This chapter highlights the careers of Save the Children’s principal field officer in Nigeria, Lieutenant-Commander A. R. Irvine Neave and the African Development Trust’s, Guy and Molly Clutton-Brock to explore the legacies of mission and empire. The former viewed poverty as a product of individual ignorance; the latter argued that it was due to the structural injustice of racist legislation across Southern Africa. Despite these differing imperial and political outlooks, both were, however, ‘techno-missionaries’: products of both the missionary past and the technocratic future of development. Mission stayed on after the empire, but it was transformed by the rise of the modern NGO and the humanitarian agencies such as Oxfam, Save the Children and Christian Aid. It resulted in a ‘third colonial occupation’ of volunteer aid workers alongside the experts and technocrats of social and economic development.

Over the past thirty years, the anti-corruption agenda has been integrated into dominant discourses of development, good governance, and democracy, reshaping political practices and knowledge production. This involved redefining concepts, operationalizing measures, and legitimizing policies. While academics have renewed focus on corruption, emphasizing global convergences and institutional designs, limited attention is given to how anti-corruption expertise is constituted and mobilized. Gaps remain in understanding the approaches shaping anti-corruption knowledge and how inequalities in knowledge production influence public policy. Recognizing its embeddedness requires examining historical roots, key actors, methods, and mobilization channels. This chapter uncovers the historical origins of anti-corruption conceptions, identifies experts by epistemological and methodological approaches, and interprets their positions. The study identifies three dominant poles of power: American academics, quantitative economists, and media-exposed practitioners. These poles reflect disparities in professional stability, autonomy, and proximity to international financial institutions. Using a historic, reflexive, and relational perspective, the investigation maps the social forces and structures shaping the field, offering insights into the production and mobilization of anti-corruption knowledge.

The world of research and innovation is no exception to a broader societal demand (at least in liberal democracies) for more direct participation of citizens in various areas of public and political life, as attested by the significant development of various forms of “citizen science” programs. Such inclusiveness is nowadays commonly considered a means to better align the outputs of scientific research and innovation with the values and needs of society, hence fostering a more humanistic science. This chapter discusses the cogency of this requisite by addressing both epistemological and political challenges raised by opening up the process of knowledge production to nonprofessional inquirers and stakeholders. It assesses the prima facie tension between the inclusion of stakeholders in scientific research and traditional expectations of objectivity and impartiality. It also challenges the valuation of culturally well-entrenched features of science such as the valuation of unpredictable and unforeseen applications of scientific developments. Finally, it identifies various challenges to be met to enable a more inclusive science to effectively reduce the gap between its outputs and society’s needs, such as the need for an evolution of the professional training of scientists and of incentives from scientific institutions.

This chapter explores the dynamics of knowledge and authority within virtual communities, where participants contribute asynchronously to shape collective understanding around specific topics. Through the interactive sharing, modification, and recirculation of information, participants recognize cognitive authority in online interactions. The notion of authority is examined across various domains: in business, authority transcends expertise to include digital presence and persuasive influence, quantified by metrics such as follower counts. Similarly, in health communities like PatientsLikeMe, personal experiences often hold sway comparable to conventional medical advice, particularly in less-researched medical conditions. Such experiences contribute significantly to medical knowledge and research, bridging gaps left by formal studies. The chapter highlights qualitative aspects of authority, emphasizing active engagement and adept use of linguistic resources to establish credibility and influence. It underscores the negotiation of authority among participants, where legitimacy enhances the capacity to claim authority within hierarchical online structures. By analyzing interactions and recognition within these communities, the chapter elucidates how individuals emerge as authoritative voices, shaping the production and legitimization of knowledge in different fields.

The primary progressive model for curing the perceived ills of social media – the failure to block harmful content – is to encourage or require social media platforms to act as gatekeepers. On this view, the institutional media, such as newspapers, radio, and television, historically ensured that the flow of information to citizens and consumers was "clean," meaning cleansed of falsehoods and malicious content. This in turn permitted a basic consensus to exist on facts and basic values, something essential for functional democracies. The rise of social media, however, destroyed the ability of institutional media to act as gatekeepers, and so, it is argued, it is incumbent on platforms to step into that role. This chapter argues that this is misguided. Traditional gatekeepers shared two key characteristics: scarcity and objectivity. Neither, however, characterizes the online world. And in any event, social media lack either the economic incentives or the expertise to be effective gatekeepers of information. Finally, and most fundamentally, the entire model of elite gatekeepers of knowledge is inconsistent with basic First Amendment principles and should be abandoned.

