Expert Identity Research Articles

The Contrastive Study on Discursive Construction of Identities and the Adaptation in Cosmetic Advertising

Discursive strategies are often used in cosmetic advertisements to construct different discursive identities in order to enter larger markets. Based on the graphic advertisements, the article reveals the dynamic selection and construction of discursive identities and their dynamic adaptation in the foundation advertisements of international brands and national brands. It is found that the cosmetic advertisements employ textual features to construct three discursive identities: one explicit identity for marketing purposes and two implicit identities: friend identity and expert identity. Based on the theories of discursive identity and linguistic adaptation, the article explores the dynamic discursive identities in this kind of advertisement discourse and analyzes the ways to dynamically adapt to the psychological, social and physical worlds of the discourse receivers.

Exploring meanings of expert and expertise in patient engagement activities: A qualitative analysis of a pan-Canadian survey

In this paper, we engage with claims of expert identities within the field of patient engagement. We do so through analysis of a subset of data collected as part of a 2020 pan-Canadian survey of patient partners. Our analysis is based on 446 qualitative responses to one target question: “Do you think the lived experience you bring to your patient partner role makes you an expert? Please explain in the box below”. Most respondents answered “yes” (n = 253 comments), a sizeable minority answered “no” (n = 161 comments) or declined to answer the target question while still providing comments (n = 32 comments). Through a discursive analysis of the comments, we explore the meanings ascribed to concepts of expert, expertise, and experience. Ultimately, we find nuanced and sometimes contradictory understandings. Thus, dilemmas of expertise in the patient engagement field may not be entirely about claims to specialized knowledge. Instead, discourses seem to be mobilized in response to the thorny, political question: “who is authorized to speak on behalf of patients”? To meaningfully advance the conversation within patient engagement research and practice, we argue for more sociological and political understandings of forms of expertise, objects of expertise, and deployments of expert status in different kinds of knowledge spaces.

The Online Identity Construction of the Elderly Women— Take Chinese Discourse Marker “Ah” as an Example

Recently, the registration of the elder user in cyberspace roses repeatedly. More and more old people prefer to realize self-expression through the Internet, among which the elderly woman is the majority. Based on self-constructed corpus, this paper examines the pragmatic functions of the Chinese discourse marker “Ah”, and discusses what kinds of pragmatic identity has been constructed. This paper discovers that, on the one hand, discourse marker “Ah” realizes topic organization function and interpersonal function; on the other hand, “ah” assists the elderly in constructing female identity, expert identity, elder identity and peer identity, and sometimes a compound identity of real and virtual identities so as to narrow the psychological distance with the audience and achieve the communicative purpose.

‘Best of luck on your journey to healing’

In many countries, including Belgium and the Netherlands, dependence on benzodiazepines (BZDs) is a medical and social issue, and, for long-term users who want to taper off, doing so remains a personal challenge. For these users, online contexts such as forums can be a place to discuss this experience and look for practical and moral support among former users and fellow users trying to reduce or stop BZD use. This paper aims to shed light on the discourses of a Dutch-language benzodiazepine withdrawal forum, examining 133 forum threads (41,516 words). We take a corpus-based approach that combines frequency analyses with qualitative discourse analysis. We explore how the users extensively share lived, experiential knowledge of using and reducing medication and, in doing so, engage with domain-specific biomedical jargon. As such they discursively construct specialised expertise and a medical(ised), health professional-like expert identity, both in relation to their own situation, but also in interaction with other forum members, as advisors to each other. The forum thus not only serves as a site for emotional peer support, but also as a site for detailed informational support on tapering, which is traditionally offered by health professionals. This is especially pervasive, as many forum users also express indignation about the medical establishment and its lack of institutional knowledge support in the process of tapering off.

