The Modified Imitation Game: A Method for Measuring Interactional Expertise

The study of the sociology of scientific knowledge distinguishes between contributory and interactional experts. Contributory experts have practical expertise—they can “walk the walk.” Interactional experts have internalized the tacit components of expertise—they can “talk the talk” but are not able to reliably “walk the walk.” Interactional expertise permits effective communication between contributory experts and others (e.g., laypeople), which in turn facilitates working jointly toward shared goals. Interactional expertise is attained through long-term immersion into the expert community in question. To assess interactional expertise, researchers developed the imitation game—a variant of the Turing test—to test whether a person, or a particular group, possesses interactional expertise of another. The imitation game, which has been used mainly in sociology to study the social nature of knowledge, may also be a useful tool for researchers who focus on cognitive aspects of expertise. In this paper, we introduce a modified version of the imitation game and apply it to examine interactional expertise in the context of blindness. Specifically, we examined blind and sighted individuals’ ability to imitate each other in a street-crossing scenario. In Phase I, blind and sighted individuals provided verbal reports of their thought processes associated with crossing a street—once while imitating the other group (i.e., as a pretender) and once responding genuinely (i.e., as a non-pretender). In Phase II, transcriptions of the reports were judged as either genuine or imitated responses by a different set of blind and sighted participants, who also provided the reasoning for their decisions. The judges comprised blind individuals, sighted orientation-and-mobility specialists, and sighted individuals with infrequent socialization with blind individuals. Decision data were analyzed using probit mixed models for signal-detection-theory indices. Reasoning data were analyzed using natural-language-processing (NLP) techniques. The results revealed evidence that interactional expertise (i.e., relevant tacit knowledge) can be acquired by immersion in the group that possesses and produces the expert knowledge. The modified imitation game can be a useful research tool for measuring interactional expertise within a community of practice and evaluating practitioners’ understanding of true experts.

Seeking “skilled, poised, fluent” verbal communicators: Aesthetic labor and signaling in journalism job advertisements

Journalism job advertisements send important signals about valued skills and attributes. How such advertisements articulate journalistic expertise, including interactional expertise, has been studied, but signals about verbal communication usually have been overlooked. Little is known about how journalism employers define the most valued communication skills and the ideal journalistic voice. This signaling theory study explores expectations advertisements convey for how journalists should sound through a thematic analysis of U.S. journalism job listings (n = 510) specifying substantial verbal communication. Requirements for exceptional verbal skills and explicit calls for vocal clarity raise barriers to entry for journalists with speech disabilities or speech anxiety.

Acknowledging Patient Expertise and the Negotiation of Meanings in the Clinical Encounter

Patient non-adherence is a common and important problem in clinical medicine. Some cases of patient non-adherence are cases in which the patient disagrees with the physician’s recommended treatment based on particular reasons. In this chapter, by drawing upon the science and technology studies literature, specifically the discussion by Collins and Evans and also Wynne of how best to understand scientific controversies, I relate their ideas to the analogous conflict that may occur within a clinical encounter. I draw upon their recognition of the importance of contributory expertise and interactional expertise in providing legitimate knowledge. I also draw upon Wynne’s idea of the ‘negotiation of meanings’ as an important element of the clinical interaction. To resolve potential conflicts between patient and physician before they develop into ‘non-adherence’, I propose the need for a new epistemological framework that recognizes legitimate knowledge offered by the patient as well as the physician. By situating this patient expertise framework within the paradigm of person-centred medicine, and by assuming the goal of medical treatment to be treatment of suffering, patient expertise becomes centralized as a means of determining the nature of patient suffering. Two aspects of the patient’s tacit knowledge - the body aspect and the meaning aspect - both of which are context-dependent and directly accessible only to the patient, are thus recognized as knowledge essential to the success of the interaction. The physician’s role becomes that of both medical expert and possessor of interactional expertise, by which the physician recognizes and includes patient expertise in the treatment decision. Finally, the patient expertise framework must also involve recognizing and incorporating the ‘negotiation of meanings’ into the development of a treatment plan. By acknowledging the importance of patient expertise and the negotiation of meanings, this patient expertise framework should dissolve the problem of patient non-adherence that derives from the patient disagreeing with the therapeutic plan.

Fra støttepædagog til ekspert med pædagogisk takt

ResuméKommunerne har siden 1980’erne etableret centrale korps af støttepædagoger. Daginstitutionerne kan søge om særlig støtte fra dette korps til pædagogiske praksis. Støttepædagogernes opgaver har ændret sig fra en kompenserende indsats til det enkelte barn til en indsats, hvor støttepædagogerne hovedsagelig skal yde støtte til pædagogernes udvikling af læringsmiljøet for alle børn i institutionen. Støttepædagogerne oplever det ofte som en følsom udfordring, når de må stille spørgsmål til fagfællers pædagogiske forståelser, antagelser og lokale praksis for at understøtte udvikling af denne. Denne udfordring kalder på en særlig form for støttepædagogisk praksis. Vi anvender begreberne interaktionel ekspertise (Collins & Evans, 2007) og pædagogisk takt (van Manen, 2015) til at forstå og karakterisere den ekspertise og faglighed, der er i spil og på spil, når der skal ydes støtte til udvikling af pædagogisk praksis i dagtilbud. Artiklen er udarbejdet på baggrund af aktionsforskning i forbindelse med et aktionslæringsforløb med støttepædagoger i en større dansk kommune. AbstractFrom assistant preschool teachers to expert with pedagogical tact Since the 1980s, many Danish municipalities have been establishing centralized units of assistant pre-school teachers who provide special assistance for the pedagogical practices of pre-school institutions. The tasks of these assistant pre-school teachers have changed over time: from an originally compensatory effort targeting individual children, to primarily assisting pre-school teachers and the development of the learning environment for all children. In the endeavor of assisting the development of these learning environments, it is often perceived as a sensitive issue, when assistant pre-school teachers question the pedagogical assumptions and local practices of their professional peers. This challenge calls for a special kind of pedagogical practice. In this article, we apply the concepts of interactional expertise (Collins & Evans, 2007) and pedagogical tact (van Manen, 2015) to characterize the expertise and professionalism that is at play and at stake, in the provision of assistance for the development of pedagogical practices in pre-schools institutions. The article has been developed based on action research in connection to an action learning course for assistant pre-schools teachers in a larger Danish municipality.

