Davide Caselli, Esperti. Come studiarli e perché, Il Mulino, 2020
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17996
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Luca Recano
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Davide Caselli, Experts. How to study them and why, Il Mulino, 2020
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Book Reviews
2023-09-26
2023-09-13
2023-09-26
2023-09-26
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Luca Recano
2023/09/26
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17996
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Davide Caselli, Experts. How to study them and why, Il Mulino, 2020
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T/S                                                                                          BOOK REVIEWS



Esperti. Come studiarli e perché
[Experts. How to study them and why]
by Davide Caselli (2020) Il Mulino, p. 200.




Luca Recano
Independent researcher


   Caselli’s work results from a vast and in-depth investigation, both theoretical and empirical,
into the interplay between experts, political-administrative institutions, businesses, and the ur-
ban social fabric, problematising the relationship between knowledge and power, governance,
or public action in the context of a particularly relevant case study: the transformations of urban
social policies across the 2008-2018 Italian crisis cycles. His study fills a dearth of attention in
the Italian literature on the figure of experts in the welfare system, a key actor, albeit neglected.
   The field research, which lasted over a decade, grounds the author’s professional experience
and social activism on a small association with a marginal role in the social policy sector in
the Milanese area. Caselli’s observations develop amid a critical discontinuity in the govern-
ance and resource system concerning local welfare. Through the exposition of field research
– which included observations and interviews with practitioners, operators, consultants and
other relevant actors – Caselli describes the changes occurring in the procurement and re-
source management system of local welfare. His study tracks the emergence of a new doxa
(i.e., the system of knowledge and values that determines the field’s normative boundaries)
marked by the “social cohesion” tenders, and accompanied by specific forms of privatisation,
financialisation and competition of organisations.
   On a more general level, the book summarises the debate on the function of expert knowl-
edge in the social sciences. More specifically, it mobilises the conceptual tools of Critical So-
ciology and Science and Technology Studies (STS) – namely Actor-Network-Theory (ANT)
– to analyse socio-technical devices implemented through expertise. Combining analyses and
descriptions with the bourdieusian notion of “field”, it shows how – through the manip-
ulation of calls for tenders, projects, measurement, and evaluation systems – conflicts and
hegemonic restructuring of the local welfare field are outlined.
   Rather than defining the professional boundaries of the social figure of the expert, Casel-
li problematises “the emergence, conceptualisation, recognition and practice of an expert
function”, which is a:

              social action marked by competence, by transgressiveness with respect to both scientific


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                                                       S dies               © The Author(s) 2023
)14( p. 19-87 ISN 2038-46                                                   Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
           DOI: 10.692/isn/1796.2038-4                                      www.tecnoscienza.net
Recano                                                                                                188

     codes and those of everyday life and by forms of asymmetry of knowledge and power in the
     relationship with objects and recipients of such competence (p. 25; see also Pellizzoni 2011).