Engaging practitioners as co-researchers in national policy evaluations as resistance to patriarchal constructions of expertise: The case of the end of year three evaluation of the access and inclusion model

Seventeen Practitioner Researchers (PRs) were engaged as co-researchers in an evaluation commissioned by Ireland’s Department of Childhood, Equality, Disability, Integration, and Youth (DCEDIY), as an innovative aspect in methodological design. The evaluation investigated the implementation and impact of Ireland’s award winning policy for the inclusion of children with disabilities in mainstream pre-schools, the Access and Inclusion Model (AIM). As co-researchers in the project, the PRs constructed case studies of pre-schools, and children who were being supported by AIM. In this context, this paper draws on feminist theory to present the rationale for involving PRs as co-researchers in evaluations of high profile national programs like AIM. It also applies thematic analysis to a critical reflection written by one co-researcher (who is also the lead author), in which she writes about her gendered experience of being a PR. Thematic Analysis (TA) is applied to this critical reflection to explore the way in which the PR role may have impacted on her professional identity and agency. Three themes were constructed from the TA which included expertise as a resource for advocacy, personal and professional development, and continual learning and inclusive practice. The findings were interpreted through a feminist lens, and cast light on the way that the PR frames professional potency within more feminine constructions of power related to care, nurture, collaboration, nurturing and enabling. They also demonstrate how, in this particular case, the PR role had a transformative impact on expert identity, and enriched capitals for empowering others. The paper ends with a call for more participative approaches to the evaluation of national policies through the engagement of practitioners as researchers. It is argued that this would result in evaluations that were more attuned to the vernacular of practice, and hence more impactful. It also offers opportunities for professional development whilst symbolizing the validation of practitioner expertise by policy makers in a feminized sector where, low pay and low status have long been issues of concern.

A content analysis of 32 years of Shark Week documentaries.

Despite evidence of their importance to marine ecosystems, at least 32% of all chondrichthyan species are estimated or assessed as threatened with extinction. In addition to the logistical difficulties of effectively conserving wide-ranging marine species, shark conservation is believed to have been hindered in the past by public perceptions of sharks as dangerous to humans. Shark Week is a high-profile, international programming event that has potentially enormous influence on public perceptions of sharks, shark research, shark researchers, and shark conservation. However, Shark Week has received regular criticism for poor factual accuracy, fearmongering, bias, and inaccurate representations of science and scientists. This research analyzes the content and titles of Shark Week episodes across its entire 32 years of programming to determine if there are trends in species covered, research techniques featured, expert identity, conservation messaging, type of programming, and portrayal of sharks. We analyzed titles from 272 episodes (100%) of Shark Week programming and the content of all available (201; 73.9%) episodes. Our data demonstrate that the majority of episodes are not focused on shark bites, although such shows are common and many Shark Week programs frame sharks around fear, risk, and adrenaline. While criticisms of disproportionate attention to particular charismatic species (e.g. great whites, bull sharks, and tiger sharks) are accurate and supported by data, 79 shark species have been featured briefly at least once. Shark Week's depictions of research and of experts are biased towards a small set of (typically visual and expensive) research methodologies and (mostly white, mostly male) experts, including presentation of many white male non-scientists as scientific experts. While sharks are more often portrayed negatively than positively, limited conservation messaging does appear in 53% of episodes analyzed. Results suggest that as a whole, while Shark Week is likely contributing to the collective public perception of sharks as bad, even relatively small alterations to programming decisions could substantially improve the presentation of sharks and shark science and conservation issues.

I share, therefore I know? Sharing online content ‐ even without reading it ‐ inflates subjective knowledge

AbstractBillions of people across the globe use social media to acquire and share information. A large and growing body of research examines how consuming online content affects what people know. The present research investigates a complementary, yet previously unstudied question: how might sharing online content affect what people think they know? Sharing signals expertise, and people frequently internalize their public behavior into their private self‐concepts. We therefore posit that sharing information on social media may cause people to believe they are as knowledgeable as their posts make them appear. We examine this possibility in the context of “sharing without reading,” a phenomenon that allows us to isolate the effect of sharing on subjective knowledge from any influence of reading or objective knowledge. Six studies provide correlational (study 1) and causal (studies 2, 2a) evidence that sharing—even without reading—increases subjective knowledge, and test the internalization mechanism by varying the degree to which sharing publicly commits the sharer to an expert identity (studies 3–5). A seventh study investigates potential consequences of sharing‐inflated subjective knowledge on downstream behavior in the domain of financial decision‐making.

