Expertise and Professional Standards

Abstract

Although professional expertise is generally considered to be a key attribute of any profession, little analysis of it has been directly undertaken. Using a model that distinguishes the kinds of uncertainty faced by the profession from those faced by individual practitioners, this study suggests how uncertainty is absorbed through professionalization and managed by practitioners through the use of professional standards. Examination of this use reveals the professional contradictions in expertise between individual virtualities and collective science; the dilemmas that standards produce by permitting the democratization of expertise yet enabling the proletarianization of professionals; and how standards may be used by outsiders to analyze and evaluate directly a profession's expertise, thereby facilitating a measure of societal control over seemingly autonomously generated knowledge.