We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Chapter 6 analyses narrative representations of local women, who feature throughout UN mediation texts as ‘the women’. This subject position is multifaceted and articulated differently according to different logics of UN mediation. Especially within the logic of UN mediation as a science, ‘the women’ are expected to play a legitimating, information-providing role to support the UN. This is an extractive, rather than an empowering, relationship. UN narratives position ‘the women’s’ labour as central to mediation effectiveness, but they also question their abilities and authenticity as representatives of their communities. Capacity-building training is one method that the UN, and particularly gender advisors, use to discipline women into appropriate forms of participation. The logic of UN mediation as an art has less use for 'the women' in its narratives and instead questions whether they are 'political enough' to be appropriate representatives in negotiations. In turn, local women resist and navigate the subject position of ‘the women’ through strategic essentialism, critique, or opting out.
Chapter 4 examines how the logic of UN mediation as a science produces and disseminates technical knowledge. It focuses on the practices of conflict analysis and the circulation of ‘best practices’ in implementing the WPS Agenda in Syria and Yemen. The beginning sections argue that conflict analysis produces instrumental knowledge about conflict by fixing actors and issues in a schema that is legible to interveners. It emerges from colonial schemes of knowledge production that diagnose the local sphere as lacking in capacity. As such, ‘gender-sensitive conflict analysis’ – a common tool for implementing the WPS Agenda in UN mediation – is subject to many of the same problems. The remainder of the chapter analyses the UN's institutional learning practices, arguing that its ‘best practice’ case studies of WPS in mediation depoliticise knowledge about gender, position the UN as the protagonist of women’s participation by erasing its own resistance to WPS, and diminish local women’s agency. Crucially, these best practice cases also elide ‘participation’ with ‘consultation’, undermining the WPS Agenda’s call for the meaningful participation of local women in UN mediation.
Chapter 3 explores narrative struggles over defining UN mediation. It examines the discursive production of UN mediation as an institution, from its beginning as a series of ad hoc diplomatic engagements, to its institutionalisation in the 2000s. The chapter shows how we can observe over time the increasingly dominant construction of conflict as a technical rather than political challenge. The chapter traces these struggles by contrasting two key documents on the UN’s role in peace and security that appeared in 1992: UN Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali’s 'Agenda for Peace' and the UN Office of Legal Affairs' 'Handbook on the Peaceful Settlement of Disputes between States'. The differences between these documents illustrate the development of competing logics of UN mediation: that of mediation as an art, and that which sees it as a science. The chapter compares and contrasts the narrative features of these institutional logics, and discusses how they rely upon gendered-colonial assumptions about the nature of politics, violence, and agency that shape the incorporation of the WPS Agenda.
Rather than leading to the emergence of a problem, some processes contribute to limiting their scope and impeding agenda-setting. These “nonproblems” are situations that could have led to social mobilizations or public intervention but end up neither being publicized nor subject to strong policy. We use occupational health in France to illustrate these mechanisms. The social invisibility of work-related ill-health is linked to the joint contribution of two processes. Firstly, from the perspective of research on ignorance and undone science, scientific knowledge is under-developed compared to other public health issues. And even available knowledge is rarely used by policy-makers. Secondly, policies use underestimated numbers from the occupational diseases compensation system. This specific configuration of knowledge/ignorance and official counting plays a central role in the production of occupational health issues as a nonproblem. Their invisibility contributes to the production of inertia and public inaction that characterize public policy in this field.
This chapter examines how language policies are constructed, focussing most attention on more institutional policies, particularly those created by governments. I discuss the often-peripheral place of language policy on the political agenda, focussing on the practical implications of this for how policies are made. Issues around the writing and ownership of policy texts are also examined, with the case study drawing on data from a detailed historical ethnographic study of policy construction in Slovenia, tracing the trajectory of a language policy text from inception to formal endorsement.
The growing interest in Conversation Analysis (CA) from the wider academic world, and the use of CA in contexts beyond academia, is largely due to the effective communication of CA findings. This chapter focuses on how to effectively communicate CA findings to non-CA professionals, such as healthcare professionals, academics, teachers, the police, politicians, and beyond. When training professionals in CA findings, careful considerations need to be made to make our findings welcome, whilst at the same time preserving the detail and nuances of human interaction. Decisions about the selection and length of representative extracts, together with decisions about the central messages being conveyed, require careful consideration. Challenges and tensions can arise when making these decisions including, managing the issue of (a) the professionals’ expertise, (b) avoiding negative self- and other evaluations, (c) how to present the data without getting lost in the detail; and (d) addressing concerns about generalizability and quantification. This chapter will address these possible tensions and offer guidance and practical solutions regarding the decisions that are made to effectively train non-CA professionals.
