Rawls2024a

Rawls2024a
BibType	ARTICLE
Key	Rawls2024a
Author(s)	Anne Warfield Rawls
Title	Consensus vs. Situated Constitutive Practices: Mapping Developments in the Role of the Expert at RAND After WWII onto Key Issues in Sociology
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Tag(s)	EMCA, Ethnomethodology, Garfinkel
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Year	2024
Language	English
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Journal	The American Sociologist
Volume	55
Number	2
Pages	105–119
URL	Link
DOI	10.1007/s12108-023-09590-3
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Institution
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Howpublished
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Abstract

Christian Daye’s Book, Experts, Social Scientists, and Techniques of Prognosis in Cold War America hit the shelves at a crucial moment. For the first time since the development of the Atom-bomb during WWII, the “culture of insecurity and its experts,” which is the focus of Daye’s book, faces the very crisis that the social scientists war gaming at the RAND corporation after the war were trying to prepare for: War between a democratic western nation, Ukraine, and Russia, which not only has nuclear capacity but has threatened to use it. It is Daye’s contention that the uncertainty ushered in by the “bomb” created an “epistemological break” with the past, which generated an urgent quest for certainty, leading, in turn, to the development of a new role for “trusted experts” in the post-war: “Conceived as a mediator between knowledge and power, the expert occupied an important position in US Cold War culture” (Daye 2020:3). That this formerly trusted expert role is now in crisis was put on display during the Trump presidency and the Covid pandemic as people loudly challenged not only the advice, but the knowledge base, of any and all “experts”. That the demise of the trusted expert may in no small part be due to efforts at RAND to produce certainty by way of a consensus among experts achieved during a simulation of interaction is a cautionary tale about mixing science and politics.

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