Norms of Testimony in Broad Interdisciplinarity: The Case of Quantum Mechanics in Critical Theory

While much interdisciplinarity brings together proximate fields, broad interdisciplinarity sees integration between disciplines that are perceived to be non-neighboring. This paper argues that the heterogeneity among disciplines in broad interdisciplinarity calls for stricter epistemic norms of testimony for experts that act as translators between the disciplines than those suggested for intra-scientific testimony. The paper is structured around two case studies: the affective turn in social theorizing and the use of quantum mechanics in critical theory as exemplified by Vicky Kirby’s use of work by Karen Barad. These are argued to be instances of broad interdisciplinary borrowing where few translators have joint expertise in both disciplines. For most, therefore, the engagement with for instance the integration between quantum mechanics and critical theory is possible only by the aid of translators. For those without sufficient interactional expertise, however, the epistemic credentials of the translations they inevitably rely upon are inscrutable. Furthermore, any comparison between translations is challenged since translations are argued to be few due to the cognitive divergence between disciplines in broad interdisciplinarity. Consequently, the epistemic integrity of broad interdisciplinarity can only be secured through additional norms of testimony for translators. The paper proposes that (a) all translator’s testimony in broad interdisciplinarity must aim to be neutral with respect to disputed issues within the relevant disciplines and (b) any deviation from (a) must be clearly highlighted.

Expert saying and doing in dealing with domestic violence: reflections on a case of legal aid in an antiviolence center

PurposeThis article sheds light on the legal services offered by antiviolence centers through a discursive practice-based analysis of women who have experienced domestic violence and the lawyers who volunteer in the center.Design/methodology/approachUsing a practice-based framework, the article utilizes a case study of the first legal meeting between a lawyer and a woman who has experienced violence. The case study illustrates how the legal advisors' expertise is deployed in the use of “discursive practices” in dealing with women who have experienced domestic violence. Through a systematic analysis of the verbatim narrative, the case shows how the lawyer performs her legal help through expert “discursive practices” which are situated in recognition of the texture of practices experienced by women in the legal system.FindingsThe case study shows how a practice-based approach is able to account for lawyers' discursive and interactional knowledge in dealing with domestic violence. This expert doing and saying includes the ability to read the complexities of abusive situations, using “professional vision” to identify, highlight and codify clues and patterns of a partners' violent behavior; the mastery of “co-implication” with women to support the development of a narrative of the abuse as a crime recognizable both by the victim and the legal system.Originality/valueThe analysis shows that practice-based approaches to knowing and learning in investigating discourse practices can provide insights on practitioners' interactional expertise as well as the relevance of the service. While a close look at the actual practices illustrates the lawyer's interactional mechanisms, the crucial role of legal aid in the antiviolence center can be appreciated by contextualizing within the texture of practices that characterizes women's experiences with violence.

Online Expert Mediators

Using Collins and Evans’ concept of interactional expertise, this article examines the online activities of three bloggers diagnosed with bipolar disorder. It argues that by combining medical knowledge with their situated experiences, and by utilizing the affordances of blogs, these bloggers have become a new type of stakeholder, the online expert mediator. Collins and Evans’ concept is extended by taking into consideration the role of the medium through which interactional expertise is displayed and by showing that its bi-directional character is more substantial than they had envisaged. The rise of this new stakeholder category denotes a possible turn from community activism to exceptional entrepreneurial selves. Despite views that the internet would have broad democratizing effects, the findings show that the high standing of online expert mediators is not the result of a subversive use of this medium, but of a dynamic alliance with ‘traditional’ experts and of a strong media presence.

Organizational Membership Negotiation of Boundary Spanners: Becoming a Competent Jack of All Trades and Master of . . . Interactional Expertise

Organizations hire in-house communication professionals to maximize efficiency in managing information and stakeholder relationships across various internal and external boundaries. The boundary-spanning aspect of in-house communication professionals’ job has the potential to shape their membership negotiation (MN, that is, ongoing communication processes through which individuals develop meanings of their organizational participation) in important ways that differ from the experiences of those who become integrated into a workgroup or domain with a well-defined boundary. Drawing on 30 in-depth interviews with communication professionals employed at public sector organizations, this study explores key characteristics and challenges of their boundary-spanning roles and how they negotiated meanings of their membership as they navigated the challenges. Based on the findings, the authors propose a novel conceptual model of boundary spanners’ MN, future research directions, and pragmatic implications for employers of boundary-spanning members.