, from the person who claims and performs expertise to the practices of claiming and performing that authorize them to do so. SE seeks a full inventory of human and non-human contributors to these practices. It examines the matrix of activity that allows someone to claim and perform expertise, which may or may not include a professional apparatus.

Accordingly, SE defines expertise as the assembling of forces—diverse actors, ideas, instruments, forms of organizing, and so forth—that enables successful claims and performances of knowhow. Here, ‘successful’ means those that stand the test of time or manage to stay viable. Specifically, expertise is the network of relations among these elements, at minimum:

• 1) ‘those empowered to speak as experts’ (Eyal and Pok 2011)

• 2) what they know, or the object of knowledge (i.e., the mobilization of those things to which they attend, such as tasks, problems, and persons)

• 3) those that also produce knowledge but do not or cannot speak (i.e., essential human and non-human infrastructure)

• 4) those who listen (i.e., clients)

• 5) constitutive exclusions (i.e., what is outside by definition, ‘included’ as an essential exclusion)

• 6) translations (i.e., sufficient interpretive alignments to enable coordination among varied participants)

Precisely because it depends, at minimum, on this array of participants, expertise cannot be conflated with experts’ interest in it. Yet this is precisely what SP does by making monopoly and autonomy over expertise the driving principles. From the expert’s point of view, these may indeed be desirable. But SE asks what expertise desires; what about its point of view, its interests? If expertise depends on a distributed network of diverse participants, whose contributions are both essential and not guaranteed, then it thrives on collaboration. Which is to say, expertise prefers principles of generosity and co-production rather than monopoly and autonomy.

In Eyal’s (2013: 898) words, SE

…differs from the sociology of professions by being inclusive of all who can make viable claims to expertise, by carefully distinguishing between experts and expertise as two modes of analysis that are not reducible to one another, by asking not only who controls a task and how jurisdictional boundaries are assembled but also what arrangements, devices, concepts, and other actors are necessary if an expert statement or performance is to be formulated, reproduced, and disseminated…

The central question of SE is how bids to speak as an expert are put together and how they succeed or fall apart. Regardless of whether and how professional closure is involved, expertise cannot be reduced to it. When we grant this reduction, as SP does, we have already favored the experts. Expertise has its own interests, which are distinct from experts’ investment in it.

CONDUCIVE TO COMMUNICATION: EXPERTISE IS AN INVITING TURN, WITH AN ASTERISK

Equipped with an introduction to SE, we can assess its relative openness to the field of communication. How might communicative analysis fare in this framework? The short answer, for me anyway, is well-to-very-well. I would go so far as to say that SE welcomes communication studies—variously defined and executed—as a full and integral partner in knowing expertise.

Take, for instance, SE’s emphasis on ‘those empowered to speak as experts’ in relation to ‘those who do not or cannot speak’ and ‘those who listen’. With this move, SE reframes expertise as a fundamentally communicative process. Placed front and center are acts of speaking and listening, of claiming and performing as well as interpreting and evaluating those statements and enactments. SE calls attention to key matters that occupy communication inquiry, questions of voice and silence, participation and marginalization, reception, interpretation, articulation, translation, and more. It conceives of communication as an ongoing exchange over meaning and value that is multi-directional, co-constructed and contested. Organizing here is most certainly a verb—a relational network in motion, a durable web of action. For SE, networks are communicative practice.

Better yet, SE grants the performative power of communication. It does not simply attend to communicative performances but, rather, to how they (succeed or fail to) enact the expertise of which they speak—hence, performativity. In other words, communication is conceived as a consequential process, pivotal to the birth, growth, and dissolution of expertise. As such, SE takes a friendly stance toward the constitutive force of communication long touted by communication scholars (see Ashcraft, Kuhn and Cooren 2009; Ashcraft 2021).

Moreover, SE is friendly to models of performativity at the heart of much communication research—for example, poststructuralist reworkings of speech act theory that explore more and less successful utterances and their felicitous conditions (e.g., Butler 2010), or the rise and fall of epistemic regimes that mobilize ‘obvious’ social problems and their ‘logical’ interventions and solutions (e.g., Foucault 1979, 1980). SE shows interest in a range of discursive practices that make certain statements matter more than others, granting or denying them weight in the world.

