ABSTRACT

The volume and content of knowledge in modern societies are changing very rapidly. Worlds are continually dying out, as others are created anew. Rapid changes promise novelty, but they also provoke fears; and at the same time they offer the opportunity to transform knowledge into social action by creating new and different worlds. How this occurs, through whose agency, and why knowledge gains legitimacy, reputation and infl uence in the process – all this remains for the most part obscure. In a knowledge society, it therefore seems paradoxical ‘how much of the communication of knowledge falls to specialized agencies and channels outside any social control or visibility’ (Birnbaum, 1971b: 431). Equally opaque is the question of why the need for knowledge continues to grow, and exactly which ‘function’ is attributed to knowledge as it does so. Hand in hand with the unprecedented increase in the volume of knowledge – to which the larger sites of knowledge production also contribute, such as universities, research organizations, and the research and development

departments of both private and state-owned companies – a new professional group of ‘experts’, advisors and consultants is developing, which is not only growing and gaining in infl uence with equal rapidity, but also proving to be markedly different, both materially and intellectually, from the experts of past societies. One of the essential goals of a study of experts must be to learn more about the methods by which, and the extent to which, the occupations that bear and disseminate knowledge actively mediate between producers of knowledge and its users, and what effects this has upon the knowledge itself. One of the outstanding qualities of advising, but also one that is largely unresearched, is thus the dynamics of constituting and altering knowledge among experts, advisors and consultants. What factors infl uence experts to maintain or to change their opinions? Are there general patterns to be found here? What repercussions does the utilization of expert knowledge have upon the professions that bear and disseminate knowledge?