The science nerd as the science expert: Enregistering asociality to achieve disciplinary expertise in high school physics

This linguistic anthropological case study builds on mass-media and school-based ethnographic studies which demonstrate the ways in which the science nerd persona is linked to whiteness and masculinity to demonstrate the consequences for multilingual and female learners. This paper uses ethnographic data to examine how youth construct science expert identities while in science classes and to examine how this identity-work shapes the local register for science expertise and the socialization of multilingual youth. In particular, I examine the role that impolite and socially awkward behaviors play in enabling white and predominately male students to index the science expert identity. I contrast the performances of expertise of white and Latinx students to reveal the ideological tensions and competing valorizations that were at play in the classroom community. However, only one of these competing notions of science expertise – the science nerd as the science expert - was naturalized by the institution through the behaviors of the teacher and other students. I relate the local notions of science expertise in the classroom community to popular culture tropes to demonstrate the larger semiotic pathway that contributes to the enregisterment of science discourse and the socialization of youth in STEM education spaces.

Unpacking the Realities and Complexities of Sensemaking: Government Practitioners' Experiences of Emergency Risk Communication.

During public health emergencies, government practitioners must rapidly make sense of the risk to human health and the emergency risk communication (ERC) options available. These practitioners determine what, how, and when information is communicated to the public. Recurring criticism of ERC indicates that the communication is not meeting the needs of the community. To improve ERC practice, it is therefore critical to understand practitioners' sensemaking in these complex and time-critical settings. This article unpacks the realities and complexities of sensemaking, the process by which practitioners create meaning from the information they receive about an emergency as it unfolds. Qualitative interviews gathered practitioners' lived experiences of public health emergencies, namely, smoke events (e.g., wildfires and industrial facility fires), and thematic analysis drew on sensemaking literature. The evidence shows that sensemaking is challenging, as practitioners experience pressure from the emergency context and organizational, political, and social expectations. Sensemaking for ERC comes with an underlying imperative to accurately make sense of the situation, in a timely manner and in a way that leads to the best health outcomes. Practitioners must balance creating plausible meaning (sensemaking) with the accuracy expected by stakeholders. The analysis also highlights how sensemaking scope is delimited by professional expert identities and roles within the emergency management system; that is, practitioners' understanding of their expertise and role, and that of other practitioners. Past lived experiences are viewed as key facilitators of both individual and collective sensemaking, and the history of similar public health events shapes sensemaking in this context.

Deontic authority and the maintenance of lay and expert identities during joint decision making: Balancing resistance and compliance

Expertise is commonly viewed as a professionalized competence in a specific field. Expert professional identities are produced and reproduced through professional training and other socialization mechanisms, which work to generate for a specific group of individuals a specific set of expert skills and knowledge. In this paper, I examine participants’ orientations to their distinct expert professional identities from the perspective of deontic authority. Drawing on 15 video-recorded church workplace meetings between pastors and cantors as data, and conversation analysis as a theoretical and methodological framework, I analyze situations where a non-expert participant makes a proposal that the expert participant orients to as reasonable to comply with. Specifically, I demonstrate how the expert participants respond to these proposals with displays of deontic authority, arguably in an attempt to maintain their expert identities in the face of their de facto compliance with the proposals. In these situations, the expert participants are shown to invoke (1) a past decision of their own, (2) a future decision of their own, or (3) a pattern that is beyond both participants’ control. Each of these practices involves the expert participant balancing resistance and compliance by minimally acknowledging the content of the non-expert participant’s proposal, while excluding the non-expert from those who have deontic authority in the matter. In so doing, the expert speaker implies that the non-expert proposal speaker lacks (1) procedural knowledge about the specific matters about which it is relevant to make proposals to experts and (2) access to the distinct experiential perspective that characterizes expert perception of things. It is thus argued that, in this context, the mere claims of deontic authority, produced without any substantial displays of expert knowledge, can serve the maintenance of expert professional identities.