These are but a few of SE’s opening gestures toward communication, as phenomenon if not field. Also noteworthy, SE is relational beyond its emphasis on connection, or what lies between people and things. Arguably, it elevates relation to ontological status, such that people and things are made as such (e.g., into experts, problems, clients, technologies, and so on) by what connects them—that is, by practices of linking (see Mol 2014, March 19). All ‘elements’ of the framework become such through acts of relating that build robust links over time—that is, through ontological practices.

SE is not only relational, then; it subscribes to relationality (Emirbayer 1997) or, at least, can be read compatibly (for more on this, see Kuhn and Rennstam 2016). In this way, it’s amenable to relational ontologies of communication, such as the ‘new materialist’ approaches that have emerged in recent years (e.g., Kuhn, Ashcraft and Cooren 2017). In fact, SE leans on one such approach to reconceptualize expertise: so-called actor-network theory (ANT) (for more, see Law and Hassard 1999).

For example, SE conceives of agency as distributed, dispersed across a web of practice (i.e., ‘located’ in the network) rather than housed in a person. Instead of sole or lead actor, the individual expert is demoted to an effect of the network, made possible only by its activity. From the network’s point of view, power operates differently than it does for the expert. Experts grow their power by owning expertise (again, monopoly and autonomy), while expertise expands its reach by disseminating successful expert statements. In other words, a network becomes more influential not by intensifying border control but, rather, by building capacity to graft its discursive practices onto what others are doing. Expertise gains power by inducing the cooperation of key parties (again, generosity and co-production), an essentially rhetorical endeavor. This is why expertise inhabits the space between fields rather than building walls around them. Experts may like to confine it, but expertise prefers the freedom to roam, engage, and persuade.

As this suggests, SE implicitly deploys ANT to call the ‘great man’ at the heart of SP—the expert—to humility. In this way, it is a democratic, dare I say populist (i.e., non- or anti-elitist), intervention that opens beyond established or aspiring professions, to anyone making sustainable claims to expertise. SE ‘listens’ to these performances not by taking the expert’s word for granted, but by tuning in to the practices and participants that ‘empower’ them to speak, that give their word authority and make it real. Following ANT, SE aims to register the whole supportive cast, including non-human actants, contributing to the fate of any given claim. It does so by following them around empirically, mapping the evolution of their relations through historical and ethnographic description.

Shadowing webs of practice this way, SE demystifies knowledge abstraction, a quality of expertise deemed essential yet often left mysterious by SP. SE explains abstraction by describing how it happens (see especially Eyal 2013; Eyal and Pok 2015). Abstraction here is grounded, redefined as those concrete steps whereby a proficiency gets translated from one context to another, until it becomes de-contextualized, transferable, even esoteric knowledge. For SE, then, ‘abstraction’ is shorthand, a placeholder for empirical investigation of the variable chains of practical transcription that make expertise real. Evident here is ANT’s sociomaterial rendition of interpretation, wherein alignments of meaning arise through practices of relating. Why do forms of expertise abstract so differently? Because the sequence of translations tethering them to the world is highly specific and variable. The job of the SE analyst is to trace those chains.

Like this, SE draws on ANT to transcend an old debate about the realness of expertise (Eyal 2013). On one side are ‘substantivist’ positions, which enlist scholars in the messy business of adjudicating whether expertise is what it claims to be—an uncomfortable task for which we are arguably unqualified. On the other are ‘constructivist’ positions, which risk reducing expertise to attributions thereof. While social construction is certainly vital to manufacturing expertise, (over)emphasizing this point can portray knowhow as ‘merely’ manufactured, as in fabricated—another kind of scholarly conceit that minimizes what expertise can do in the world.

Resisting the either/or terms of debate, SE tracks the existence of expertise as sociomaterial networks of practice that make a difference (i.e., matter in both senses: leave material and meaningful marks) in the world. SE keeps scholars in their lane, so to speak, doing the job for which they are qualified, which is studying how expertise holds up or falls apart.

