Sociology of expertise as public sociology

This paper compares and contrasts three versions of public sociology of expertise to evaluate how they respond to the current crisis of mistrust in experts: 1) Collins and Evans’ proposal for “Studies of Expertise and Experience” in which public sociologists of expertise essentially police the boundaries of public debate; 2) my own “networks of expertise” approach, which was influenced by research on “lay expertise,” and in which the public sociological task is to open up public discourse to those whose contributions were rendered invisible by existing mechanisms of attribution; 3) an emergent approach wherein the public sociologist focuses on the triangulation of relations of trust and mistrust at the access points of expert systems, and seeks to intervene in these relations to increase the possibilities for dialogue. All three approaches suffer from certain limitations and should be considered as complementary rather than alternatives.