Engendering the sociology of expertise

Received: 1 April 2016 Revised: 26 September 2016 Accepted: 29 September 2016 DOI 10.1111/soc4.12438 ARTICLE Engendering the sociology of expertise Maria J. Azocar1,2 | 1 University of Wisconsin–Madison 2 Universidad Diego Portales Myra Marx Ferree1 Correspondence Maria Azocar, University of Wisconsin– Madison, 1180 Observatory Drive, Madison WI 53706, USA. Email: [email protected] 1 | Abstract This paper delineates areas of research for the emergent sociology of expertise. We review how expertise has been studied in the sociology of professions, sociology of work, and sociology of science and technology, and we show the contribution that intersectionality can make in understanding processes of gendering expertise. I N T RO DU CT I O N As a nodal point for different strands of feminist perspectives, intersectionality has triggered new venues of academic research and new forms of political activism. In this article, we trace the contribution that intersectionality offers to the emergent sociology of expertise. Expertise is a relatively new term (Eyal, 2015), but its present configuration can be tracked back to insights that the sociology of professions, sociology of work, and sociology of science and technology have offered to its development. In this article, we review how these three subfields have conceptualized expertise and show the specific contribution that intersectionality can make in understanding processes of gendering expertise. Before presenting our arguments, it is important to clarify the core concerns that characterize intersectionality as an analytical strategy. There is no one single way to conduct intersectional research; different epistemological and methodological positions emerge as scholars grapple with taking multiple inequalities equally seriously at the same time (Crenshaw 1991; McCall 2005; Hancock 2007; Choo & Ferree 2010; Lykke 2011; Puar 2013; Mann 2013; Cho, Crenshaw, & McCall 2013; Collins 2015; Cooper 2016). However, in our reading of intersectionality, there are three common guiding principles. First, the goal of an intersectional approach is to analyze social inequalities and systems of power with awareness of their interlocking character. For example, some effects of sexism may be more salient depending on different historical periods, but an intersectional approach would always stress that sexism has a relational, dynamic, processual, and mutually transforming character in any system of power differentials. In methodological terms, this principle is often translated in “asking the other question.” As Matsuda (1991) explains, the way I try to understand the interconnection of all forms of subordination is through a method I call ‘ask the other question.’ When I see something that looks racist, I ask, ‘Where is the patriarchy in this?’ When I see something that looks sexist, I ask, ‘Where is the heterosexism in this?’ (p. 1189). The second principle of intersectionality is to conceptualize power relationships as both material and discursively constituted. An intersectional analysis starts from discriminatory practices and oppressive features of the world, examining how specific material conditions enable justificatory discourses to unfold and how understandings of power and inequality have different degrees to shape experiences of the world people call “real.” In methodological terms, scholars often translate this principle into observing the experience of individuals located at the intersection of interlocking inequalities, asking how experiences and perceptions are specific to particular locations that are Sociology Compass 2016; 10: 1079–1089 wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/soc4 © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 1079 1080 AZOCAR AND FERREE simultaneously defined by the multiple inequalities. The key point is to study the co‐constitution of material and discursive practices at particular intersections, avoiding universalistic attributions (i.e., “the experience of all women is x”) and the flattening of differences (i.e., “women are too different to talk about gender as a meaningful relationship of inequality”). The third principle of intersectionality is to recognize the centrality of knowledge in maintaining and changing unjust power relationships. Knowledge claims occur in the interaction with the world, arise in specific historical moments, and have real consequences. In methodological terms, this often means asking how social relations operate, rather than focusing on categorical identities, individual intentions, or universal claims. In other words, intersectionality is a feminist political knowledge project that aims to transform reality by disrupting the relational practices of power by which certain claims are being heard and are made intelligible, and others made invisible or unrecognizable. These three simple guiding principles—the interlocking character of power relations, their discursive and material effects, and the significance of knowledge relations as a politics of transformation—direct how we analyze the emergent sociology of expertise. We first show how this concept of expertise draws insights from specific sociological traditions of studying professions, work relations, and science and then point to ways that all these ways of knowing benefit from taking a more intersectional view. 2 | STUDYING PROFESSIONS AND OCCUPATIONS The sociology of occupations and professions emerged with primary concern to explain what was distinctive about professions, which scholars defined as their capacity to monopolize esoteric knowledge (Parsons, 1939; Hughes, 1994; Wilensky, 1964; Millerson, 