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Using Collins and Evans' (2002) concept of interactional expertise, this article examines the online activities of three bloggers diagnosed with bipolar disorder. It argues that by combining medical knowledge with their situated experiences, and by utilizing the affordances of blogs, these bloggers have become a new type of stakeholder, the online expert mediator. Collins and Evans' concept is extended by taking into consideration the role of the medium through which interactional expertise is displayed and by showing that its bi-directional character is more substantial than they had envisaged. The rise of this new stakeholder category denotes a possible turn from community activism to exceptional entrepreneurial selves. Despite views that the internet would have broad democratizing effects, the findings show that the high standing of online expert mediators is not the result of a subversive use of this medium, but of a dynamic alliance with 'traditional' experts and of a strong media presence.

Organizations hire in-house communication professionals to maximize efficiency in managing information and stakeholder relationships across various internal and external boundaries. The boundary-spanning aspect of in-house communication professionals’ job has the potential to shape their membership negotiation (MN, that is, ongoing communication processes through which individuals develop meanings of their organizational participation) in important ways that differ from the experiences of those who become integrated into a workgroup or domain with a well-defined boundary. Drawing on 30 in-depth interviews with communication professionals employed at public sector organizations, this study explores key characteristics and challenges of their boundary-spanning roles and how they negotiated meanings of their membership as they navigated the challenges. Based on the findings, the authors propose a novel conceptual model of boundary spanners’ MN, future research directions, and pragmatic implications for employers of boundary-spanning members.

As a part of their normative theory of expertise, Harry Collins and Robert Evans proposed that interactional expertise forms the third kind of knowledge, located between formal propositional knowledge and embodied skills. Interactional expertise refers to the capability to grasp the conceptual structure of another’s social world, and it is expressed as the ability to speak fluently the language spoken in that social world. According to their theory, it is a key concept of sociology, because it refers to the understanding and coordination of joint actions between members of different social groups. Collins and Evans have further claimed that minority social group members tend to outpace majority social group members in terms of interactional expertise. Drawing on ethnomethodology, we detail the ways in which interactional expertise is displayed and revealed in experiments. This allowed us to specify the underlying reasons for the distribution of interactional expertise between social groups. Our results indicate that the difference between the groups depends on whether a group is either actively maintained or a passive latent category, because interactional expertise provides for not only the crossing of social boundaries but also their maintenance. The minority social group members’ greater interactional expertise or competence is therefore proven to be illusory.

This thesis focuses on The Imitation Game, a relatively new research method used in social sciences, which records qualitative and quantitative data. Derived from the “Turing test”, the technique consists of conducting experiments between the members of specific social groups with different characteristics and life experiences, such as blind and sighted, parents and non-parents, or sociologists and computer scientists. A sample from each group is invited to interact using software specifically designed for the method. The principal aim of this PhD thesis was to create a new version of the software with three objectives in mind: making the game more entertaining, improving the data reliability, and facilitating the organisation of experiments. A mobile version of the software, The Imitation Game 2.0, was created using Node.js and WebSocket technologies to attain these objectives.

This chapter shows that the Internet does not always favor the powerful, but this still does not mean that it is democratizing. It traces the online activities of two bloggers diagnosed with bipolar disorder using the concept of interactional expertise (Collins & Evans, 2002). I argue that by combining medical knowledge with their situated experiences and the affordances of blogs, these bloggers have become a new type of stakeholder, “online expert mediators.” The notion of interactional expertise is extended by illustrating the relevance of the medium through which interactional expertise is performed and by showing that it has a substantial bi-directional character.

Philosophers of science are increasingly arguing for and addressing the need to do work that is socially and scientifically engaged. However, we currently lack well-developed frameworks for thinking about how we should engage other expert communities and what the epistemic benefits are of doing so. In this paper, I draw on Collins and Evans' concept of ‘interactional expertise’ – the ability to speak the language of a discipline in the absence of an ability to practice – to consider the epistemic benefits that can arise when philosophers engage scientific communities. As Collins and Evans argue, becoming an interactional expert requires that one ‘hang out’ with members of the relevant expert community in order to learn crucial tacit knowledge needed to speak the language. Building on this work, I argue that acquiring interactional expertise not only leads to linguistic fluency, but it also confers several ‘socio-epistemic’ benefits such as the opportunity to cultivate trust with scientific communities. These benefits can improve philosophical work and facilitate the broader uptake of philosophers' ideas, enabling philosophers to meet a variety of epistemic goals. As a result, having at least some philosophers of science acquire interactional expertise via engagement will likely enhance the diversity of epistemic capacities for philosophy of science as a whole. For some philosophers of science, moreover, the socio-epistemic benefits identified here may be more important than the ability to speak the language of a discipline, suggesting the need for a broader analysis of interactional expertise, which this paper also advances.

This chapter discusses how both the biological and interactional expertise conception make cognitive sense. It argues that the concept of interactional expertise is particularly interesting with respect to meta-cognitive abilities and so-called executive functions, and that the employment of interactional expertise abilities may be an essential primer of abstract thought both at the ontogenetic and phylogenetic levels.

Collins and Evans have proposed a ‘normative theory of expertise’ as a way to solve the ‘problem of demarcation’ in public debates involving technical matters. Their argument is that all citizens have the right to participate in the ‘political’ phases of such debates, while only three types of experts should have a voice in the ‘technical’ phases. In this article, Collins and Evans’ typology of expertise – in particular, the idea of ‘interactional expertise’ – is the focus of a detailed empirical, methodological and philosophical analysis. As a result, we reaffirm the difference between practitioners and non-practitioners, contesting the four central claims about interactional expertise – namely, that (1) the idea of interactional expertise has been proven empirically, (2) it is possible to develop interactional expertise through ‘linguistic socialization alone’, (3) the idea of interactional expertise supports the ‘the minimal embodiment thesis’ that the individual human body or, more broadly, ‘embodiment’ is not as relevant as linguistic socialization for acquiring a language and (4) interactional experts have the same linguistic fluency, understanding and judgemental abilities of practitioners within discursive settings. Instead, we argue, individuals’ abilities and understandings vary according to the ‘type of immersion’ they have experienced within a given practice and whether they bring with them another ‘perspective’. Acknowledging these differences helps with demarcation but does not solve the ‘problem of demarcation’. Every experience is perspectival and cannot handle, alone, the intertwined and complex issues found in public debates involving technical matters. The challenge, then, concerns the ways to mediate interactions between actors with distinct perspectives, experiences and abilities.