2023-09-28 06:30:52
Engineers are today often offered expert roles, designed as a way of exercising their skills that differs from the role of manager. The reasoning of business strategists is quite simple: on the one hand, not all engineers aspire to become managers and, on the other hand, their know-how is sometimes insufficiently used due to work routines.
An extract from “Engineers facing the challenge of participatory expertise” by Jean-Yves Trepos
From the strict point of view of Latin etymology, the expert is one who has gone through trials and faced dangers (experiti) and who therefore emerges experienced. This is not enough to characterize it, but it brings out the idea of experience resulting from trials. If, now, we try to detail the most constant components of expertise, the following features emerge. The expertise is carried out on a troubled situation which cannot be dealt with “on the fly” with usual means. It mobilizes specialized knowledge and combines it in an adjusted manner, as a response to a problem, and it concludes with a judgment formulated in a report addressed to a sponsor which allows a decision to be made. The range of uses of the concept is vast, but certain uses seem preferable to others. It is an activity (doing an expertise) rather than a skill (being excellent), a one-off position (a defined mission) rather than a profession (a permanent, socially protected capacity), and a collective in situation (experts , but also sponsors, professionals, counter-experts with or without a label) rather than a person.
With great expertise comes great responsibility
Although requested by an internal demand in the professional world where they will intervene (a sponsor), the experts do not automatically benefit from initial credit in the eyes of all. They must defend their commercial interests, challenge accusations of unfair competition, and situate the specificity of the skills they deploy. But they can only do so with difficulty in the shelter of a professional body: they are in a situation of extra-territoriality. Some engineers became experts because they were identified as being capable of transposing their professional skills into difficult situations, others because they worked to make themselves identifiable by putting forward a set of techniques, others once more because they were connected to networks. It is precisely this set of tools that must also be considered in the expert procedure. The latter thus implements his “toolbox” to confront the troubled situation. It is at the same time stable equipment (from training, for example scientific), the precipitate of previous expertise and an indefinable part of the experience acquired. The articulation of these three dimensions will be the distinctive mark of the expert. From then on, he can claim exclusivity and the toolbox tends to function like a “black box”.
Experts generally claim to have no moral or political bias. Nevertheless, they engage values and mobilize ethics by choosing their instruments for measuring reality. To what extent do they assume this responsibility? The question can arise acutely when societal issues are clearly linked to expertise. According to the hypothesis of the “two bodies of the expert”: put in difficulty or anxious to work sheltered from social pressures, he might assert his authority over the progress of the procedures, by relying on an invisible collective (“We , experts”), repository of knowledge and established authority; in other circumstances, it will rather be in his interest to stand out from previous groups of experts to affirm the irreducible singularity of the situation. He will then highlight his personal beliefs and values (“as an expert, my conviction is that…”). But another path is emerging. In the same way that we can consider knowledge to be distributed between the actors (no protagonist – expert, user or sponsor – has complete knowledge of the situation), we can also consider ethics to be distributed. What is ethical in the actions of an expert is not only due to his own intentions or his ethos (his internalized moral dispositions), but also to the way in which he accords with the ethics of others.
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