Professional ICT Knowledge, Epistemic Standards, and Social Epistemology

Abstract

Several co-evolving trends have impacted expectations of professional workers’ quality of knowledge. The abundance of information shared through the Internet, the ever-increasing specialization of tasks, the possibility of immediately accessible information through social networks, the participation of stakeholders in the social web, and the increased requirements for separation of duty in a corporate context have contributed to a situation where the current ‘knowledge worker’ is not expected to have the same level of readily available knowledge as before. This chapter describes this phenomenon in detail with a case study from ICT-expert jobs. It shows that an ICT manager can no longer overlook the work of collaborators, just by virtue of being the smartest employee around. He/she will increasingly rely on organizational procedures and professional standards to assess whether the right people - with the right competencies for the job – are at his/her disposal. After describing the specifics of professional knowledge for ICT experts and the role of social software plays in this, the chapter focuses on the epistemological aspects of ICT expertise. The authors discuss current strands of reliabilistic accounts for knowledge in relation to expertise. They show that besides reliability, it is accuracy that is needed in order to perform as an expert.