In sum, SE reframes the debate over the realness of expertise, from ‘is it genuine or fake?’ to ‘how (by what concrete practices) does it become real?’ SE documents how the capacity to accomplish tasks better and faster is developed, how knowhow survives or fails empirical test. Note: not whether a proficiency should withstand trial (evaluative) but, rather, how it manages to do so or not (descriptive). Using my earlier analogy, SE abandons all debate over whether the emperor is clothed, pointing out that this is none of our scholarly business. Whether expertise is truth or illusion is beside the point when it is real—operative, existing, in effect—nonetheless. The better question is how emperors rise and fall from power: By what patterned activity is expertise made real, or put into effect?

I have tried to show here that SE is thoroughly communication-curious, open to a range of conceptions and approaches, and especially friendly to relational models of communication as a sociomaterial process. Earlier, I described how George Cheney and I tried to envision the professional as a fundamentally communicative, performative process in which the act of scholarly knowledge production is implicated (Cheney and Ashcraft 2007). As should now be evident, SE takes major strides in that direction.

Why not accept the implied invitation, then? Dropping the competitive frame of disciplinary battles over professional jurisdiction (e.g., communication versus sociology), communication scholars could instead engage with SE as an invitation to work the space between fields and co-produce expertise on expertise. And so they have. The productive anthology Expertise, Communication, and Organizing (Treem and Leonardi 2016) is but one telling example.

The paper might end here, with a happily-ever-after call to continue interdisciplinary collaboration, were it not for a major oversight that haunts the communication volume just referenced and the lion’s share of literature on SE, as well as SP before it. Namely, the turn to expertise once again sidesteps how difference makes a difference—that is, how relations of gender, race, sexuality, and the like are crucial to the ontological practices of expertise.

Below, I formulate this oversight as the problem of ‘face value’, a stubborn scholarly habit of neglecting how the character and value of knowhow—the status of any proficiency as knowledge or expertise—leans heavily on the experts with whom it is aligned. I argue that SE dispenses with experts, or dissolves them into effects, too quickly. Until scholars appreciate the expert’s associational contributions to expertise, we are not done with him yet. SE may humble the ‘great man’, but it is also still seduced by him.

FACE VALUE: THE GHOST OF PROFESSIONS PAST

As we have seen, SE emphatically distinguishes the interests of the expert (in monopoly and autonomy) from those of expertise (in generosity and co-production). There is, however, one interest they definitively share, which is that both aspire to accumulate value.

Especially coveted is the achievement of face value, that precious form of recognition by which something is obviously and immediately authorized, or credible ‘on its face’. As much as any expert, expertise is invested in assuming face value, such that its character, necessity, and utility as (the go-to) knowledge becomes readily apparent, self-evident, and automatic, a matter of reflex. You might say that expertise seeks brand recognition: ‘Of course this is the needed proficiency!’ (Ashcraft et al. 2012).

By dodging the process whereby face value is produced, SP became an unwitting partner in its production. Notice, for example, how this common claim presumes the existence of such a process without showing much curiosity for it:

Professions, such as medicine, law, and accounting, arise when an organized group possesses esoteric knowledge that has economic value… Because of their unique knowledge and skill sets, society grants professionals higher levels of prestige and autonomy than it grants non-professionals (Pratt, Rockmann and Kaufmann 2006: 235).

Like this, SP serves professional interests, helping to reproduce the face value of expertise by treating it as something self-evident, already proven or easily explained by market dynamics. But when knowledge is presumed deserving by scholars too, the nature and operations of that market remain a black box. If ‘the market’ has determined its merits, case closed until further contest; why bother following up on their source?

Here’s why: Because knowledge, as with an occupation, is known by the company it keeps (Ashcraft 2013). Aptitudes and proficiencies are recognized as knowledge (as opposed to, say, intuition), and elevated to expertise (or demoted to bodily instinct), in significant part on the basis of who they are associated with. Of course, they are also evaluated on whether they work better and faster to accomplish tasks and solve problems. To succeed, they must withstand trial, as SE puts it. What I am saying is that whether and how they pass these empirical tests depends more on associated practitioners than we might care to think.

This is the argument I made in (re)formulating the ‘glass slipper’ of professions: that occupations as well as what they know and do (i.e., expertise) are evaluated in light of the embodied social identities with whom they are aligned (Ashcraft 2013, 2020). Drawing on decades of research, I showed how face value is generally achieved through (dis)associations that have as much or more to do with specific entanglements of gender, race, sexuality, and so forth—in a word, relations of ‘difference’—than they do with anything else.

