Organization and Expertise: Producing, Stabilizing, and Contesting Knowledge

Expertise plays a central role in contemporary societies across domains such as politics, business, science, and the media. Global challenges like climate change, geopolitical instability, authoritarianism, and technological transformations, including artificial intelligence and digitalization, fuel the demand for specialized, often science-based knowledge. Yet expertise is also contested, often by actors who themselves claim to be authorities.

Sociology has long examined expertise, from the entrenched authority of professions to competing forms of knowledge. Recent research increasingly draws on organizational sociology, making the relationship between organization and expertise a particularly fruitful field of inquiry. The session focuses on how expertise is organized, produced, disseminated, de/stabilized, staged, and contested, both by organizations and within organizations.

Expertise is typically embedded in formal organizations such as governments, universities, research institutes, NGOs, companies, and think tanks. Beyond producing and stabilizing expertise, organizations may also generate, sponsor, or institutionalize forms of counter-expertise. Rather than merely serving as arenas in which expert claims compete, organizations themselves can become active participants in struggles over epistemic authority and the legitimate interpretation of reality. This raises important questions about the organizational conditions under which expertise and counter-expertise emerge, gain legitimacy, and influence public decision-making.

We invite theoretical and empirical contributions addressing the relationship between organization and expertise. Relevant topics include the organization of expertise, expertise within organizations, dynamics of organizational fields of expertise, the production and legitimation of expert knowledge, and changing forms of expert roles, professions, and organizational arrangements in the context of digital transformation.