The fragility of experts: A moderated-mediation model of expertise, identity threat, & overprecision

Experts play a crucial role in modern organizations, but evidence regarding the soundness and reliability of their decision-making is mixed and often contradictory. Drawing on theories of identity threat, I argue that experts are more susceptible to bias following disconfirming feedback from others. A series of lab experiments show that (a) experts are more likely than novices to double-down and produce overly precise predictions following disconfirming feedback; (b) this feedback-induced overprecision by experts is mediated by perceived level of expert identity threat; and (c) self-affirmation attenuates identity threat and reduces overprecision. I supplement these experimental findings by investigating experts’ response to disconfirming feedback in a real-world settings - Major League Baseball umpiring. Ultimately, I propose a moderated-mediation model of expert decision-making to understand “when” and “why” experts offer overly precise judgments that is unavoidable and prevalent in organizational settings.

Radio program hosts’ self-identity mobilization in Chinese radio-mediated medical consultations

Abstract While previous studies highlight the dynamic nature of identity co-construction, how and especially why speakers construct and shift their own multiple identities still remains understudied. The present study argues that identity is part of speaker communicative resources as evidenced by radio program hosts’ strategic employment and shift among their different identities to facilitate their interactional purposes. Based on data drawn from radio medical consultations, this article attempts to reveal the dynamic adaptability of hosts’ identity construction. It is found that (1) in general, hosts of medical consultation programs construct three identities for themselves, namely an authoritative expert identity, a caring friend identity and a sales representative identity; (2) the three identities constructed are respectively adaptable to power relationships, solidarity and role relationships between hosts and callers in conversation; (3) the three identities shift in conversations to facilitate callers’ purchasing acts.

Novice or expert? Heritage speaker's orientation to the novice-expert paradigm

Drawing on the theoretical tenets of the communities of practice (CofP) framework (Lave and Wenger 1991) and using an emic microanalytic perspective to analyze the data, this study explores how bilingual heritage speakers (HS) make relevant their novice-expert identities through references to their expertise and during repair activity. Data from four paired videoconferencing conversations between two focal bilingual Spanish HSs and either a monolingual Spanish native speaker (NS) or a Spanish second language (L2) learner was used to examine how the bilingual HSs negotiated their participation and membership within the speaking community of their minority language. Data analysis revealed fluctuations in the HSs' orientations to their novice and expert identities, discourse-internal as well as external, which can be interpreted as HSs’ fluidity to move between categories or as evidence of their struggle to self-claim their identities in their minority language. Overall, the data shows that the construction of a social identity is a dynamic, locally-contingent, and situationally-bounded process that emerges during talk-in-interaction. Additionally, the results also provide insights into the dialectic relationship between locally co-constructed actions and macro-level sociolinguistic categories such as NS and NNS commonly used in second language acquisition (SLA) research.

Doctors’ Pragmatic Identity Construction Based on The Doctors

In recent years, conflicts between doctors and patients in China have occurred from time to time. In the past, some scholars conducted research on the doctor-patient relationship, but there are few studies on doctors’ pragmatic identity construction. Therefore, guided by Chen Xinren’s pragmatic identity theory, using python as an analytical aid, this paper uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis to conduct a study of doctor’s pragmatic identity construction based on a medical documentary The Doctors . The main focus of this study is not only the types of pragmatic identity constructed by doctors in the documentary, but also the emotional characteristics of these pragmatic identities. According to this research, the doctors in the documentary The Doctors mainly construct expert identity, peer identity, and stress bearer identity. The overall emotional characteristics of the constructed pragmatic identities are neutral, and positive emotions are greater than negative ones. This paper has certain research significance. For one thing, this study provides a new research perspective for doctors’ pragmatic identity construction, that is, to study the overall emotional characteristics of the constructed identities. For another, this study can help the public understand the pragmatic identity of doctors to a certain extent, and promote the harmonious relationship between doctors and patients.

The Fragility of Experts: A Moderated-Mediation Model of Expertise, Expert Identity Threat, and Overprecision

Experts play a crucial role in modern organizations, but evidence regarding the soundness and reliability of their decision-making is mixed and often contradictory. We develop and test a moderated-...

Disseminating knowledge: A discourse analysis of terrorism in TED talks

This study aims to investigate the linguistic mechanism of disseminating knowledge about terrorism by professionals to laypersons in TED Talks. The study examines the interface between knowledge, meaning and social practices in terms of text and context when speakers cognitively reconceptualize terrorism discourse as a professional practice and maintain their stance over social issues. Drawing on a multidisciplinary approach of discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, the study sets out to analyse the discursive representation of terrorism in TED talks delivered between 2002 and 2019, focusing on explanation strategies of definition, description, denomination and metaphor. The results revealed that TED talks’ discourse was a less popularised genre regarding terrorism, marked by specialised terms of traditional right discourse of military actions, and impersonal reference for private intentions of building up expert identity.

