<b>The Candlin Lecture Communicative expertise

The mutation of expertise and expert systems in contemporary professional practice

Authors

  • Srikant Sarangi Aalborg University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/japl.37507

Keywords:

competence, decision-making, expert system, communicative expertise, distributed expertise, intuition, lay expertise, novice, professional expertise

Abstract

In this conceptual paper, I begin with a differentiation between generic 'competence' and professional 'expertise', the latter being manifest at the communicative level. I characterise professional expertise more broadly to include 'communicative expertise' as well as 'distributed expertise'. With regard to decision-making, expertise is no longer seen as an attribute of individuals deriving from scientific knowledge and practical experience. Instead, 'distributed expertise' in its mediated format underpins decisionmaking in many professional and institutional settings. I then extend the notion of 'distributed expertise' as constitutive of 'lay expertise' and 'expert systems'. Access to and use of 'expert systems' in optimal ways inevitably reconfigures the very conditions and consequences of professional expertise. I argue that 'communicative expertise' in professional practice comprises not only knowledge/skill about the mechanics of communication but also the channels through which the other types of knowledge/skill (including scientific, experiential, relational, technological, organisational, legal and ethical) are communicated in real-life settings.

Author Biography

  • Srikant Sarangi, Aalborg University

    Srikant Sarangi is Professor in Humanities and Medicine and Director of the Danish Institute of Humanities and Medicine (DIHM) at Aalborg University, Denmark. Between 1993 and 2013, he was Professor in Language and Communication and Director of the Health Communication Research Centre at Cardiff University (UK), where he continues as Honorary Professor. Other current affiliations include Adjunct Professorship at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway, Visiting Professorship at University of Jyväskylä, Finland and Visiting Professorship at the College of Medicine, Qatar University. In 2012, he was awarded the title of 'Fellow' by the Academy of Social Sciences, UK. His research interests are in institutional/professional discourse studies (e.g., healthcare, social work, bureaucracy, education) and applied linguistics. He is editor of Text & Talk; Communication & Medicine and Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice.

References

Atkinson, P. (1995) Medical Talk and Medical Work. London: Sage.

Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage.

Beck, U. (1995) Ecological Politics in the Age of Risk. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Benner, P. (1984) From Novice to Expert: Excellence and Power in Clinical Nursing Practice. Menlo Park, CA: Addison-Wesley.

Benner, P. and Tanner, C. (1987) Clinical judgment: How expert nurses use intuition. American Journal of Nursing 87 (1): 23–31. https://doi.org/10.2307/3470396

Burke, K. (1935 [1965]) Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose. Indianapolis: Bobs-Merrill.

Candlin, C. N. and Candlin, S. (2002) Editorial: Discourse, expertise and the management of risk in healthcare settings. Research on Language and Social Interaction 35 (2): 115–137. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327973RLSI3502_1

Candlin, S. (2000) New dynamics in the nurse-patient relationship? In S. Sarangi and M. Coulthard (eds) Discourse and Social Life, 230–245. London: Pearson.

Candlin, S. (2002) Taking risks: An indicator of expertise? Research on Language and Social Interaction 35 (2): 173–193. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327973RLSI3502_3

Clancey, W. J. (1997) The conceptual nature of knowledge, situations, and activity. In P. J. Fetovich, K. M. Ford and R. R. Hoffman (eds) Expertise in Context, 247–291. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Dijkstra, J. J., Liebrand, W. B. G. and Timminga, E. (1998) Persuasiveness of expert systems. Behaviour & Information Technology 17 (3): 155–163.

Dreyfus, H. L. and Dreyfus, S. (1986) Mind Over Machine: The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in the Era of the Computer. New York: The Free Press. https://doi.org/10.1080/014492998119526

Fetovich, P. J., Ford, K. M. and Hoffman, R. R. (eds) (1997) Expertise in Context. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Freidson, E. (1970) Profession of Medicine: A Study of the Sociology of Applied Knowledge. New York: Dodd, Mead.

Freidson, E. (2001) Professionalism: The Third Logic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gawande, A. (2009) The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. New York: Henry Holt.

Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Goodman, N. (1978) Ways of World Making. Indianapolis: Hackett.

Goodwin, C. (1994) Professional vision. American Anthropologist 96 (3): 606–633. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1994.96.3.02a00100

Grice, H. P. (1975) Logic and conversation. In P. Cole and J. L. Morgan (eds) Syntax and Semantics, Volume III: Speech Acts, 41–58. New York: Academic Press.

Hart, A. (1986) Knowledge Acquisition for Expert Systems. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Haskell, T. L. (1984) The Authority of Experts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Hodges, B. D. and Lingard, L. (eds) (2012) The Question of Competence: Reconsidering Medical Education in the Twenty-First Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Hymes, D. (1972) On communicative competence. In J. B. Pride and J. Holmes (eds) Sociolinguistics, 277–284. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.

