This chapter argues that the challenge that faces public professionals operating as democratic professionals is to respect other sources of expertise as well as to understand how they are constituted and how to facilitate their use. The definition of expertise which will be used in this book is that the combination of knowledge and skills creates expertise. This is generated through practical experience combined with theoretical study and learning (Polanyi, 1958; Polanyi, 1966).

Crouch (2015) showed how the market over-simplifies the knowledge needed to run public services, undermines professional expertise and leads to short term ‘gaming’ of the system. The fragmentation of public services has damaged the quality and destroyed much institutional knowledge which is handed down and exchanged between public professionals (Whitty, 2000: Ball, 2008). The relationship of the democratic professional to the building up of expertise will have to change and the recognition of the value of diverse sources of expertise will necessarily change perceptions of what constitutes professional knowledge and expertise. At the same time as acknowledging the diverse sources of knowledge and expertise, the democratic professional will have to engage with the tensions and conflicts arising from a widespread distrust of experts and expert knowledge.

Knowledge, skills and expertise

Drawing the concept of ‘human plurality’ from Hannah Arendt's vita activa, which she defined as a “basic condition of both action and speech, has the twofold character of equality and distinction” (Arendt, 1958: 175) informs an analysis of how knowledge and skills contribute to different ways of seeing the world and to understanding different worlds (Arendt, 1958; Ranson, 2018). It can help to appreciate different life-worlds and so inform the creation of the public sphere. For a democratic professional wanting to examine knowledge, skills and expertise within public services from a democratic perspective, acknowledging plurality will have to inform an analysis of the types of knowledge and skills that underpin existing public services as well as the impact that outsourcing and privatisation have had on the knowledge and skills base used to run public services.

Traditionally the role of professionals has been to act as guardians of privileged expertise. Democratic professionalism provides expert opinions in more accessible ways, but this does not mean that experts are redundant; rather they have to operate with more diverse and pluralist sources of knowledge and information.