The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance

Citation

Kekäle, T. (2009), "The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance", Journal of Workplace Learning, Vol. 21 No. 7, pp. 575-576. https://doi.org/10.1108/13665620910985559

This book is definitely not new, not but it has come to my hands only now, three years after publication. And it is the definitive tome in what expertise is, how it develops, and what makes experts somehow different from the rest. At least in Northwestern Europe I dare to state that there is currently am increasing demand for nearly everybody to become a generalist in their institutional stage of learning, while they are required to become specialists through learning their work. (I just yesterday heard this stated by the CE of personnel of one of Finland's biggest companies: “Give us suitable raw material, and we take over from there and make them experts”).

Expertise research has now, in the words of one of the editors, K. Anders Ericsson, reached a significant milestone: the first handbook of the field is published. The role of such a handbook typically is to give an introduction, or 101, of what is known today. This kind of book is suitable for whoever wants to get a basic building block for his or her study in the field, either new doctoral students who want to study the nature of expertise, or persons who come from other directions and who have come into contact with the expertise phenomenon and would like a theoretical understanding of it. These kinds of research‐based handbooks are not necessarily like engineers' pocket handbooks giving practical advice for problematic situations or reminders of basic formulas or theorems of the field. (Goal/QPC's Memory Jogger pocket handbook on continuous improvement methods is 164 pages long and weighs three ounces; the Handbook is very nearly 1,000 pages with a smallish font, and weighs about three pounds. Do not read it in bed.) Instead, books of this type are a good source for anybody writing scientific texts and planning research topics, due to their well thought‐out nature and good referencing. The Handbook is right on the spot for the researcher or philosopher of expertise, and very reasonably priced (US$55 on Amazon) in its category.

What is there, then, in this Handbook for a workplace‐learning researcher ? First, the definition (p. 3): you workplace‐learn and learn, until you are “someone widely recognized as a reliable source of knowledge, technique, or skill whose judgment is accorded authority and status by the public or his or her peers. Experts have prolonged or intense experience through practice and education in a particular field”. Then, the implications (p. 9): “once we know how experts organize their knowledge and their performance, is it possible to improve the efficiency of learning to reach higher levels of expert performance in these domains? It should also be possible to answer why different individuals improve their performance at different rates and why different people reach very different levels of final achievement. Would a deeper inderstanding of the development and its mediating mechanisms make it possible to select individuals with unusual potential and to design better developmental environments to increase the proportion of performers who reach the highest levels?”.

For a person like myself, a researcher wanting to understand how software programmers learn their work, chapters 8 to 18 (research methods for studying expertise for different viewpoints; a nearly 200‐page “book within a book”) are particularly worth the price of the book. These chapters are generally well written also for a non‐psychologist and include a wide variety of approaches (observation, textual and protocol analysis, psychometric approaches, knowledge assessment in laboratory, task analysis, etc., and another four chapters for studying how experts acquire their expertise).

Chapters 19 to 33 are more area‐specific, describing what expertise might be in a wide variety of fields (from medicine, decision‐making and software design through music and sports to such areas as chess, maths and history). The book ends with some attempts to regeneralize: the titles of the last nine chapters include “A merging theory of expertise and intelligence” (Horn and Masunaga), “Tacit knowledge, practical intelligence and expertise” (Cianciolo, Matthew, Sternberg and Wagner), and “The influence of experience and deliberate practice on the development of superior expertise performance” (Ericsson). All of these could have been JWL article titles, and an invitational Special Issue on expertise development in the workplace could feature in books in the future.

In summary, this book is recommended for all current and future researchers of expertise and high‐level workplace learning; definitely not a handbook for practitioners or even people who want to become experts.