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The Coevolution of Tasks and Expertise

2025· book-chapter· en· W4416535789 on OpenAlex
Lisa E. Cohen, Le Hung Bui

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typebook-chapter
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicExpert finding and Q&A systems
Canadian institutionsMcGill University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsTask (project management)CoevolutionTRACE (psycholinguistics)Dynamics (music)Core (optical fiber)Task analysisWork (physics)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

How do tasks and expertise coevolve? Tasks and expertise are tightly linked and essential for the execution of work in organizations. Despite the link in the practice of tasks and expertise, scholars have yet to theorize them as coevolving. A small body of research provides evidence that by failing to treat them this way, research misses insights critical to explaining the evolving nature and future of work. To explore these dynamics, we analyze interviews and observations of people involved with the data-collection task in an early-stage startup. We trace the task’s detailed movement across jobs and by doing so, observe complex dynamics between the task and associated expertise. The task moved from proto-analysts to analysts to data-entry operators and, with that, the core expertise required for the task moved across positions. In addition, doing data collection produced expertise that those in the analyst position applied in performing other tasks. In part, because it facilitated the production of expertise, analysts continued to collect data – a task that they routinely complained about doing – even after it migrated to data-entry operators. Based on these findings, we develop the distinction between core and produced expertise. We also refine our understanding of hiving-off with an alternative explanation for why menial tasks might not be hived-off. Finally, our findings enhance our understanding of the dynamics around change in jobs and task segregation.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.936
Threshold uncertainty score0.315

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.013
GPT teacher head0.224
Teacher spread0.212 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Quick stats

Citations3
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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