Interactional Expertise

Interactional Expertise = the way people from different fields communicate between each other.

The concept of interactional expertise may explain why collaboration between experts in a field, with those outside the field, or even with amateurs, may be effective.

Paper by sociologist Harry Collins: http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/schoolsanddivisions/academicschools/socsi/staff/acad/collins/expertise/17183.dld) Abstract

Description

“ `Interactional expertise' is developed through linguistic interaction without full scale practical immersion in a culture. Interactional expertise is the medium of communication in peer review in science, in review committees, and in interdisciplinary projects. It is also the medium of specialist journalists and of interpretative methods in the social sciences. We describe imitation game experiments designed to make concrete the idea of interactional expertise. The experiments show that the linguistic performance of those well-socialized in the language of a specialist group is indistinguishable from those with full-blown practical socialization but distinguishable from those who are not well-socialized. The imitation game can also be used to indicate whether an individual can enter an esoteric domain and master the interactional expertise, a skill required by interpretative sociologists of science, anthropologists, ethnographers, and the like.â€? (from the abstract of the Collins paper)