Universities and the public recognition of expertise

Expertise and Collaboration: Cultural Workers’ Performance on Social Media

“…peer-to-peer "lay thinking" as facilitated by the internet) is widespread' (Wilson, 2010, p.372). Arnoldi (2007) defines expertise as 'the product of a symbolic attribution of status and authority, changing over time ' (p. 50). Schudson (2006) describes an expert as 'someone in possession of specialized knowledge that is accepted by the wider society as legitimate ' (p. 499).…”

“…This questioning of the legitimacy of expertise is discussed by Ulrich Beck (1992) in Risk Society, where public trust in experts was undermined during the 1980s and early 1990s by not only mistakes and inaccuracies, but also the incorrect perception of the public by experts as 'engineering students in their first semester ' (p. 59). This led to less public trust in experts, and increased mass media exposure by experts has been argued to contribute to a de-legitimisation of expertise overall (Beck, 1998;Luhmann, 2000;Arnoldi, 2007). What about the legitimacy of expertise performed in more contemporary contexts on social media?…”

Los medios de comunicación como recurso para formar en competencias en el área de la Economía Financiera

“…Centrándonos en el contexto académico, y tal y como asevera Arnoldi (2007), estos medios de comunicación también han sido notablemente influyentes en nuestros estudiantes a la hora de transmitir la información y lo que es más relevante, la transmisión del conocimiento.…”

Knowledge Limited: Public communication, risk and university media policy

“…In a 'risk society', institutions are ever more aware of self-manufactured risk (Beck 1992), a reflexivity that according to Latour 'means that the unintended consequences of actions reverberate throughout the whole of society in such a way that they become intractable ' (2003, 36). Risk management practices, then, 'embody the fundamentally contradictory nature of organisational and political life', whereby myths of organizational control and manageability are challenged by consistent scandals, failures and disasters that suggest not only a world out of control but also a world 'where failure may be endemic, and in which the organisational interdependencies are so intricate that no single locus of control has a grasp of them' (Power 2004, 10).…”

“…Two broad types of risk have underpinned Australian universities' recent strategies to manage academic -media relations: that associated with organizational reputation, and risk associated with the legitimacy and legitimization of knowledge and expertise. These categories of risk have become hallmarks of contemporary socio-cultural experience (Beck 1992;Beck, Giddens, and Lash 1986;Ericson and Haggerty 1997) involving a persistent consideration of 'counterfactual possibilities' applied to wide areas of institutional, social and individual life (Giddens 1991, 29). Giddens has more recently expressed the ubiquity or embeddedness of risk: the 'notion of risk becomes inseparable from how we talk about ourselves and think about ourselves, even if we don't know we are necessarily thinking about ourselves in terms of risk' (Giddens 2005).…”