1964; Becker, 1970; Friedson, 1970). As a result, expertise became the core feature of professions. Expertise was understood as not only having both practical and theoretical dimensions (what knowledge was and how it was used) but also intrinsically evolving into ever more rational forms (Parsons, 1939; Friedson, 1970; Abbott, 1988). The content of expertise, however, was never the central focus of this tradition. Instead, scholars focused on the tactics that professional groups used in a seemingly inevitable competition to secure their monopoly over knowledge and autonomy in its use (Freidson, 1986). When scholars connected expertise with socialization practices and educational certification, this was arguably addressed more “as part of the credentialist ideology linked to professional projects than a claim necessarily reflecting substance.” (Saks, 2012, p. 5). Neo‐Marxist scholars pointed to how professionalization projects were embedded in wider class struggles (Larson 1977; Johnson, 1980) but did not implicate the knowledge that professionals claimed in this domination. More pluralist or liberal views of power relations defined expertise merely as a resource for or outcome of professional groups' struggle over hierarchical status positions. Because expertise was located as an asset in the various battles within and between professions, it was relatively easy for gender scholars to intervene by exposing the gendered politics of professional closure and status hierarchies. Witz (1990), for example, focused on the diversity of strategies that medical men used to exclude women, including legislation that controlled access to credentials, associational and corporate rules that kept women from membership, and demarcations of boundaries between physicians and nurses and midwives that retained men's control over the prestige and power accorded to medical knowledge. Witz also described usurpation strategies, by which women successfully challenged men's monopoly, gaining admission to medical education and the medical register. From an intersectional approach, however, the gendering of expertise as a matter of women's inclusionary tactics and men's exclusionary tactics presents some problems. First, tactics for professional recognition are related not only to one axis of power but also to the interlocking of several macro structures of power. Thus, the strategies used by nurses, midwives, or medical men described by Witz need to be read as simultaneously produced not just by gender but also through racialization, class segregation, and other processes, however AZOCAR AND FERREE 1081 unremarkable to them, that explain inclusion and exclusion in the professional struggles waged in the specific historical context studied by the author. Second, more positivists of the scholars in this tradition assume that expertise is valuable as being knowledge that represents things in the world as they really are (nature) and professional battles as waged independently of such content through socially constructed organizations (culture). These scholars assume that the sources of change come from organizational intervention, for example, by transforming men's active discriminatory practices or reforming legal or institutional frameworks to which women would be socialized (see Roberts & Coutts, 1992; Carter, 1994). However, from an intersectional perspective, expert claims are also a target of transformation. These claims have a situated character that makes ideas powerful (for example, defining what is “excellence” in research or “achievement gaps” in education). Such discursive work produces organizational conditions that empower professional groups to draw and defend boundaries that set the material conditions for inclusion and exclusion (e.g., tests, credentials, and tenure decisions) across multiple relations of inequality at the same time. They can be studied through the informal, interconnected, and often unnoticed practices that give meaning to expertise in a specific historical moment. In sum, this professional group‐based view of expertise accepted it as a product of nature to be controlled rationally, and these scholars tended to treat its discursive and material dimensions as separate, without considering the material effects of expert claims (e.g., when quantification is treated as a masculine attribute) and the material conditions necessary for specific meanings of expertise to unfold (e.g. organizational cultures that celebrate quantification). Acker (1990) made an important intervention into this separation by pointing out how hierarchies of occupations hinged on the definitions of jobs as having ideal occupants, and Pierce (1995) showed how trial lawyering, for example, called on certain gendered understandings of aggression and authority to define the skill set recognized as expertise in this field. But both of these important studies highlighted gender alone as the key element of power. By contrast, Azocar and Ferree (2015) address the gendered nature of expertise in a more intersectional way, highlighting the differences in versions of masculinity that were both associated with specific ways of knowing and the sides taken in a battle for professional authority. The criminal lawyers in Chile who wanted state authorities to enact their proposal made knowledge claims that gendered their male opponents as “old gentlemen” with class‐based expertise and the family lawyers who proposed an alternative reform as having a feminized “special expertise” that was therapeutic in character. As a professional group, they took advantage of their young age and class position as well as male gender to validate their own expertise as