Knowledge, Expertise, And Professional Practice in the Sociology of Michael Schudson

Abstract

Although we often do not think of him this way, Michael Schudson can be seen as a moderate, critical-yet reasonable sociologist of knowledge. This identity reveals itself most clearly in his very first work, his doctoral dissertation, completed in 1976 and published in full in 1990. The second part of this essay argues that in his later career Schudson turned his gaze from questions of knowledge per se to questions of occupational expertise. I frame this turn towards the normative by recounting what we might call the Schudson–Carey debate over the nature and desirability of journalistic and professional expertise. I then tie this debate into current battles over the status of journalistic professionalism in the digital age. I conclude the essay by arguing that, while normative debates over the status of journalistic expertise remain important in 2017, these claims are also confronting a radically altered socio-technical environment. In our current unsettled times, Schudson’s sociologist of knowledge may—along with more radical theorists like Michel Foucault and Bruno Latour—serve as a helpful empirical guide and useful normative corrective to more extreme views on the constructed and power-indebted nature of knowledge.

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