Connection to academic knowledge is a defining feature of modern expertise, and it is often treated as the key to maintaining professional authority. It is unclear, however, just where and when it has to be made and how it might fail. Interviews with economists working in a variety of different settings in the United States suggest that most of their academic knowledge is too abstract to be of much substantive use, and their academic standards of scientific rigor may play only a minor role in legitimizing their day-to-day authority. This does not threaten their status, however, because economists have become entrenched in a variety of organizational settings as possessors of a craft-like “core” of valuable skills. The momentum of this basic institutionalization suggests that although connection to elite academic knowledge is a defining characteristic of modern expertise, it may not always be central to explaining ongoing expert authority.
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