meritocratic, ambitious, theoretical, and objective. By also gendering the technologies they used (statistics and numbers) and the alliances they established with other professionals (economists and international human rights lawyers) as simultaneously male and modern, they took power from wider discourses of power to position their expertise as superior. By looking at the young lawyers' professional struggle in a more intersectional way, this study shows it to be not only about gender but simultaneously also about generation and internationalization as power relations and de‐naturalizes the claims about expertise that the male reformers made as also being social constructed ways of justifying hierarchies. As this example shows, expertise treated as a form of knowledge used to define and defend professions' claims to authority is not a natural resource but a social one. It relies on broader social definitions of value (of quantification, international networks, modernity, and innovation). As professional groups struggle to define their boundaries and secure their power, they expose expertise itself as a contested product of privilege and oppression on multiple axes simultaneously, as, for example, quantification as an asset in these struggles is already socially constructed as associated with White Western masculine innovators, not simply with “men.” This perspective offers new angles of vision for seeing the material and discursive effects of oppression being enacted in claims to professional expertise made by various social groups like education reformers in United States struggles over charter schools (Quinn, 2013) or courts debating including women in military (Holzer, 2008). As scholars of professions have emphasized, the groups advancing claims to specific expertise in these matters have much to gain by securing their recognition as “knowing,” but content claims about what they know also will in turn reflect and reinforce aspects of intersectional power relations. While it would be simplistic to think that the experts in Collateralized Debt Obligations and other financial inventions behind the 2008 crisis were wrong “because they were 1082 AZOCAR AND FERREE men,” there is a strong argument to be made that their temporarily successful claims to expertise rested on gender, class, and generation relations that lent too much credibility to their networks, tools, and credentials (Walby, 2015). 3 | S T U D Y I N G W O R K A N D SK I L L S A second important approach to studying expertise is found in the work of Everett Hughes and the school of symbolic interactionism (Hughes, 1994; Barley, 1989; Becker, 1970). As a leader in applying symbolic interactionist theory to work processes, Hughes described how symbols became attached to tasks and objects as well as bodies and how such interactions crystalize into collective and enduring meanings attached to individual and group identities (Prasad, 1993; Bechky, 2003). From this perspective, expertise appears as a meaning emergent in and attached to interpersonal interactions rather than a resource controlled by professions. Abbott's ecological model (1988) specifically defines expertise as a capacity to accomplish a task that is built on interactions. Although Abbott's perspective “has generated only a limited number of empirical studies on the professions explicitly following its interactionist approach” (Liu, 2016), his understanding of expertise connected the structural struggles of professional groups to the interactional work of making expert claims. According to Abbott, these claims classify problems (diagnosis), rationalize these problems (inference), and make a proposal to take action on them (treatments). For Abbott, the second moment (inference) is the most “pure” act of professional work because abstract knowledge is applied to a particular situation (1988, p. 40). Moreover, the construction of expertise through such boundary claims implies that professionals can redefine the work of other professions into a version of their own by framing their knowledge claims as higher‐level abstractions, or conversely, they can delegate to other professionals certain tasks in the process of inference (Abbott, 1981, p. 823). Claiming that academic knowledge is “pure” helps to resolve practical problems for the group, granting them status as experts when it serves their purposes. In practice, however, connecting the status of professions to their making inference claims in “pure” terms is empirically questionable. Gender scholars in the sociology of work have provided ample evidence of how capacities attributed to “women's nature” are systematically devalued (e.g., caring, teaching, and helping) and underpaid, relative to skills seen as naturally “male” (e.g., physical or mechanical abilities; Collins, 2003; Padavic & Reskin, 2002). Thus, nursing may be evaluated more as an expression of nurturance (to patients) and helpfulness (to doctors) than as a profession defined by its expertise (Evans, 1997; Fisher, 2010). Moreover, skills that have been gendered female (emotional labor, for example) are devalued, regardless of the gender of the worker (e.g., flight attendants; Hochschild, 1983), but cis men in such jobs may be offered a “glass escalator” up to greater authority (e.g., teachers to principals, paralegals to lawyers, and nurses to psychiatrists; Williams, 1992; Pierce, 1995; Williams, 1995). In the study of the construction of gendered expertise, Kelan (2008), for example, studied how ICT workers gave interactional meaning to their expertise on rational terms not only exclusively but also emotionally. Male ICT workers interpreted having technical expertise as meaning that they might