Simply put, difference is a reliable shortcut to (de)valuation. Face value as we know it—worth accepted on its face—rests on association with valued ‘faces’. These linkages must be made, which is to say that face value is a relational practice that yields ‘inherent’ qualities and worth by linking knowhow with certain sorts of practitioners. This is the double meaning of face value I intend going forward: the ways presumptions of merit arise through relations of difference.

To illustrate, take all three forms of expertise mentioned in the preceding quote: medical, legal, and accounting. In each case, research powerfully demonstrates that the proficiencies involved were differentiated from other forms of knowing nearby and vaunted to expertise largely by contrasting their gendered practitioners. Physicians over nurses over midwives (Hearn 1982; Davies 2003). Lawyers over paralegals (Pierce 1995). Accountants versus bookkeepers and clerks (Kirkham and Loft 1993). Finer-grained hierarchies of expertise, within rank, were similarly produced. Cardiology over radiology, versus pediatrics (Witz 1992), or certain surgical aptitudes over others (Hinze 1999).

Predictably, ‘higher’ levels of knowing are progressively masculinized (i.e., rising by association with increasingly elite masculinities), while ‘lower’ levels are degraded through feminization (i.e., falling by alignment with progressively lowly femininities). Arguably, masculinization is the most historically proven strategy to advance knowledge interests. Countless forms of expertise were born by association with specific forms of masculinity (white, heterosexual, college-educated, ‘clean-cut’, etc.) and dissociation from women as well as racial and sexual ‘others’.

The latter, dissociation, is critical here. Face value depends not just on linking but severing ties too. Separating and distancing from feminized and racialized figures is a perfect example of ‘constitutive exclusion’, the creation of that outside without which there is no inside, an ontological exclusion (Davies 1996). Constitutive exclusions like this haunt countless efforts at so-called inclusion, or diversification. Campaigns to enhance the presence and participation of women in STEM majors and jobs, for example, often neglect how the face value of STEM fields is premised on their exclusion, to the extent that mass inclusion would likely erode that value (Ashcraft and Ashcraft 2015), as occurred in fields like library sciences and public relations (e.g., Garrison 1972–1973; Alvesson 1998).

To be clear, it is not only the practitioner-made-expert who benefits from these constitutive acts of (dis)association. Knowhow itself—as it gets recognized as knowledge and promoted to expertise—benefits too.

In this way, the interests of expert and expertise are aligned, contra SE. Put plainly, expertise has a direct interest in the practitioners to whom it becomes attached and cut off. ‘Experts’ here refers to the relative value of the figurative, if not likely and actual, bodies associated with any given proficiency. The black box of face value begins to open: ‘The market’ we are really talking about is an economy of difference, the comparative worth granted to different kinds of practitioners.

The point is that expertise always withstands trial (or not) through relations of difference. Practitioners’ embodied social identities serve to undervalue and hype the value of certain proficiencies; to boost or deflate the rationality, complexity, and technicality of knowhow; and to justify ignoring many forms of knowing as knowledge altogether (Ashcraft 2013; Azocar and Ferree 2016; Brady 2018). Difference is a regular and vital yet consistently discounted ‘participant’ in assembling expertise, and SE continues SP’s long tradition of denying and underrating it.

I argue that face value (in the dual sense) is ‘the ghost of professions past’ that SE has yet to confront, though it might appear to. On the one hand, SE is well positioned to open the black box of face value, just as it does with knowledge abstraction. Consider its commitment to historical and ethnographic description of how expert claims are assembled and received—how objects of knowledge and supportive infrastructures are mobilized, how clients are addressed, how chains of transcription align the interested interpretations of diverse constituents, and so on. Such an approach would seem to welcome analysis of how practices of difference are involved in expertise. Indeed, constitutive exclusions of the sort I just described—people, things, and concepts ‘included’ as founding, definitional exclusions—are expressly marked by SE, the fifth element introduced earlier. If relevant to a given empirical case, then, SE appears to account for relations of difference already.