   This function exceeds and transfigures the academic one: it is distinguished from pure sci-
entific action by a different and less autonomous relationship with the client, and its status
is continuously negotiated through power and market games. Expert’s action is also distin-
guished from “expertise” – as the “ability to perform a given task” – identified not in indi-
vidual persons or groups or disciplines, but rather in a network that connects experts with
customers (either public or private), and the public sphere (Eyal 2013). Thus, framed in its
material-discursive concatenations, in its technical, conceptual instrumentation, and in its in-
stitutional and spatial operativity, expertise combines theoretical agency (namely production
and appropriation of “vehicular ideas”, “buzzwords”, “knowledge brands”) and socio-tech-
nical agency (namely production and appropriation of tools for measuring and controlling
operational and intellectual resources).
   In the evolving context described by Caselli, it is shown how the ability of organisations to
dispose of resources and technical-professional knowledge qualified as authoritative, through
the mediation of experts (consultants or academics), constitutes a selection mechanism. In-
deed, it increasingly became the fundamental condition for access to the new public and pri-
vate tenders of the Milanese local welfare system. In this way, the asymmetrical status that
constitutes and reproduces expertise as a dependency relationship is highlighted and observed
from an operational and procedural point of view.
   Caselli’s research mobilises a wide variety of theoretical approaches, as well as draws on a broad
genealogy of social and intellectual struggles in the field of disciplinary institutions (the factory,
the asylum, the school, social services). Particularly relevant is the use of the co-production mod-
el of expertise networks borrowed from Actor-Network Theory (ANT) as proposed by Vololo-
na Rabeharisoa and Michel Callon, together with a constructivist and institutionalist sensibility.
   The book is structured along two parallel layers, juxtaposing reflections on the field notes,
discussions on their theoretical framing and the author’s personal elaborations.
   The first chapter mainly deals with the issue of the asymmetrical nature of expertise ac-
cording to three models: the classical model of monopoly and closure derived from the so-
ciology of the professions, the conflictual model of critique and reinvention of professional
boundaries related to the impact of social movements on disciplinary institutions since the
1960s, and the co-productive model derived from ANT. In this case, Caselli draws on Gil
Eyal’s (2013) research on the breakdown of disciplinary boundaries as a process that alters the
balance between specialist closure and communicational openness in professional cultures,
proposing an interpretation that emphasises the relational dimension of expertise.
   The second chapter outlines the “field” of local welfare research and consultancy actors
(intellectuals and economists), by acknowledging the contribution of social sciences in the-
matising the relationship between experts and political power. Caselli combines the notion
of “field”, proposed by Bourdieu (1995) and elaborated by Sapiro (2009), with Gramsci’s
conception of hegemony, to frame the tensions between the autonomy of the actors that
traverse and compose the field itself and the heteronomous (political, economic, bureaucrat-
ic) forces that from the outside contribute to shaping its dynamics. What is at stake in the
189                                                                        Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(1)

conflicts is the definitional power of the doxa and the conquest of hegemonic positions. In
this way, Caselli emphasises the tacit and invisible mechanisms through which the market is
structured, exposing the foundation and maintenance of markets to social criticism.
   In the third chapter, a specific and emerging aspect of the field of social policies is addressed:
the growing diffusion of competition for social entrepreneurship start-ups in the health and
social services sector and accompanying the transition from care and assistance targeting
those in need to a re-functioning of governance objectives in favour of animation, incentive,
empowerment. This transition calls into question consolidated practices promoting some ac-
tors and marginalising others. As explained by Caselli, a previous technical-managerial “soft”
model, based on the operational control of processes and which is attentive to the content of
actions, has been contrasted by a technical-directorial model based on the centrality of expert
knowledge in the design and evaluation phases. Crucial to the analysis of these transforma-
tions proposed in the book are the Cultural Political Economy (CPE) approaches developed
by Bob Jessop and Ngai-Ling Sum (2013). Such a material-semiotic framework combines
the elaborations of Gramsci and Foucault, integrating historical materialism and discourse
analysis in a common research programme to “identify, in a given crisis phase, the processes
of variation, selection and stabilisation of imaginaries” (p. 99). Considerable attention is paid
to French-language studies on role reconversion and recuperation processes between militant
and professional culture across the local welfare.
   The fourth chapter gets to the heart of the deployment of “social cohesion” projects, focus-
ing on the specific role of social workers in the conflicts between the various actors-networks
and organisations, and following the constitutive tensions characteristic of project develop-
ment in labour relations and interpersonal dynamics within organisations. Such dynamics
point to the intertwining of the cognitive and normative dimensions of social action, illus-
trating the relationship between representations and the concrete operational modes of so-
cial intervention. Drawing on a theoretical framework that considers governance through
instruments, Caselli explores the tensions between actors, interests, and instruments, under-
stood as autonomous agents that shape and direct the behaviour of social actors. Thus, the
political dimension of public action is revealed, subtracting it from depoliticisation strategies
that tend to obscure it as well as naturalising and destoricising its technical, managerial and
economic procedures. The technocratic appearance towards which the narrative of contem-
porary governance is oriented is thus problematised.
   In the fifth chapter, Caselli grasps the relevance of “social impact finance” (p. 143) as a
specific research topic, which he develops especially through the sociology of institutions, by
focusing on the problems of measuring and exchanging abstract value underlying the con-
struction of the market as a social institution. Caselli juxtaposes the research methods and ap-
proaches of STS and, precisely, ANT with the Sociology of Economics and Labour. He out-
lines some typical dynamics (self-fulfilling prophecies, reactivity and self-disciplining, reverse
engineering) that emerge from the observation of tools (such as metrics and measurement
standards, management procedures, or information systems and databases that make up the
Social Impact Assessment (SIA) and replace previous reporting systems), understood as “act-
ants” with their own degree of autonomy, capable of orienting expectations, enabling behav-
iour and results of other social actors. This apparatus is mobilised to prepare the ground for
Recano                                                                                        190

