Fleshing out expertise: The making of creative industries experts in the United Kingdom

Abstract

The place of expertise in modern systems of government continues to be of concern to critical social scientists. Recent years have seen something of a shift away from conceptions of expertise that tended to see it as distant, overly technical and aligned with the needs of the state and capital. Expertise is increasingly recognised as having a more complex relation with the subjects of government than just as a means for shoring up authority, offering them a space for engagement, critique and counter-expertise. This paper argues that focusing on particular experts and their changing roles in governmental assemblages can flesh out one-dimensional conceptions of expertise and provide insights into governmental change. Drawing on a variety of literature, it is argued that expertise can usefully be conceived as; first, a social relation based on one party having access to knowledge which gives them authority over another; second, as distributed across a governmental assemblage in a particular way, with some expert relations being positioned to have more influence, understood here as expert power, across the assemblage; and third, as a matter of strategic engagement on the part of experts located in particular epistemic communities seeking to gain expert power. The potential of this perspective is explored through an analysis of an emergent expert system for the creative industries in the UK where a small community of actors have realigned their practices and cast themselves as creative industries experts. This has allowed then to reshape the governmental assemblage forming around this economic sector in a direction favourable to their own ideas. It is concluded that efforts to convert expertise into greater expert power is a key dynamic transforming governmental assemblages.