And yet, SE analyses of face value are hard to come by, even when the empirical case in question is laced with evidence that economies of difference are making a difference. In their initial formulation, Gil and Pok (2011) illustrate ‘constitutive exclusions’ through reference to two cases. The first involves the role of convulsions in the making of ‘abnormal’ individuals. That nuns were especially at issue here receives parenthetical mention, but the role of gender—specifically, how the resistance practices in question were caught up with a particular religious gendering—goes unmarked. The second case involves the severing of Jewish-Palestinian ties in the rise of Israeli security. While anti-Arabist sentiment is certainly emphasized, the way in which religion, nation, ethnicity, gender, and so forth entangled to yield a disposable racialized ‘other’ is not. Similarly, difference features all over the autism case—for instance, in the crucial role of mothering practices as well as race-class differentiations among patients—yet race and gender especially are all but ignored as forceful participants in the emerging network.

Suffice it to say, SE cracks open a door it has yet to enter, and the face value of expertise remains masked as a result. To repair this oversight, SE must admit and redress its complicity in the production of expertise. Like SP before it, SE colludes in face value, however unwittingly. How? Precisely by severing the interests of expertise from those of experts and ignoring the vital interest they share. Namely, to accumulate value, expertise remains invested in ‘its’ experts.

I mean to make a critical turnabout here. Experts aren’t alone in seeking to own expertise; expertise also has an interest in ‘owning’ certain experts, though this reversal has yet to be systematically recognized. SE is correct that SP overstates the expertise–expert attachment in one sense: Expertise has a life of its own, exceeding the experts who try to possess it. But SE underestimates their tenacious connection in another sense: Knowledge is known by the company it keeps, so expertise has a stake in the possession of experts.

When it comes to difference, it turns out that SP and SE are not separate analytical tracks, as SE claims. They are reducible, in that both ignore how expertise on expertise—scholarship—participates in perpetually deferring face value. Until we confront this ghost, ‘viable claims to expertise’ will continue to be missed and misrecognized (Eyal 2013: 898). Jens Rennstam and I show how this occurs in the literature on knowledge (Rennstam and Ashcraft 2014); Jennifer Brady demonstrates how it occurs in the specific context of SE (Brady 2018).

In the end, it is not enough to humble ‘those empowered to speak as experts’ by acknowledging the wider matrix of action that makes their statements possible. Alone, this move can further obscure rather than disrupt face value, for instance, by dissolving the expert and deflecting attention from the enduring power of their bodily association.

It is not a question of whether but how scholars participate in the networks of expertise we study. Failing to investigate face value—dismissing difference as a non-participant or downgrading it to passing mention—is a contribution that lets face value persist, unknown and unchallenged. The emperor’s path to power remains partially shrouded in mystery. This omission is not satisfactorily dismissed as an idiosyncratic error or disciplinary tick. A custom of evasion this old and widespread, entrenched by deep grooves, will require careful course correction. To banish this ghost, we need an explicit, elevated normative-ethical commitment that can make inroads to our concrete practices of inquiry.

I appreciate the communicative and democratic impulses of SE; I just think it could use some revision. For as long as it denies the overlapping interest of expertise and experts in face value, it cannot make good on the promise to become more ‘inclusive of all who can make viable claims to expertise’.

FACE UP TO FACE VALUE: CONFRONTING OUR COMPLICITY WITH ECONOMIES OF DIFFERENCE

I propose adding another element to SE, a friendly amendment along these lines:

• 7) Every network of expertise involves a set of relations between those empowered to speak as experts and an economy of difference.

With this addition, I mean to mark difference as another essential participant in expertise and, thereby, officially open the black box of the market assessing face value. I am calling attention to, and compelling inspection of, the myriad ways in which difference contributes quiet proxies for the knowledge (de)valuation process.

I call this a friendly amendment because it moves in the same spirit with which SE brings the mystery of knowledge abstraction down to the ground, by making it an empirical question. SE does so with the sixth element, translation, which requires the analyst to trace chains of transcription by which expertise becomes real. How does knowledge find a foothold in material practices of interpretive coordination among diverse parties? In distinguishing translation as its own element, SE is not splitting it from the other elements—expertise is a relational network, after all—but simply ensuring that this matter receives the attention it deserves.