Illich, I. (1977) Disabling professions. In I. Illich, with contributions from I. K. Zola, J. McKnight, J. Caplan and H. Shaiken, Disabling Professions, 11–40. London: Marion Boyars.

Johnson, P. E. (1983) What kind of expert should a system be? Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 8 (1): 77–97. https://doi.org/10.1093/jmp/8.1.77

Kahneman, D. (2011) Thinking Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Kahneman, D. and Klein, G. (2009) Conditions for intuitive expertise: A failure to disagree. American Psychologist 64 (6): 515–526. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0016755

Lincoln, T. L., Essin, D. J. and Ware, W. H. (1993) The electronic medical records: A challenge for computer science to develop clinically and socially relevant computer systems to coordinate the patient care and analysis. Information Society 9 (2): 157–188. https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.1993.9960138

Montgomery, K. (2006) How Doctors Think: Clinical Judgment and the Practice of Medicine. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Moore, A., Candlin, C. N. and Plum, G. A. (2001) Making sense of HIV-related viral load: One expert or two? Culture, Health & Sexuality 3 (4): 429–450. https://doi.org/10.1080/136910501753184150

Noveck, B. S. (2015) Smart Citizens, Smarter State: The Technologies of Expertise and the Future of Governing. Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674915435

O’Hara K. and Shadbolt, N. (1997) Interpreting generic structures: Expert systems, expertise and context. In P. J. Fetovich, K. M. Ford and R. R. Hoffman (eds) Expertise in Context, 449–472. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Parsaye, K. and Chignell, M. (1988) Expert Systems for Experts. New York: John Wiley and Sons.

Polanyi, M. (1958) Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Reiser, S. (1978) Medicine and the Reign of Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Riboni, G. (2017) Between professionalism and amateurship: Makeup discourse on YouYube. Languages Cultures Mediation 4 (1): 117–134. https://doi.org/10.7358/lcm-2017-001-ribo

Ryle, G. (1949) The Concept of Mind. London: Hutchinson & Co.

Sarangi, S. (2010) Healthcare interaction as an expert communicative system: An activity analysis perspective. In J. Streeck (ed.) New Adventures in Language and Interaction, 167–197. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Sarangi, S. (2017) Editorial: Teamwork and team talk as distributed and coordinated action in healthcare delivery. Communication & Medicine 13 (1): 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1558/cam.32569

Sarangi, S. and Gilstad, H. (2014) Midwives’ communicative expertise in obstetric ultrasound encounters. In H. Hamilton and W.-Y. S. Chou (eds) Routledge Handbook of Language and Health Communication, 539–556. London: Routledge.

Schön, D. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic Books.

Schön, D. (1987a) Educating the Reflective Practitioner: Towards a New Design for Teaching and Learning in the Professions. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Schön, D. (1987b) Changing patterns in inquiry in work and living. Journal of the Royal Society of Art Proceedings 135 (5367): 225–231.

Schutz, A. (1964 [1946]) The well-informed citizen: An essay on the social distribution of knowledge. In A. Schutz (author) and A. Brodersen (ed.) Collected Papers, Volume 2: Studies in Social Theory, 120–134. The Hague: Nijhoff.

Sherzer, J. (1987) A discourse-centred approach to language and culture. American Anthropologist 89 (2): 295–309. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1987.89.2.02a00010

Simon, H. A. (1987) Making management decisions: The role of intuition and emotion. Academy of Management Executive 1 (1): 57–64. https://doi.org/10.5465/ame.1987.4275905

Stanovich, K. E. and West, R. F. (2000) Individual differences in reasoning: Implications for the rationality debate. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23 (5): 645–665. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00003435

Stehr, N. (1994) Knowledge Societies. London: Sage.

Sullivan, M. (2003) The new subjective medicine: Taking the patient’s point of view on health care and health. Social Science & Medicine 56 (7): 1595–1604. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0277-9536(02)00159-4

Sutherland, J. (2015) How Good is your Grammar? London: Short Books.

Tolson, A. (2010) A new authenticity? Communicative practices on YouTube. Critical Discourse Studies 7 (4): 277–289. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2010.511834

Tuckett, D., Boulton, M., Olson, C. and Williams, A. (1985) Meetings Between Experts London: Tavistock Publications.

Tversky, A. and Kahneman, D. (1973) Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology 5 (2): 207–232. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(73)90033-9

Walton, D. (1997) Appeal to Expert Opinion: Arguments from Authority. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Watzlawick, P., Beavin, J. H. and Jackson, D. D. (1968) Pragmatics of Human Communica­tion. London: Faber & Faber.

Weaver, R. (1953) The Ethics of Rhetoric. Chicago: H. Regnery.

Woolery, L. (1990) Expert nurses and expert systems. Computers in Nursing 8 (1): 23–28.

Published

2018-12-31

Issue

Section

Special Features

How to Cite

Sarangi, S. (2018). <b>The Candlin Lecture Communicative expertise: The mutation of expertise and expert systems in contemporary professional practice. Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice, 13(1-3), 371-392. https://doi.org/10.1558/japl.37507