Online collaboration and identity work in a brony fandom: Constructing a dialogic space in a fan translation project

Online collaboration has become a regular practice for many Internet users, reflecting the emergence of new participatory cultures in the virtual world. However, little is yet known about the processes and conditions for online collaboration in informally formed writing spaces and how these create opportunities for participants’ identity work. This ethnographic case study explores how four young adults, fans of the show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (bronies), negotiated a dialogic space for their online collaboration on a fan translation project and how this created opportunities for their identity work. After a year of participant observation, we collected interviews, ethnographic diaries and participants’ chats, which were analysed with qualitative content and discourse analysis methods. The findings showed how the Etherpad online writing platform used by the participants facilitated the construction of dialogic space through the visualization of a shared artefact and adjustable features. It was in this dialogic space where the participants negotiated their expert identities which furthered their discussions about writing, translating and technological innovations. The study advances present-day knowledge about online collaboration in affinity groups, engendering the construction of a dialogic space for collaborative writing and participants’ identity work.

Science and Law in Environmental Law and Policy: The Case of the European Commission

AbstractThis article draws on empirical research conducted with European Commission officials in three Directorates-General and its other services on their perception of how the legislative and policy-making process facilitates the interaction of science and environmental law. This article deploys Sheila Jasanoff's theoretical framework of co-production as an important lens to examine how the European Commission creates this interaction of science and law in environmental policy making and identifies how the Commission incorporates different voices and stakeholders in this policy area. The Commission can be seen as a vehicle of co-production of science and law in EU environmental policy by building strong expert identities, putting in place institutional processes and instruments, and creating discourse between scientists and lawyers leading to outputs of co-production. It is argued that in actively facilitating co-production, the Commission underpins the legislative and policy-making process with its institutional values.

When expert recommendation contradicts peer opinion: Relative social influence of valence, group identity and artificial intelligence

Whom do we trust more, the recommendation of an expert or public opinion from a crowd of other users of the site? Does it matter if the expert belongs to our in-group? And, what, if anything, would change if an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system was the recommender rather than a human expert? In order to answer these research questions, we conducted a between-subjects online experiment, informed by MAIN Model (Sundar, 2008), which posits that interface cues signaling different types of sources can influence perceived credibility of content by triggering distinct cognitive heuristics. Participants were assigned to a scenario wherein the expert review contrasted the peer rating about recommending photos for business profiles, with systematic variations in expert review valence (negative vs. positive), expert identity (ingroup vs. outgroup vs. no identity), and agent type (human vs. AI). Results show that positive ratings are more influential on user judgements. However, for negative ratings, human ingroup members generated greater effects than no-identity experts. Moreover, AI systems were as influential as human experts, suggesting the potential for AI to substitute human experts for online recommendations.

A Cross-cultural Study of Pragmatic Identities Constructed in Chinese and American Marketing Discourse on Social Media

Based on a mini-corpus of Chinese and American marketing discourse on social media (150 discourses each), this study conducts a cross-cultural investigation of pragmatic identity construction in marketing discourse on social media. The results show that in the context of social media, a larger variety of individual pragmatic identities rather than organizational pragmatic identities is employed in both American and Chinese marketing discourses. Chinese and American enterprises both construct six different types of individual pragmatic identities (Experiencer, Sales Representative, Friend, Adviser, Expert and Official Introducer) in marketing discourse. Both Chinese and American marketing discourses tend to build official introducer and sales representative identity more than other identities. Adviser identity is not regularly constructed in both Chinese and American discourses. American marketing discourse on social media adopts the identity of experiencer and adviser more whereas Chinese discourse adopts expert and official introducer identity more than its counterpart. American discourse adopts more subjective identities than objective identities whereas Chinese discourse evenly employs both subjective and objective identities. Three cultural value dimensions (collectivism vs. individualism, high power distance vs. low power distance, relation-driven vs. task-driven) attribute to the different use of the pragmatic identities.