The context of humanitarian action has changed considerably over the past twenty years. These upheavals have given rise to a need to reflect on humanitarian action, as evidenced by the new focus on scientific research by humanitarian actors since the turn of the century. This new approach has led to the creation of numerous organizations dedicated to research within the sector itself, so that scientific knowledge on humanitarian action is no longer produced solely by university researchers. One such organization is the French Red Cross Foundation, founded in 2013. This organization bears witness to the diversity and depth of the issues affecting the humanitarian sector, and the challenges of responding to them. Its history and its past and present difficulties and successes also illustrate the complexity of implementing such a response.
This article aims to analyze and capitalize on several examples of scientific programmes built in direct relation to the humanitarian sector, in order to draw lessons from them (success factors, difficulties encountered, testimonials of applications of research results). In the article, we provide retrospective information on collaboration between the humanitarian and social action sectors and the academic sector, and look to the future by anticipating the shortcomings and needs that organizations – like researchers – will have to address in order to nurture the solidarity practices of tomorrow.
This chapter delves into the concept of legitimacy and introduces the readers to key debates on regulatory legitimacy. The concept of legitimacy has been extensively studied by scholars from various academic disciplines, including political theory, legal theory, political science, sociology and management studies. The resulting body of scholarship has, however, tended to remain in disciplinary siloes, making the study of legitimacy difficult to navigate. Chapter 11 offers first an exploration of different legitimacy claims that justify why individuals recognize an authority and its rules as legitimate. The chapter then moves to regulatory legitimacy.
Vernacular discourse about science reveals theorizations of it as a power-laden, morally charged experimentation with the world guided by (often implicit) ethical orientations. Applying these vernacular theorizations to interpret professional class science on the continent, the author argues that this science has been shaped most profoundly by the politics of independence. While indigenous projects, European imperialism, and neoliberalism shape scientific institutions, African independence continues to inform the moral and political ends toward which science is thought to work. Understanding the alignment of professional class science with nation-building can help guide the recalibration of science toward the goal of substantive independence.
Coroners have a wide discretion in the calling of witnesses, including expert witnesses. This chapter looks briefly at the role of experts in the coroner’s court, admissibility of expert evidence and some factors that experts consider when writing a report.
This article re-examines the traditional account of administrative decision-making under wide conferrals of statutory power. The received wisdom in such cases is that public officials exercise “discretion”, usually defined as freedom of choice. Based on a doctrinal study of the English planning system and related case law, this paper contends that the notion of discretion as choice obscures one of the defining characteristics of modern government. That is, the making of public decisions tackling practical problems with intelligent and expert judgement under legal standards set out in legislation and further developed by the courts. More widely, the paper discusses the foundational role of tacit knowledge and decision-making expertise in public administration.
In this article, I critically examine the ‘Cyber Kill Chain’, a methodological framework for thought and action that shapes both contemporary cybersecurity practice and the discursive construction of security threats. The history and epistemology of the Cyber Kill Chain provide unique insight into the practice of contemporary cybersecurity, insofar as the Kill Chain provides cybersecurity practitioners with predetermined categories and indicators of threat that shape how threats are conceptualised and understood by defenders and suggests actions to secure against them. Locating the origins of the kill chain concept in US military operational logics, its transformation through the anticipatory inquiries of intelligence, and its automation in computational networks, this article argues that the Cyber Kill Chain is emblematic of a vigilant socio-technical logic of security, where human perception, technical sensing, and automation all respond to and co-produce the (in)security through which political security concerns are articulated. This practice makes politics; it excludes, includes, and shapes what is perceived to be dangerous and not, directly impacting the security constructed. Through a critical reading of the Cyber Kill Chain, this article provides insight into cybersecurity practitioners’ epistemic practice and as such contributes to discussions of cybersecurity expertise, threat construction, and the way in which cybersecurity is understood and practised as a global security concern.
I offer two interpretations of independence between experts: (i) independence as deciding autonomously, and (ii) independence as having different perspectives. I argue that when experts are grouped together, independence of both kinds is valuable for the same reason: they reduce the likelihood of erroneous consensus by enabling a greater variety of critical viewpoints. In offering this argument, I show that a purported proof from Finnur Dellsén that groups of more autonomous experts are more reliable does not work. It relies on a flawed ceteris paribus assumption, as well as a false equivalence between autonomy and probabilistic independence. A purely formal proof that more autonomous experts are more reliable is in fact not possible – substantive claims about how more autonomous groups reason are required. My alternative argument for the value of autonomy between experts rests on the claim that groups that triangulate a greater range of critical viewpoints will be less likely to accept hypotheses in error. As well as clarifying what makes autonomy between experts valuable, this mechanism of critical triangulation, gives us reason to value groups of experts that cover a wide range of relevant skills and knowledge. This justifies my second interpretation of expert independence.
