Introduction

Experts are at the heart of any fact-cultivating enterprise. … Today, though, something has shifted: the once-stable framework of facts and reliable knowledge that has supported our liberal democracies is showing signs of fracture (Daniels 2021: 137 – 140).

Because the experts fill a genuine need for order in the chaotic whirl of high-tech, high-speed living, some of us remain stunningly blind to their pervasive, invasive, encroachment on the prerogatives of our private lives, as well as to the possibility that something besides pure benevolence motivates their actions (Chafetz 1995: xiv).

In this book we tell the story of the decay of institutionalized trust as the lodestone of expert authority. We also highlight the legitimacy struggles engaged in by various expert groups to revivify the latter through strategies which do not follow the orthodox ‘professionalization playbook’ in which a combination of formal credentialism and jurisdictional regulation are the dominant elements.

Instead of striving to restore the orthodox or received ‘rational/deferential’ model of expert authority, we focus on the emergence of a ‘reflexive/deliberative’ model which is much more open, inclusive and collaborative than the former. However, we do not underestimate how difficult it will be to make the ‘reflexive/deliberative’ model a reality in a socio-historical context where economic dislocation, ideological polarization and political fragmentation have cumulatively challenged and threatened expert authority in manifold ways. Insofar as contestation lies at the organizational core of the ‘reflexive/deliberative’ model, then so will its inherent instability, fragility and complexity. Nevertheless, we suggest that a much more open, dynamic and flexible model of expert authority and governance is required if the latter is to retain the ‘adaptable resilience’ needed in a world of high risks, high stakes decision-making where established conventions and predictions are scarce.

Although they are separated by more than two and a half decades, the quotes from Daniels (2021) and Chafetz (1995) which head-up this introductory chapter illustrate how far we have travelled, ideologically, politically and culturally from the ‘high water mark’ of established expert authority and all its core presumptions in favour of the latter as an institutional articulation of disinterested objectivity in liberal democracies. Chafetz’s polemic against expert authority and its curtailment of individual liberty and weakening of collective resolve was published 26 years before Daniels’ encomium for higher education as the primary institutional home of the objective expert knowledge fundamental to liberal democracy. However, he anticipates much of the excoriating critique of ‘experts’ which is to follow in the succeeding decades. Indeed, the very fact that Daniels feels the need to restate the case for universities as the cultivators and curators of the objective expert knowledge required to sustain, practically and ethically, liberal democracy shows how serious the corrosive impact of more than two decades of neoliberal and populist critique has become by the third decade of the twenty-first century!

This book traces this transition from a rational/deferential conception of expert authority which rarely feels the need to justify itself – apart from the rare occasions on which it fails to live-up to its own exacting standards – to a reflexive/deliberative model in which the demand to respond to challenges and threats to its legitimacy are ever-present. It begins by scrutinising the established model of ‘professional authority’ as the overarching theoretical template for understanding all forms of expertise-based legitimacy conceptually grounded in a Neo-Weberian analysis of institutionalized domination structures. This is followed by three interlinked chapters in which escalating attacks on the institutionalized trust relations which underpin the rational/deferential model are documented and evaluated within three overlapping but distinctive analytical narratives. The latter, in different ways and to different degrees, chart the fracturing of the core social, political and economic foundations on which the latter depended for its legitimacy and stability.

Chapter 5 focuses on the Covid-19 pandemic and the opportunities which it offers to expert groups to revivify their authority and status by providing the highly specialized knowledge and technical interventions whereby the extreme risks and uncertainties presented by a global disease and its highly disruptive impact on ‘normal life’ can be contained and mitigated. It also highlights the ‘double-edged’ nature of the opportunities which the pandemic offers in the ‘clear and present danger’ that it entails to public trust in expert authority as experts find themselves drawn increasingly into a political decision-making process in which their independence and autonomy is compromised, if not tainted, by closer association with political power. They may have no choice but ‘to sup with the devil’ as they become more intimately involved in high-risk mitigation and public order management, but their need for a ‘long spoon’ becomes more evident as the boundaries between ‘expert authority’ and ‘political authority’ are inevitably weakened and narrowed.

In the following chapter we identify the nature and significance of the emergence of a ‘reflexive mode of expert authority and governance’ which departs, in several crucial respects, from the institutional logic and organizational practice on which the orthodox ‘rational/deferential model’ outlined in chapter two rested. We see this development, with all its complexities and uncertainties, as a cumulative collective response to the mounting failings and limitations of the established model. These have become more evident over the preceding decades-long critique of the latter’s pivotal assumptions concerning the inherent stability of liberal representative democracy and the unbreachable disinterested objectivity of scientific knowledge. Both presuppositions played a key role in intellectually buttressing and practically legitimating the rational/deferential model of expert authority. However, they have become subject to an intensity and scale of critique that putatively undermines their veracity and sustainability.

Reflexive expert authority and governance is presented as a more realistic and resilient model better suited to the endemic uncertainties and instabilities of political, economic and cultural life in twenty-first century societies. Yet, we cannot deny that it is also characterized by levels of contestation and tension which make it much more tendentious and unpredictable as to its functioning and the outcomes it produces. But we also contend that it is a necessary precondition for a more responsible form of expert authority and governance to re-emerge and regain the public trust on which its continued existence and effectiveness crucially depends.

The final two chapters of this book look more towards the future as they reflect on the kind of challenges which experts are likely to encounter as the twenty-first century unfolds and the need for a ‘new social contract’ in which that future can be potentially secured. If, as seems very likely, experts will inhabit a twenty-first century expert ecology in which negotiated conventions, understandings and improvisations, as much, if not more, than formalized rules, regulations and accreditations lie at the core of expert practice, then their reliance on their tacit interpretive judgements – mediated through reliable and relevant accumulated knowledge within and across their specialist fields – will inevitably increase over time. Of course, emerging digital technologies and new expert systems yet to be developed will also play an increasingly important role in supporting expert decision-taking. Yet the need for interpretive judgement based on tacit knowledge and ‘synthetic flexibility’ across a range of specialist domains is unlikely to disappear in a world where high stakes, high risk decision contexts will proliferate. Indeed, all the evidence suggests that reflexively negotiated expert interpretations and judgements are likely to become even more critical in situations where formalized rules and regulations cannot keep pace with the complexities and uncertainties of the high stakes, high risks decision-making contexts in which increasing numbers of experts will work in mid-twenty-first century societies.

During these final two chapters we also revisit theories of ‘reflexive modernization’ developed by analysts such as Giddens and Beck, but in much changed socio-historical circumstances from those in which they advanced their ideas at the end of the twentieth century when underlying optimism about the long-term trajectory and impact of globalization was at its zenith. In the three decades or so which have followed this ‘Whig-like optimism’ about the necessarily progressive dynamic inherent in the process of globalization has been severely dented, some would say decimated, by a succession of economic, political, medical and military crises that have undermined the epistemological assumptions and structural conditions on which the former depended for its intellectual authority and governmental legitimacy. We are living through much more dangerous and uncertain times in which the combined threats of global economic recession, political polarization, military conflict,...