Elites and expertise: The changing material production of knowledge for policy

Abstract

The terms ‘experts’, ‘expertise’ and ‘knowledge’ are used frequently in current discussion by policymakers and in academic literature on policymaking in education and other fields, though often in loosely defined or contradictory ways. Experts face criticism as enemies of the free flow of information, as anti-democratic, serving vested interests and conspiring against society to protect economic and political elites against challenges to their power and interests. Experts are, nevertheless, invoked frequently by policymakers in support of specific policy directions, yet also castigated by them for their failure to provide coherent, incontrovertible and ‘actionable’ knowledge (Grundmann and Stehr 2012: 19). At the same time as public is confidently told that policy can now be based securely on objective scientific fact, policymakers state that society ‘has had enough of experts’ (see, e.g., Michael Gove, then Secretary of State for Education in England, quoted in Clarke and Newman 2017: 1).