The expatriate executive overseas Book

So much of the sociology of scientific knowledge tradition appears as a game of chicken, teetering on the edge of relativism or nihilism, if not actually plunging in. The authors' choice of epigraph--"to everything there is a season . . . a time to break down, and a time to build up," from Ecclesiastes--is an indication that this investigation of expertise represents a stepping back from the brink. It is not vertiginously exciting, crackling with analytical profundity, but it is useful in its sober modesty. It maps out a terrain, and offers a new vocabulary to help distinguish among the many different types of expertise.

I found especially interesting and helpful the notion of "interactional expertise." As a policy consultant I have collaborated for years with chemists, geologists, etc., on water quality issues. I wouldn't be able to run the laboratory equipment, but I can speak and write about the stuff, and sometimes can write it more clearly and cogently than the specialists. Until I read this book I didn't have a word to describe it, but like Harry Collins in his sociological field work, I have acquired a good deal of interactional expertise.