Over the past several decades, American society has experienced fundamental changes – from shifting relations between social groups and evolving language and behavior norms to the increasing value of a college degree. These transformations have polarized the nation's political climate and ignited a perpetual culture war. In a sequel to their award-winning collaboration Asymmetric Politics, Grossmann and Hopkins draw on an extensive variety of evidence to explore how these changes have affected both major parties. They show that the Democrats have become the home of highly-educated citizens with progressive social views who prefer credentialed experts to make policy decisions, while Republicans have become the populist champions of white voters without college degrees who increasingly distrust teachers, scientists, journalists, universities, non-profit organizations, and even corporations. The result of this new “diploma divide” between the parties is an increasingly complex world in which everything is about politics – and politics is about everything.
Democrats prize experts in staffing the Executive Branch while Republicans prefer political operatives and media spokespersons. But across the issue spectrum, policies are increasingly complicated and technical, requiring knowledge of many previous rounds of institution-building and policymaking. New social problems require remixing of complex policy tools, often led by research and experts. Addressing climate change and public health, for example, requires professionalized expert workforces and technical analyses. Even seemingly value-based areas of policymaking such as economic development and racial discrimination increasingly require subject-matter experts and formalized training. And the issue of higher education itself has increasingly divided the parties. Chapter 6 documents how each policy area is increasingly dominated by complex proposals from liberals accompanied by conservative suspicion of expert-led governance. Policy knowledge and evaluation capacity have become increasingly tethered to the Democratic Party, with believably nonpartisan expertise now in short supply.
No-one can predict the future with accuracy. Yet doctors in all disciplines are required to make projections about the future and doctors are held to a level of expertise when exercising professional judgement within their scope of practice. The acquisition of expertise requires a knowledge of what expertise is in itself. Diagnosis is such a skill, demonstrating that unstructured professional judgement seldom exists in the absence of semi-structured or structured approaches to expert judgement. Risk has been taken as a paradigm for structured professional judgement. A thorough understanding of the nature of expertise in psychiatry and in the courts is necessary for the practice of forensic psychiatry. The process of both teaching and acquiring clinical expertise is considered both from first principles and in relation to topics such as the use of structured professional judgement instruments and judgement support frameworks. These extend to all aspects of practice including triage and needs assessment, leave, conditional discharge, treatment programme completion, forensic recovery, a range of functional mental capacities, legal defences and reliability.
The aims of this chapter are firstly to help trainees refine forensic assessments of offender patients so they can give advice to courts in determining an offender’s legal responsibility for a criminal act. Secondly, the chapter aims to help illuminate the motivation for violent offending and the pathways to violence. This is not only necessary for giving expert evidence in courts but is also essential in choosing the treatment that should be offered to a patient and the level of security required in which to deliver treatment. In some cases it may be relevant to the likelihood of a successful response to treatment. Thirdly, associations between criminal behaviour and mental disorder may be highly important in the assessment of risk of future offending. Finally, and most importantly, a good forensic assessment should concentrate on the future management and prevention of further violence. Although forensic psychiatrists should be experts in the assessment of violence among people with mental disorder, it is essential to develop expertise with those who have no evidence of mental disorder. Paradoxically, these cases are often the most challenging to understand and evaluate.
This chapter addresses how cognitive flexibility enables an individual to respond adaptively to new situations and respond appropriately to any situation. Interrupting automaticity avoids being trapped in mindsets that foreclose generating new options; avoiding reductive bias reduces the tendency to oversimplify and turn dynamic processes into fixed objects and make complex interactions linear; avoiding functional fixedness reduces the tendency to apply the same solution to different situations; and cognitive connectivity opens up to new approaches in which mental models can be transformed, schemata reorganized, and cognitive bridges built between previous expertise and new situations. This kind of cognitive flexibility enables individuals to respond and adapt to the new situation into which they are moving. This is discussed in light of the retrospective interviews with twenty-four elite performers in three domains (business, sports, and music) who successfully and repeatedly transitioned to higher positions within their field.
This chapter presents a brief theoretical overview of intelligence, cognition, and expertise and their theoretical basis for use in the subsequent chapters. It introduces the main models of intelligence including trait and factorial models, the triarchic mind, and multiple intelligence theories. It then reviews the approach of cognitive psychology based upon early computer modelling of human cognition, schemas and frames, production systems, and episodic and semantic memory. Finally, it reviews expert systems, expert knowledge acquisition and retrieval, practice, transfer of skill, flexibility of knowledge retrieval, and how all of these factors influence the ability of an individual to make transitions in their careers.
This chapter presents an overview of the book and positions it in the context of the development of expertise and the pursuit of excellence. It presents the historical context of the development of expertise and the theoretical context of the study of expertise.