be seen as asocial and solitary hackers. They stressed that social competences were actually part of the expertise needed, especially when coordinating programming practices. In practice, the male ICT workers were specifically rewarded for such social competences, but female ICT workers did not get credit for either social competence (which was treated as natural) or technical competencies (which were treated as what justified their inclusion in the work group). In these ways, gendering competences independently of the gender of the worker created situations in which women were asked to trade off doing expertise and doing gender. This example is one of the many that build on a “doing gender” perspective to study work relations. As West and Zimmerman (1987) famously observed, gender is not a pre‐given attribute of individuals carried into non‐gendered spaces, but a culturally constructed standard of evaluation of objects, relations, and actions for which individuals are held “accountable” in social relations (p. 136). From this perspective, gender, like expertise, is theorized as an emergent feature of interactions, an accomplishment, and a rationale for situated conduct (Leidner, 1991; Williams, 1992; Pierce, 1995; Hearn & Collinson, 1998; Martin, 2003; for a review, see Nentwich & Kelan, 2014). While understanding “doing” both personal gender and gendered expertise together generates insight into day‐to‐day differences AZOCAR AND FERREE 1083 in performances of expertise, much of this scholarship also disconnects the expertise being “done” from interlocking macro processes of power that are not only about gender but also about race; class; sexuality; and other forms of exploitation, oppression, and institutionalized inequality (Collins, 2002, p. 84). To illustrate what a focus on just doing gender or race or class in tension with doing expertise misses and that an intersectional perspective brings, the work of Wingfield (2007, 2009) is particularly useful. Wingfield compared the way in which racism is gendered for Black women and Black men, exposing the concrete effects that gendered racism had for their interactions at work. Black women, for example, often had to confront controlling images, such as the modern “Mammy” (woman who is expected to sacrifice her personal life to her boss; Wingfield, 2007, p. 202). Furthermore, as a response to these controlling images, Black women adopted a specific threatening and intimidating emotional disposition at work as part of their struggle to be respected by their colleagues and validated as professionals. Professional Black men had to confront the controlling image of the “angry Black man” (the man who perceives racial discrimination everywhere, so is always angry; Wingfield, 2007, p. 205; see also Wingfield 2009). As a result, they were excluded from professional social networks, were seen as less competent and less qualified for promotion, and felt required to downplay their feelings of irritation or displeasure at work. By studying the intersecting effects of racism and sexism in work‐based interactions, Wingfield was able to show how the interpersonal skills and professional training of Black workers were often mis‐recognized and how the evaluations made of them did not fit patterns for either White men or White women. Focusing on the workplace interactions through which the production and maintenance of racism and sexism work together, Wingfield demonstrated how access to resources to enact expertise was multiply determined for individuals and how performance of expertise was also informed by their strategies of resistance against oppressive categorizations. Wingfield's intersectional scholarship illuminates the dynamic, intersecting, and open‐ended character of how expertise is enacted and recognized at the workplace. But a “doing” perspective tends to present a static theory of expertise as a form of work‐based authority because it highlights how the actions of both dominant groups and subordinated groups reinforce existing oppressions. The tendency to explain “doing” conformity rather than change may be related to the epistemological perspective that scholars from the symbolic interactionist tradition adopt. Social constructionism often takes social factors (such as interests, controlling images, or cultural identities) as self‐evident and uncontestable social realities, marginalizing the changeability of factors that stand outside the interaction (Wehling, 2006). By contrast, Dorothy Smith (1990) theoretically joins the material reality of intersecting oppressions with a discourse‐centered approach to understanding how controlling images and other aspects of social reality are being produced in authoritative texts across time and space rather than individual sites like workplaces. In other words, in the interactionist tradition, expertise has a more abstract gender (or race or class) attached to its performance rules, which remain separated from the doing of gender (or race or class). Expertise as a workplace performance is one form of conformity, while doing gender (or race or class) is another. Wingfield resists this dualism of doing gender versus doing a gendered expertise by means of the intersectionality of her analysis. Black women professionals enacted expertise in diverse relationships established between different bodies (i.e., with men and women who sexually objectified them, with female lower‐level coworkers who devalued them, and with colleagues who were overtly respectful) and in relation to multiple objects (e.g., wearing a red leather suit) and multiple body movements (e.g., kiss on the cheek). In such diverse material and discursive configurations, Black women's enactments of expertise could hardly be reduced to either a conflict with their gender or race enactments nor depicted as some fixed form of embodied intimidation. By stressing intersectionality, change appears in the different material configurations that made intelligible Black women's embodied expertise in their particular practices. 