Similarly, I mean to grant difference its due by posing an empirical question about its manifold contributions to the production of expertise. How does difference produce value for knowledge? As with knowledge abstraction chains, or translation, the answer will be highly specific and variable, requiring careful historical and ethnographic description. Invariably, the answer will also be intersectional, meaning that multiple aspects of difference operate together, at once. Gender alone is an insufficient vector of analysis, for example, because value is always produced through particular genderings—configurations that may include race, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, ability, educational or citizenship status, and a hundred other case-specific considerations (Ashcraft 2013; Azocar and Ferree 2016). Again, how difference comes to matter is an empirical question. That it will is sufficiently predictable to warrant its own element.

As with translations, economies of difference are not separate from the other elements of the network. We have already considered how the embodied social identities of ‘those empowered to speak as experts’ participate in the production of expertise by contributing a prima facie case for value. But difference participates in all the other elements too. Brief illustrations from a case I have studied and analyzed extensively, US commercial aviation, might help (e.g., see Ashcraft and Mumby 2004; Ashcraft 2005, 2007).

The airline pilot’s body was strategically made over in the image of an officer, specifically a ship captain, to persuade various client, government, employer, and regulatory audiences that his knowhow was not the embodied talent of a circus performer (as in barnstorming or popular airshows of the time) but, rather, complex technical knowledge, ‘scientific’ expertise. This makeover enlisted not only the details of his physical body and embodied performances, but also a host of artifacts, devices, and other props—technologies such as uniforms bearing rank, bulky navigation kits, wedding rings (even for the unmarried) to indicate fatherly maturity and dependability, intercoms to facilitate the sound of invisible authority, and cockpit doors to seal the mystery of knowledge abstraction, to name a few. Additionally, the pilot’s overhaul included expressly barring women as well as men of color, especially Black men, from the cockpit, constitutive exclusions that lasted for decades and persist in some form to this day. The transformation of pilots was integral to the chain of transcriptions that mobilized patrons not only now willing to fly (where once they feared it), but also rendered compliant, subdued with a reverential awe for flying expertise. Passenger deference was definitively ‘brought to you by’ difference—a point underscored by the fact that the sight of women in airline pilot uniforms, or the sound of their voice streaming through the intercom, still evokes anxiety among passengers, though by now most know not to express it.

On the one hand, the evolution of knowledge-producing infrastructure like automation honed flying proficiency, building capacity for more precise execution of tasks while contributing to impressions that flying required highly technical knowhow (e.g., flashing screens and digital indicators over analog controls). On the other hand, technologies like automation—or the managerial mandate that captains lead by ‘crew resource management’ instead of lone decision-making—were encountered among pilots as feminizing forces that disempowered and de-skilled them. Speaking of the sociomaterial matrix, one other thing: Cockpits were literally designed and built around men’s bodies (e.g., average measurements, strength capacity, etc.) and heterosexual family relations (e.g., warning indicators expressed in ‘soothing’ women’s voices, flight attendants in the cabin to attend to pilot needs, relay their instructions, pacify passengers with food and beverage service and friendly discipline, all while shielding ‘daddy’ from interruption in his office).

Since I am talking in one sense about the transformation of pilots, it may be tempting to reduce these examples to the production of experts, not expertise—the terrain of SP, not SE. Not so fast, for what is revealed here is the production of expertise through the production of experts. This classic case of professionalization only punctuates the reversal I underscored earlier, which nonetheless holds for expertise beyond professional bounds: Expertise has an (at least residual) interest in associating with certain practitioners over others. Experts are not the only ones invested in ownership; so too expertise gains power by possessing ‘its’ experts. Expertise, in other words, becomes such by relating to literal and figurative bodies in a marketplace of difference. Moreover, ‘it takes a village’. A whole network of human and non-human actants are enrolled in these constitutive practices of linking and distancing.

At some level, early airlines and labor leaders alike understood this, essentially telling pilots: If you want your knowhow to be known as technical expertise, you need to perform differently and enlist a large supporting cast—of bodies, identities, instruments, and other ‘stuff’—in the performance. Meanwhile, scholarship still struggles to recover what they knew by instinct. Putting together a successful bid for expertise, or withstanding trial, entails maneuvering economies of difference to assemble practitioners of value. To finally recognize this process in the systematic way it deserves, we need to single it out as a network element unto itself.

