ABSTRACT
Expertise, according to this stipulation, implies an in-depth mastery of a field of knowledge. "Warranted assertions" can only be made within a "limited field." Lay knowledge, by contrast, is not distinctly specific: It is rather "typical." Schutz went on to propose that lay perspectives can be mapped onto a continuum—which would be closer to our lived realities. In this view, scientific knowledge, however defined, is no longer a privilege of the experts, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to draw a line between lay and expert knowledge. In the health care domain, Mishler's (1984) dichotomy between the voice of medicine and the voice of the lifeworld may account inadequately now for the progressively less asymmetrical distribution of available knowledge in doctor-patient encounters (Atkinson, 1995; Silverman 1987). Given the rapid advancements in information and technology, the lay public has access to more or less the same kind of scientific knowledge that experts have via surfing of Web sites, participation in support groups, and so on. Indeed the rapid advancement of scientific knowledge makes it difficult for individual professionals to claim expert status in any purist form. The limited field that Schutz referred to suggests the near proximity of or overlapping zones of expertise even within the same profession. In the postmodern society, pluralization of expert knowledge is readily acknowledged and this has consequences for professions such as medicine (Williams & Calnan, 1996).