4 | STUDYING SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY (STS) A third approach, that of STS scholars, explicitly challenges the sociology of professions' conceptualization of expertise as a resource. For STS scholars, theorists like Abbott and Friedson have reduced expertise to a property of actors 1084 AZOCAR AND FERREE who carry it into battles for their recognition and jurisdiction. For STS scholars, expertise is defined as a performance or enactment, but unlike social interactionist studies of work focused on single sites like workplaces and pre‐defined properties of expertise, the STS approach puts emphasis on historical forms of inquiry and treats expertise as a constantly changing legitimation of actions. They draw particular attention to the material and discursive conditions under which expertise itself is created and disseminated into a network (Callon, 2007; Latour, 1987; Cambrosio, Limoges, & Hoffman, 1992; Collins & Evans, 2008; Law, 2008; Eyal, 2013). The STS perspective has been critically informed by the work of Foucault (Foucault & Gordon, 1980) and feminist explorations of cultural practices of science (Harding, 1986; Haraway, 1988; Keller, 1985; Longino, 1990). These critics identified processes by which truth claims made by scientists used a subject–object binary to situate themselves outside social relations and thus enact an “objective” perspective that is itself constructed as inherently valuable. Critics instead encouraged recognizing truth claims as situated in space and time but not less useful and valuable for that. What scientists know, for example, about genetic sex determination rests on socially defined meanings, in this case, cultural norms that posit the female as passive recipients and the male as active triggers (Fujimura, 2006). STS perspectives present reality itself as historically, culturally, and materially located by social relations. Mol's exploration of the reality of anemia illustrates this point (1999). Scientists use at least three indicators to measure anemia: clinical, statistical, and pathophysiological. For statistical measurement, they differentiate normal levels of hemoglobin by group: men have different normal levels than women, children than adults, and pregnant women than non‐pregnant women. Thus, each of these groups needs to be materialized as bodies that are understood to be similar intragroup and different from out‐group bodies. Many other gender scholars in STS have shown how gender politics is involved in claims about bodies, brains, genetics, and hormones that define what counts as “real” differences (Fausto‐Sterling, 2005; Hyde, 2005; Wade, 2013). From an STS perspective, gender politics plays a role not only in how scientists know the world (the epistemology of expertise) but also in how they participate in the production of the world (the ontology of expertise). Building on these insights, actor–network theory (ANT) scholarship understands expertise as what links statements about the world with particular human and material resources (Latour, 1987). People can have knowledge of how to accomplish a task, but that know‐how is transformed into expertise only when this element becomes a part of an effective network that can produce transformations in other elements, and network creation is called assemblage. Thus, to study expertise is to study the historical processes of assemblage that connect statements with technologies, objects, institutions, and all the heterogeneous elements that form its network. ANT scholars also tend to include both scientists and laypersons as relevant actors in networks of expertise without pre‐defining scientists as more important (Cambrosio et al., 1992). Eyal (2013) offers an example of understanding expertise from an ANT perspective. He studied the formation of a web of relations that identified autism as a real psychiatric problem, differentiated from other mental problems, and diagnosed on a large scale. The history of this web begins in a specific period (the 1940s when the specific distinction between mental illness and mental retardation was first made), among specific actors (White middle‐class parents of children with autism, psychiatrists, psychologists, and occupational therapists), and using specific objects (records, diaries, mechanisms of data collection, experiments, and legislation). Eyal presents this network of relations as together creating the reality of autism. To explain why autism emerged as an epidemic, Eyal distinguished a specific event (de‐institutionalization of mentally ill patients) as a key episode that set the conditions to make the network stronger. It was not a change on diagnosis, but the change on the custody of children that created “a new institutional matrix—community treatment, special education, and early intervention programs—wherein autism could be identified, differentiated, and multiplied” (Eyal, 2013, p. 867–868). Eyal's work illustrates how STS relies on both an eventful analysis (Sewell, 1996) and relational ontology (Barad 2003) to explain expertise simultaneously as material (de‐institutionalization as an event), social (parents, psychologists, and occupational therapists), and discursive (new contestations of the blame placed on parents for their children's autism). Eyal's treatment of discursive knowledge claims