Rhetoric of epistemic authority: Defending field positions during the financial crisis
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article we explore how elite actors respond to a field-wide crisis. Drawing from a study of CEOs of large US banks in the immediate aftermath of the global financial crisis, we show how elite actors use rhetorical strategies to defend their dominant position in the field. Specifically, we show how actors strengthen their epistemic authority – the perceived expertise and trustworthiness of an actor – through four distinct but interwoven rhetorical strategies. Actors used two internally-directed means of strengthening epistemic authority by providing rational guarantees and expressing normative responsibilities, and two externally-directed strategies that sought to strengthen their own epistemic authority by lowering the epistemic authority of others through critiquing judgments and questioning motives. We contribute to research on defensive institutional work by highlighting how elite actors rhetorically defended their position following a field-wide crisis.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it