To ‘operationalize’ market dynamics of difference, historical and ethnographic investigation might proceed by mapping three things at minimum (for the original formulation of this framework, see Ashcraft and Simonson 2016):

• 1 Figures: Who are the influential inhabitants of this difference economy? ‘Figures’ includes people who exert any influence, but I would caution against treating them as free agents or autonomous actors (no ‘great men’ here). Networked understandings of individual actors, which diminish or distribute ‘their’ agency, would be more consistent with SE’s ANT leanings. People in this sense are more like lightning rods, magnets, vessels, or contact points, nestled in practices and enabled by habitats. Figures also include more than living, breathing humans—for example, composite figures (e.g., airline pilot and ‘stewardess’, computing ‘nerd’) or symbolic and figurative bodies and body parts (e.g., avatars, proficiencies said to take ‘balls’ or strong hands). Finally, figures include non-human actants too, like gendered uniforms, automation and managerial technologies, or even phallic airplanes—most any inhabitant recognized as such.

• 2 Formations: What are the influential habitats and habits of this difference economy? ‘Formations’ includes environments and relations that are repeated to the point of predictability, pattern, and durability (e.g., ‘the airport’ and its specific gendered and racialized divisions and hierarchies of labor or valuation practices). Think of these not so much as fixed places, structures, or norms but, rather, as assemblages of action that have solidified into recognizable form, trajectories of practice with strong but not invincible momentum. Relevant formations may exceed the immediate and apparent bounds of the expertise network in question, as when airline pilots imitated ship captains to elevate their knowledge. Analysts are thus advised to follow the chain of influence where it leads.

• 3 Flows: What are the influential inhabitations of this difference economy? ‘Flows’ are currents of activity in motion, or in the moment-to-moment of occurrence—the eventfulness or happening of difference making a difference. This includes how ‘figures’ and ‘formations’ circulate, travel, and make contact, as well as concrete instances of this movement (e.g., performances of ‘tech bro’ culture, or occurrences of sexist, racist, or heteronormative valuation practices). The quality and texture of flows merit close study too, for they are not necessarily constant but may take on different forms and rhythms—pulses, waves, and surges; ebb and flow, coming and going, or bumping up against. Libidinal flows belong here too, like swells of anger, entitlement, fear, relief, and desire (like the routine pacification of airline passengers, or the long cultural romance with pilots) that contribute to the production of expertise.

Mobilizing alliteration, we might call this analytical guide the ‘3 F’s’ (again, see Ashcraft and Simonson 2016). I offer it here as a tangible and generative example, only one approach by which economies of difference might be studied. One advantage of this framework, especially for communication scholars, is its compatibility with both SE’s orientation to ANT and emerging sociomaterial conceptions of communication, such as those born of relationality and new materialist thinking (see Kuhn and Rennstam 2016; Kuhn, Ashcraft and Cooren 2017).

Whatever the approach, the proposed new element—economies of difference—is indispensable if we are to realize SE’s potential to be ‘inclusive of all who can make viable claims to expertise’ (Eyal 2013: 898). Otherwise, the stubborn scholarly habit of face value will continue to block the way. Therein lies our continuing susceptibility to the ‘great man’, even after he is dissolved into networks of distributed agency.

This paper makes a normative-ethical appeal to finally and fully part ways with him, then hatches a plan to let him go. What awaits are the chains of transcription by which his specter fades into memory.

CONCLUSION

Long ago, stacks of research proved the point. Bypassing the economies of difference that produce face value, we become participants in them, albeit unawares. It is past time to acknowledge, investigate, and challenge the contributions of difference to the production of expertise. First and foremost, this paper (1) argues that the turn to expertise must confront this ghost of professions past if it is to reach its considerable potential and (2) charts a path toward doing so. The specific potential that occupies me here is the development of a fundamentally communicative (and, more specifically, performative and sociomaterial) model of real expertise, which promises to be more humble and democratic than the sociology of professions. My not-so-subtle goal is to make it more feminist too.

Toward that aim, I let go of the minor turf war George Cheney and I imagined in 2007. This time, I say we get to know the professional by avoiding disciplinary jurisdiction battles and, instead, confronting a ghost that haunts the spaces between fields. This is how I envision the inquiry into economies of difference: as a playground for building better expertise on expertise, where disciplines meet to face up to face value. Now let’s see if that withstands trial.

REFERENCES