Davide Nicolini, University of Warwick: "Towards A Rhizomatic View of Expertise. Insights from the Field of Cardiology"

Location:  TC.5.12

Time and Date: Tuesday, December 15, 2015, 16:30

In this presentation I will  interrogate current views on expertise building upon the study of an innovative medical cardiology procedure called transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI). I will start by summarising recent theories that describe expertise as a social, relational and material phenomenon. I will suggest that our case invites to extend this view. In the case of TAVI, in fact, expertise occurs in many locales concurrently; each with their own trajectory and history; and that expert activity feeds upon the connections established and maintained between locales. Accordingly, expertise is not so much distributed or relational as it is trans-local and rhizomatic. Being an expert implies not only being socialised and becoming versed in the local doing; it also implies participating in, learning to navigate, and exploiting alternative potentially competing circuits of knowledge.

Davide Nicolini is Professor of Organization Studies at Warwick Business School where he co-directs the IKON Research Centre. In the past he has held positions at The Tavistock Institute in London, ESADE in Barcelona and the University of Trento and Bergamo in Italy. His work has appeared in a number of major North American and European journals. His current research focuses on the circulation of knowledge and ideas in organizational settings, the dynamics of innovation and the development of practice-based approaches and their application to phenomena such as collaboration, innovation and change in organizations. Although these days most of his empirical work is carried out in healthcare organisations, he has also studied construction sites, factories, public organizations, pharmacies, and scientific labs.