Geopolitical tensions are reshaping the future of work, influencing who works, how work is performed, and where it takes place. As nations become increasingly protective of their technological advantages and intellectual property, remote work is facing resistance and there is a shift toward more localized talent pools. While creating new opportunities in some regions, it is also limiting them in others. The nature of work itself is evolving in response to these tensions. Remote work, cybersecurity, new protocols, and organizational practices are fundamentally altering how employees interact with information and each other. Moreover, the physical location of work is being reevaluated. Companies are revising job descriptions and requiring top managers to engage in the political process. There is a cultural shift in how work is done as companies import practices from other locations. Organizational changes tilt the balance toward discord rather than harmony. There is more emphasis on retooling and reskilling as countries try to maintain a domestic labor force.

Democrats prize experts in staffing the Executive Branch while Republicans prefer political operatives and media spokespersons. But across the issue spectrum, policies are increasingly complicated and technical, requiring knowledge of many previous rounds of institution-building and policymaking. New social problems require remixing of complex policy tools, often led by research and experts. Addressing climate change and public health, for example, requires professionalized expert workforces and technical analyses. Even seemingly value-based areas of policymaking such as economic development and racial discrimination increasingly require subject-matter experts and formalized training. And the issue of higher education itself has increasingly divided the parties. Chapter 6 documents how each policy area is increasingly dominated by complex proposals from liberals accompanied by conservative suspicion of expert-led governance. Policy knowledge and evaluation capacity have become increasingly tethered to the Democratic Party, with believably nonpartisan expertise now in short supply.

Increasing educational standards in the workforce have increased the use of experts throughout the economy, leading to processes that more closely resemble bureaucracies and stakeholder policymaking, with an increasing emphasis on culturally liberal values such as diversity, representation, and social responsibility. The guiding industries and workforces of the scientific and technology sectors have enabled a technocratic ethos in government and industry. Public opposition to technocracy and skepticism of meritocracy is growing among voters, allowing conservatism to brand itself as an opposition movement to the extension of government reach and the associated prevalence of “politically correct” messages and practices across educational institutions and in the workplace. The polarized American brand of politics now pervades internal debates across organizational sectors, enlarging the scope of activist politics beyond campaigns and government, especially where educational and cultural divides are strongest. The distinct styles of the culture war’s two conflicting sides have become more dissimilar at the national, state, and local levels, even in ostensibly apolitical arenas.

In the late 1970s, queer parents increasingly fought to maintain custody of their children from different-sex relationships. These mothers and fathers were responding in part to the gay liberation movement, which inspired them to come out and demand their rights. Also important was that the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental illness, which eliminated what had been an all-but-impenetrable barrier to custody. Courts were nevertheless reluctant to grant these petitions, fearing that the children would learn to be gay or lesbian from the adults in their lives. In response to these court cases, social scientists developed research studies that concluded parental homosexuality had no effect on the future sexual orientation of children. Based on that work, family courts around the country granted custody to lesbian mothers and gay fathers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, creating the first wave of visible queer-headed families.

Chapter 4 traces a rising market of professional consultants and think tanks in policymaking and political activity. Upper-caste and elite-educated men have long filled positions of power, including parliamentary seats, administrative services, business groups, advisory boards, and chambers of commerce. Despite some shifts towards caste-based affirmative action since the 1980s, the political classes remain predominantly elite (Verniers and Jaffrelor 2020). In 2014, anti-incumbent sentiment led to widespread distrust in existing experts, such that elite intellectuals and Western-educated economists holding political and policymaking positions were replaced by technical professionals: engineers, business managers, and consultants. As an alternative to intellectual and insular elites, this group of professionals projects itself as politically agnostic, rational, and a practical source of business-minded knowledge. This group, however, is no less insular or exclusionary: one set of intellectual experts has merely been replaced by a more elite, deracinated group of professional consultants situated in global management consulting firms.

In this chapter we review some of the biases by health policymakers, public health decision-makers, and other experts that have emerged during the current COVID-19 pandemic. Alongside the formidable and tireless work on the ground of thousands of doctors, nurses, and healthcare professionals, the COVID-19 pandemic has documented an unprecedented series of distorted or sub-optimal decisions and behaviours by health policymakers and expert health decision-makers in countries considered to be at the forefront of public health, such as the United Kingdom and Italy, for example. Some of these biased decisions and behaviours have had dramatic effects and deserve a critical analysis under the lens of behavioural economics. In this chapter we list and describe some of the behavioural distortions that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of these behavioural biases have not been previously documented, or categorised as such, or may have been discussed under different names.