The essays collected here display an extravagant range, depth, and scale of insights, reflections, and explorations covering an extensive array of topics. Chapters cluster around the question of what to make of a burgeoning constellation of experts and the frequently incongruous (or inconclusive) claims to expertise that these experts produce. We learn about a vast range of incidents and episodes. We learn of the ever accelerating expansion of expertise and more expertise and the war-like rumblings of diverse organizational contests over territory and authority. Reading these chapters in and of themselves provides an education. They are instructive about the knowledge-dependence of major sectors of the contemporary world and how these knowledge-dependent sectors interface with and ramify from the micropractices of everyday life as well as strategic global initiatives.

— from the epilogue by Paul Rabinow, professor of anthropology, University of California, Berkeley

The essays collected here display an extravagant range, depth, and scale of insights, reflections, and explorations covering an extensive array of topics. Chapters cluster around the question of what to make of a burgeoning constellation of experts and the frequently incongruous (or inconclusive) claims to expertise that these experts produce. We learn about a vast range of incidents and episodes. We learn of the ever accelerating expansion of expertise and more expertise and the war-like rumblings of diverse organizational contests over territory and authority. Reading these chapters in and of themselves provides an education. They are instructive about the knowledge-dependence of major sectors of the contemporary world and how these knowledge-dependent sectors interface with and ramify from the micropractices of everyday life as well as strategic global initiatives.