‘Professionals who understand’: Expertise, public interest and societal risk governance

Abstract

This paper applies ideas from Beck, Power and Collins & Evans to investigate why crises triggered by societal risks heighten tension between self-regulated experts and the state, and why this increased tension threatens professional self-regulation. Using an Irish case of the regulation of professional auditors, we find that Beck helps us to understand the accounting bodies’ view of their own position as experts and their role in mitigating risk. Beck’s idea of a closed organizational roof, Collins and Evans (2002) work on waves of risk and expertise, and Power’s insights on the significance of public perception of risk are deployed as a framework to explore why these bodies lost power to a non-expert state which more clearly grasped the importance of lay power in a time of crisis. We propose the idea of professional regulation as a form of societal risk governance; this provides a frame to investigate why the state was able to harness a growing public disquiet to assert more control in their relationship with the professional bodies, and underscores the precedence of public interest over expertise in the self-regulatory debate. An analysis of the perspectives of government, profession and civil society illustrates inherent vulnerabilities in the authority of a self-regulated professional body excessively reliant on its own expertise.