Abstract
Prior research on expert collaborations has focused on how specialists–experts with deep domain knowledge–work across disciplinary boundaries with other specialists, with much less attention paid to how generalists–experts with broader and connective knowledge–work alongside specialists. To address this gap, we examined collaborative work requiring expertise of generalists (regional planners) and specialists (civil engineers). Our interview data revealed that privileged values of specialist expertise (i.e., exclusivity, neutrality, and feasibility) could close interpretive possibilities of their collaboration and that generalists engaged in communicative expertise positioning to make their expertise work with that of specialists. We developed a grounded model of generalist-specialist collaboration theorizing how they used discursive closures and openings to accentuate gains from their different expertise.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 70-95 |
| Number of pages | 26 |
| Journal | Communication Monographs |
| Volume | 89 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2022 |
Funding
This article is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation: [SES-1057148]. The authors would like to thank the study participants for their valuable time and candid reflections, as well as the editor and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on the manuscript.
Keywords
- Collaboration
- discursive closure
- discursive openings
- expertise
- knowledge work
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Communication
- Language and Linguistics