The Management of Expertise

The spread of information technology and the globalisation of market forces have a paradoxical effect on knowledge-work and expertise. The expert groups who embody these competences are increasingly vital to competitiveness and innovation. Yet, for that very reason, they have also become a critical target of management discipline and control. With the traditional ivory-tower habitats of professionalism under attack, the battle-lines between managers and expert groups stretch across a wide swathe of the public and private sectors of the economy. This book addresses this clashing of business and professional values, and also the underlying shifts in knowledge-production which have made expertise, not professionalism, the defining problem and solution of the current era.