the entry of new financing channels (solidarity finance, social venture capital, impact finance)
into the social and community enterprise system and transform its characteristics.
   According to the author, the essay highlights, firstly, the dialectical and political dimension
of the movements of convergence and divergence, alliances and conflicts, between established
and emerging networks of expertise, in the shift towards the financialisation of social enter-
prise. Secondly, the book exposes the co-evolutionary dynamic between policy paradigms,
intervention models and characteristics of networks of expertise in the field of local welfare,
which invests value systems, the form and organisation of actors, (economic and extra-eco-
nomic) interests, funding mechanisms, and public governance tools and devices. Finally, the
research provides analytical tools to frame the conflicting and historical nature of institution-
al procedures, instruments, and governance devices in the field of welfare that appear, or are
presented, as neutral or natural. The research fully fits in as an STS contribution to the study
of the socio-technical systems intervening in the welfare management system and in the inter-
actions between different actors (public, private and third sector), and different levels (micro
and local, meso and organisational, macro and structural). Furthermore, the book addresses
some of more neglected and nonetheless relevant aspects, with a considerable degree of depth
and breadth, as well as with originality and epistemological and critical awareness.
   In this work, the impact of financial crisis on the local welfare funding system, which has
been exacerbating since 2010 onwards, is investigated through the transformations of the
content of public tenders and competitions. The analysis of the latter, used as a “probe” of
the research, allows us to reconstruct an index of the breaks and changes that are crossing
the field of local welfare players, in particular the figures that make up the networks of exper-
tise, pointing out the alternations and aggregations/dissolutions between dominant players,
groups and networks, and the transformation of their hierarchies. According to Caselli, the
pressure exerted by the decrease in national and local funds, both for welfare and scientific
research, has opened the way for private actors and made expertise networks with a more
markedly entrepreneurial and financial matrix gain space. Symbolic power, entrepreneurial
capacity, availability of economic resources and a series of tools – lexical, value-based, techni-
cal, and operational – steered these transformations and are the objects of Caselli’s research.
   The book is also a contribution to a broader intellectual debate on the controversial and
contested role of expert knowledge in the crisis of democratic societies. Indeed, Caselli be-
lieves that “a critical and constructivist approach to knowledge, to its production [...] repre-
sents a cultural and political proposal” (p. 172), alternative to the two main imaginaries of exit
from the contemporary economic-financial and political crisis. Indeed, Caselli’s stance thus
rejects both the prospect of strengthening technocratic approaches and non-representative
institutions (an “automatic government” of instruments, which would save democracy from
the unreasonableness of the masses) and identity-based and authoritarian movements that
feed resentment towards elitist powers by recovering a supremacist common sense combined
with traditional forms of knowledge and authority.
191                                                                             Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(1)

References

Eyal, Gil (2013) For a Sociology of Expertise: The Social Origins of the Autism Epidemic, in “American
    Journal of Sociology”, 118, pp. 863-907.
Bourdieau, Pierre (1994) Raisons pratiques: Sur la théorie de l’action, Éditions du Seuil.
Pellizzoni, Luigi (2011) Conflitti ambientali: Esperti, politica, istituzioni nelle controversie ecologiche,
    Bologna, Il Mulino.
Sapiro, Gisèle (2009) Modèles d’intervention politique des intellectuels: Le cas français, in “Actes Re-
    cherche en Sciences Sociales”, 176-177, pp. 5-20.
Sum, Ngai-Ling and Jessop, Bob (2013) Towards a Cultural Political Economy: Putting Culture in its
    Place in Political Economy, Cheltenham, Edward Elgar Publishing.