stresses their materially situated character and opens the door to an intersectional understanding of how and when, and by what and whom expertise is itself AZOCAR AND FERREE 1085 gendered (and raced and classed), not merely performed in a way that is intersectionally distinctive by actors with different social locations or histories themselves. Eyal, however, tends to reduce the analysis of power to battles over expert statements (2013, p. 273) rather than already permeating the circuits in which assemblages are formed. Furthermore, the logic of an intersectional approach also problematizes how Eyal makes only male heroes visible and presents the enactments of expertise in a genderless, raceless, and classless manner (e.g., by treating “mother blaming” as usurping “parents' knowledge”; Eyal, p. 883). Although the ANT approach is about discovering which individuals are affected in which ways in the formation of a network of expertise, Eyal missed an opportunity to identify intersectional forms of privilege as they worked to create the assemblage of expertise on autism. However, the relational logic of this ANT perspective could easily become more intersectional, for example, addressing how the process of de‐institutionalization of children already depended upon their institutionalization at home. This would make evident how the process of de‐institutionalization in itself relied on an intersectional logic that pervades caregiving for children and others who are considered less self‐sufficient. Without the intersectional relations distributing power by gender, race, and class together, neither institutionalization nor de‐institutionalization can “make sense” for either the parents or the professionals. Moreover, from STS's “eventful perspective,” actions that shape and constrain unfolding outcomes are stressed. Under these terms, the creation of the expert network on autism might be look like just one of a number of outcomes that emerge from new categories of ability applied to children and their bodies. Following the work of disability scholars (Samuels, 2014), focus would turn to the wider cultural anxieties regarding real and fake disabilities, the knowability of bodies, and the illusions of self‐reliance that have gender, race, class, and other connotations of ability. These create conditions for producing new expert claims justifying placing bodies into specific bio‐medical categories such as autistic. In this example, “asking the other question” (where is sexism and ableism in the formation of a network of expertise around autism?) suggests another way in which intersectional approaches can inform the STS logic of inquiry. 5 | C O N CL U S I O N Although a sociology of expertise is new, the studies of expertise have been done within three different traditions with different understandings of what the term implies: resources as part of professions, enactments in workplaces, and acknowledgements in networks around science. In all these traditions, feminist researchers have played important roles in drawing attention to gendered biases and offering alternative ways of asking the question. Often, however, this research has an “add women and stir” quality, because the fundamental elements of the theory are not recognized as situated in a social science network that is itself shaped by intersectional power relations that would obscure inequalities. Intersectional analysis aims to disrupt these taken‐for‐granted elements of theorizing, which is itself reflexively seen as the expertise on expertise we make claims as social scientists to offer. Adopting an intersectional perspective is not adopting a formula or a specific new theory. Rather, the goal becomes reasserting attention to “conceiving of categories not as distinct but as always permeated by other categories, fluid and changing, always in the process of creating and being created by dynamics of power—[emphasizing] what intersectionality does rather than what intersectionality is” (Cho et al., 2013, p. 795). And intersectionality brings a sensibility to the study of expertise that builds on what other traditions offer. The sociology of professions said very little about the content of expertise other than defining it as esoteric knowledge and instead emphasized the role of battles for professional recognition to secure the social authority of experts. It thus brought social power to the forefront without bringing it into the discourses shaping or being shaped by these struggles. The symbolic interaction tradition in the sociology of work conceptualized expertise as a capacity to accomplish a task built on interactions. It thus made discourse more amenable to study, but separated the meanings imbued in expertise from the embodied actors in local struggles. Theories of “doing gender” challenged this and 1086 AZOCAR AND FERREE allowed gender scholars to move beyond just studying gendered expertise as battles between women and men over expertise understood as masculine and feminine, to emphasize the way in which expertise is actively constructed in interactions where gendered meanings to skills, job requirements, technologies, and body dispositions are attributed to experts. But when the social construction of expertise is separated from the social construction of men and women, conformity to the meanings it already holds is over‐stressed. The STS perspective in its ANT tradition also expanded the interactionist perspective to locate expertise as a network, discursively formed around statements and materially including a diversity of people and objects. Putting the social construction of people, things, and ideas together, ANT widened the understanding of how expertise