Specialists over generalists?: Examining discursive closures and openings in expert collaborations

Prior research on expert collaborations has focused on how specialists – experts with deep domain knowledge – work across disciplinary boundaries with other specialists, with much less attention paid to how generalists – experts with broader and connective knowledge – work alongside specialists. To address this gap, we examined collaborative work requiring expertise of generalists (regional planners) and specialists (civil engineers). Our interview data revealed that privileged values of specialist expertise (i.e., exclusivity, neutrality, and feasibility) could close interpretive possibilities of their collaboration and that generalists engaged in communicative expertise positioning to make their expertise work with that of specialists. We developed a grounded model of generalist-specialist collaboration theorizing how they used discursive closures and openings to accentuate gains from their different expertise.