Seminar – Expert-Audience Disconnects and the Reshaping of Expertise: US Puppeteers Move from Stage to Screen

Dr Michel Anteby, Boston University Questrom School of Business

Expertise is central to today’s knowledge economy. Yet as experts increasingly move between work contexts to perform their jobs, the translation of expertise across distinct contexts remains less understood. Building on a relational view of expertise, we examine how changes in work configurations – here, relational disconnects between experts and their core audience – might affect the nature of expertise. Through an inductive study of puppeteers’ move from “stage” to “screen” (namely, an expert-audience disconnect), we show that while all puppeteers drew on comparable basic skills to perform, puppeteers in stage relied heavily on audience interactions to gain recognition. By contrast, puppeteers in screen gained recognition by showcasing their technical proficiency. The latter understanding of expertise as a readily-accessible proficiency was also associated with a critical shift in learning practices – from learning via experimenting with audiences to learning by repeatedly training individually – and reinforced by the nature of work patterns in screen contexts. As puppeteers’ labour market shifted and they came to perform more work disconnected from their core audience, the nature of expertise shifted as well. More broadly, we argue that expertise should not be viewed as a static construct and that novel work configurations can gradually shape the essence of expertise. We discuss implications of these findings for expert work in organisations and beyond.

Speaker bio

Michel Anteby is an Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business and (by courtesy) Sociology at Boston University’s College of Arts and Sciences. Prior to joining Boston University (BU), Michel taught in master, doctoral, and executive programs at the Harvard Business School and the Yale School of Management.

His research looks at how individuals relate to their work, their occupations, and the organisations they belong to. He examines more specifically the practices people engage in at work that help them sustain their chosen cultures or identities. In doing so, his research contributes to a better understanding of how these cultures and identities come to be and manifest themselves. Empirical settings for these and other inquiries have included airport security officers, clinical anatomists, factory craftsmen, and university professors.

Michel’s research has appeared in journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Ethnography, Organization Science, Social Science & Medicine, and Sociologie du Travail. He also is the author of two monographs: an ethnography of the Harvard Business School titled Manufacturing Morals: The Values of Silence in Business School Education (also available in French and Chinese) and a study of illegal factory production titled Moral Gray Zones: Side Productions, Identity, and Regulation in an Aeronautics Plant. His work was recognised by BU’s Slatkin Family Fund award, NYU’s Herman E. Krooss award and the David M. Graifman Memorial award. He also is a recipient of the Donald & Valerie Ruth Honerkamp fellowship, a Susilo fellowship, and a Marvin Bower fellowship.