is gendered to more dynamically address historical processes where power facilitates (or impedes) the assemblage of expert enactments in a network. Our conclusion is that intersectionality adds crucially to all these traditions by showing how power and knowledge—including our own—are related in a wider system of inequality in which gender is one, but only one, significant part. Intersectionality identifies interlocking systems of oppression (i.e., racism, classism, sexism, and ableism) that are rooted in relations of domination and subordination, and inseparably interact to define life possibilities of individuals, all of whom necessarily live at the intersection of multiple (privileged and dominated) identity categories. Making gender and other forms of situated inequality visible in all enactments of expertise illuminates the contingency and complexity of expert practices and their different material and discursive configurations. In the sociology of professions and occupations, an intersectional approach helps to see how privilege and oppression work together in the way in which professional battles for the recognition of expertise unfold. Moreover, intersectionality invites scholars to think about how the social value of groups and expertise work together and why changing either will transform the way in which power gets materialized in professional battles. For the specific case of lawyers in Chile (Azocar & Ferree, 2015), the gendering of lawyers' expertise not only segregated concrete men by age and class and devalued women judges and policymakers but also constructed family law expertise as less “real” and changed the material reality of law by sidelining family law reform. In the sociology of work, when the simultaneity of inequalities and empowerment is included in the analysis of job skills, intersectionality offers new perspectives to understand when and by whom performances of expertise will be understood as “unmarked”—and thus purer and more objective—than those that are done in the matrix of oppression that intersectionality exposes. The work of Wingfield (2007, 2009) illustrated how sexism and racism worked in practice for Black professionals, affecting the way in which they do expertise, but the implicit and invisible baseline of expertise itself was not directly exposed. An additional step would be to problematize the character of material configurations needed for expert performances to unfold as “unmarked,” for example, in the risk‐taking behavior of bankers and financial managers before and after 2008. In the sociology of science and technology, an intersectional approach invites scholars to analyze historical institutional arrangements that may be less obvious because of their congruence with the researcher's own taken‐for‐ granted view. By adding a focus on the processes of racialization, gendering and class stratification, and segregation into the history being traced, ANT scholars are more likely to see the power differentials that run through the different networks being assembled and how these differences make the agency and effects of some actors more easily recognized than others. While we see all of traditions of studying expertise as having valuable contributions to offer, we particularly stress how the combination of discursive, material, and historical analysis in STS offers a promising direction for the study of expertise that takes advantage of an intersectional perspective. We reiterate that the intersectional perspective is to be found not only in studying people or situations that are understood as marginalized or dominated but also in following the guiding principles that we outlined above: recognizing the interlocking character of power relations, viewing these as both discursive and material in their causes and effects, and acknowledging the significance of knowledge relations as a politics of transformation. Because of this, we argue that the study of expertise offers a particularly rich field for learning more about intersectionality through sociological analysis and an unparalleled opportunity for enhancing the reflexive understanding of various ways sociological expertise itself is produced and made effective in the world. AZOCAR AND FERREE 1087 RE FE R ENC ES Abbott, A. (1981). Status and status strain in the professions. American Journal of Sociology, 819–835. Abbott, A. (1988). 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Hidden advantages for men in nursing. Nursing Administration Quarterly, 19(2), 63–70. Wingfield, A. H. (2007). The modern mammy and the angry Black man: African American professionals' experiences with gendered racism in the workplace. Race, Gender & Class, 14(1/2), 196–212. Wingfield, A. H. (2009). Racializing the glass escalator. Reconsidering men's experiences with women's work. Gender and Society, 23(1), 5–26. Witz, A. (1990). Patriarchy and professions: The gendered politics of occupational closure. Sociology, 24, 675–690. How to cite this article: Azocar, M. J., and Ferree, M. M. (2016), Engendering the sociology of expertise, Sociology Compass, doi: 10.1111/soc4.12438 AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES Maria Jose Azocar is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is also an investigative affiliate at the Universidad Diego Portales in Chile. Her research interests are related to the sociology of law and gender. Myra Marx Ferree is the Alice H. Cook Professor of Sociology and Director of the European Union Center of Excellence at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She has written numerous articles about feminist organizations and politics in the United States, Germany, and internationally.