Abstract

This paper attempts to demonstrate that both expertise and policy categories are artificial and politically motivated and oriented. And in the end, so is the conceptual system that opposes one to the other. A poststructuralist perspective tends to redistribute the cards, to redraw explanatory categories. It also underlines the necessary gap between the normative and the analytical. In conclusion, the dichotomy needs to be exploded in multiple competing and cooperating discourses.

Under this perhaps overly ambitious title we will try in this paper not so much to cover the extents of the question of expert advice -- which would probably be impossible -- but rather to offer a slightly different theoretical point of view on how it can be approached.

Not a great deal has been written on the processes leading to and following policy decisions, and it has mostly been done in a historical perspective, or in the "sociology of knowledge" framework. We propose here a post-structuralist perspective largely inspired by the work of Michel Foucault. Our main mission will be to underline for the reader some of the more fertile aspects of this "governmentality" perspective on the study of the role of sociological expertise.

Before we begin, it is important to clarify what we mean when using concepts like "expert", "expertise", "policy", and "the state". Indeed experts, for instance, come in so many shapes and sizes that efforts at producing a single definition seem inevitably doomed. Robert Merton (1957: 265-6) tried to differentiate between what he called "bureaucratic" and "unattached" intellectuals, the latter being free from administrative necessities and of direct political influence. He thought that both were sources of usable information in terms of policy-making and evaluation if one took into account their different environments. From the start there was a problem with this simple rule of thumb, but today it seems entirely artificial and arbitrary: (1) in this day of financial cutbacks, many academics are now dependant on individual government contracts for funding and therefore are not nearly as independent as they may appear or try to present themselves; the ivory tower is quickly becoming a myth. (2) At the same time, as Pat O'Malley (1996) points out, the shrinking state employs ever fewer experts as such. (3) Most grant giving agencies are under scrutiny and allocations are now evaluated in terms of concrete results, not in advances in theory or criticism, to the point that some academics will actually avoid the word "theory" in written project proposals. Evidently, the unattached/bureaucratic and other comparisons of that type were only useful when the type of perspectives, methods, conclusions and expectations would actually differ between the two. We propose, under the circumstances, to consider as an "expert" whoever formulates an opinion based, assumed to be based, or claimed to be based on scientific analysis, observation or knowledge. This way we avoid the trap of trying to define the nature of the expert, and simply look at her (assumed) rationale, which in most cases will be explicit and immediately available to analysis.

This obviously leads us to the question of what exactly is "scientific knowledge" or -- and we will treat both as synonyms⁽¹⁾ -- "expertise." While we will briefly discuss the nature of knowledge in the following section, we must here first look at what is considered expertise in operational terms (i.e. how knowledge is used). For the expert, her knowledge is her ticket to having a voice in policy decisions⁽²⁾ that ordinary citizens would not have. For the politician, referring to the expert's opinion constructs her policy judgment as a purely logical/objective intellectual process, free of interests, personal values, myth, beliefs, etc. The expert, is the voice of reason and objectivity; her conclusions convey a sense of objective/universal rationality which is most often associated with the exact sciences but also exists in social science⁽³⁾. That is because all administrative processes, in business as well as inside the state, are deemed to be rational, or at least ideally/potentially rational. So both the expert and the politician gain authority through their interaction.

While elected officials come and go, civil servants stay and make careers in the government; they are responsible for gathering, producing and explaining the information available to the decision-makers, for implementation, for agenda-setting, for continuity in adressing priorities, etc., determining to a large extent the work of a minister, for instance. At the same time, bureaucrats are becoming experts themselves (as are some politicians, no doubt), which makes them self-reliant in terms of objective credibility: they need to call on scientific authority less often. A good example being the new nomination process at the (federal) National Parole Board: fewer political nominees, more experts. These bureaucrats are not hired as experts, but as public servants, and that sets the administrative nature of the tasks they have to perform. This obviously affects their status as consumers and users of "non-bureaucratic" or externally produced knowledge, as well as the strategies available to them to explain/justify their actions.

Conventional categorizations of individuals as experts, politicians, bureaucrats are in fact greatly removed from reality and practically useless in the approach of administrative use of knowledge. What about the separation between "knowledge" and "policy"?

NOTES

1. Obviously, one could be a religious expert, which has nothing to do with science; nevertheless, in the present context we concentrate on the social sciences, and particularly criminology, where this type of problem is unlikely to arise.

2. We will collapse, for now, the ideas of "agenda setting", "policy-making" and "evaluation" into one.

3. It is important for the reader to notice that the question of whether this objectivity in fact exists or not is perfectly inconsequential at this point. This will become clearer as we progress.