The Performance of Expertise

The Spectacle of Expertise: Why Financial Analysts Perform in the Media. By Alex Preda (Columbia University Press, 2023) This engaging volume is ostensibly concerned with the world of finance, financial analysis, and media performance. As an ethnography that draws on observation of television and radio studios and conversations with financial analysts within the context of Hong Kong as a global financial center, it is most surely all of these things. However, I would contend that the readership for this work should not be limited to those sociologists who attend to the sociology of finance or the sociology of occupations. The audience for this volume is more broadly situated among those who examine social interaction, talk and the practical accomplishment of expertise within dramaturgical settings. Preda's “The Spectacle of Expertise” is a work of broad appeal. For while it is marked by a detailed rendering of the setting at hand, it is a valuable resource for those who work within the dramaturgical tradition developed by Goffman (1959, 1967) and advanced by his followers and interpreters (e.g., Burns 1992; Edgley 2016). This volume embraces the dramaturgical interest in talk, frames, and the embodied self. In addition to these more foundational concerns, this work innovatively attends to the performance of “expertise as spectacle”—associated with staged presentations and strategies of truth-claiming. While this is a work that offers a detailed analysis of financial talk in the context of mediated presentations, I turn my attention in this review to themes that transcend the uniqueness of the research setting and may be of broader interest to those working within the symbolic interactionist tradition. Specifically, I emphasize two central themes: expert talk and embodied expert talk. The theoretical importance of this work is realized through situating the analysis in the context of an ethnographically grounded examination of the production of expert talk in the context of financial journalists who work in radio and television in Hong Kong. This work examines the distinct practices of financial analysts who produce written reports (and whose talk is directed toward investors), academics working in the area of finance (whose professional talk is attentive to models and peer-audiences) and those who offer another form of expert talk—expert witnesses. Each of these four areas (the academic study of finance, financial analysts, finance journalist, and expert witness) all trade to some extent on generating and maintaining the forms of expertise that accompany them. Preda (p. 77) suggests that the process by which expertise is realized is both “game and spectacle.” This distinction speaks to Goffman's (1959) examination of the staging of performances. In this instance, Preda points the reader to regions in which the game is played (e.g., laboratories, experimental settings)—settings that may possess many of the qualities of backstage regions—whereas the spectacle of expertise is performed in the presence of audiences—in the front stage regions of the setting. The insight that accompanies this argument is of considerable relevance for researchers in a wide variety of settings. Preda suggests that where institutions rely on expertise, they also rely on the various spectacles of expertise. This observation invites researchers to attend to the place of expertise and its realization in various research settings. Schütz' (1962) distinction between everyday knowledge, well informed knowledge and expert knowledge is helpful here. For where members of various subcultures are laying claim, in part, on creating and disseminating expert understandings of situations at hand, we might profitably follow Preda's lead here and examine both the game of creating what passes for expert knowledge and the spectacles which accompany the performance of expertise. Reading Preda in this light, researchers are encouraged to attend to the various collaborations, uncertainties and technologies that accompany the realization of the spectacle. While the cross-situational applicability of an examination of expertise and expert talk is an important aspect to the work, its central purpose is to be found in the careful, nuanced and detailed ethnographic rendering of the settings under examination. To illustrate this point, I turn my attention to aspects of the argument advanced in the chapter, “Strategic Facework: The Expert Presentation of Experts.” Fundamentally, there is an important distinction to be made between expertise which is rendered via text (e.g. academic journal articles, formal reports from state mandated inquiries, legal rulings) and expertise that is performed in front of audiences. While both the author of written text and the “performing expert” might be quite attentive to anticipated audiences, it is the performing expert whose physical appearance/body is directed toward and cognizant of perceived audiences. Preda also notes the importance of embodied expert talk in the specific context of the work of financial analysts. Contrary to the assumption that much of the expert work of financial analysts is confined to the development of written reports, Preda (p. 109) suggests that “they regularly produce expert talk as intrinsic to financial intermediations—that is, to the work of capturing capital and steering it into markets.” As such, financial analysts develop a sense of appearance norms within various settings and develop a gender-specific understanding of how one's physical presence and related costuming convey an “expert appearance.” As one informant shares, “if we go into a client meeting, we will wear a tie, but many times the client will not wear a tie .… In a meeting you know who is pitching to whom, and the person who is being pitched.” (p. 110). Consistent with Goffman's (1959) interest in impression management, the body in this context reflects “signs given” that offers important interactional cues for participants. Preda extends the examination of the embodiment of expertise by addressing the diversity that marks the presentation of self among financial analysts. Rather than there being a more singular, normalized and standardized “look,” subcultural members adopt a variety of appearances. These presentation strategies are audience attentive, serve to denote some version of financial expertise, and embrace various available social types. Klapp's (2017) thoughtful rendering of political types encourages an attentiveness to the hero, the villain and the fool. We see related types in this setting as well. Actors adopt types that may attempt to neutralize audience concerns about the level of expertise of the analysis, assume more comedic stances to mitigate errant financial forecasts, and embrace a Buddha-like presentation of self as a means of bolstering audience perceptions. Preda concludes this chapter by contrasting financial expert talk with everyday discourse. While everyday talk is marred by sentence fragments, misused words, and various other “misspeakings” through both performance and presentation, expert talk on finance broadcasts seeks “to deploy efforts to ensure their talk cannot be faulted” (p. 130). Through the embodiment of talk, actors employ a variety of strategies to set financial talk and claims of expertise apart from common sense understandings of finance and markets and by so doing engage in a variety of audience attentive aligning actions. Psathas (1996:391) is critical of Goffman in that he “remained uninterested in connecting his own theorizings with those of others, of using concepts in the ways others had used them. In this regard his originality must be celebrated. But his disconnection with other developments in philosophy and the social sciences must be lamented.” This criticism can be leveled against various applications of Goffman—that they have produced disconnected “islands” of knowledge (Grills 2020). With Preda's presentation we have a fine example of a Goffmanesque work that resists this line of critique. While arguing effectively for a detailed, focused examination of relevant settings, this text also is broadly attentive to the conceptual interconnectedness of the project at hand. This work deserves an audience far beyond the substantive areas it addresses. It has much to contribute to an examination of talk, expertise, audience attentive action, the (embodied) presentation of self, and knowledge claiming. For Goffman (1959) one of the fundamental challenges of the human condition was the discernment between cynical and sincere behavior—and the various secrets that accompany team performances. And as Preda (p. 219) affirms, audience members never fully know the relationship between “talk at hand and the truth.” Given that the speakers truth claims may be challenged in a variety of ways there is a certain precariousness to truth-claiming and embracing the identity of the expert. This is a work that carefully examines how, “at least for the time spent in front of the curtain, this is a presence to be defended, a defense in which speakers invest their whole body and speech” (p. 219). This is an investment shared by many social actors, and it is through the more generic applicability of this central problem that this work holds the promise of informing a wide range of research. Scott Grills is a Professor of Sociology at Brandon University. His published research has included work in the substantive areas of administration and management, deviance, education, health and illness, music, political life, and research methods. He has served as the president of four organizations, one of which was the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction.

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