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The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.

Non-technical skills are of increasing importance for safety engineers to perform their job. In their position as expert consultants, they work closely with managers. Thus, gaining management support is oftentimes crucial for safety engineers to successfully improve occupational health and safety. Drawing on organizational support theory (OST), this study investigates how safety engineers’ non-technical skills in communication and persuasion (i.e. rational and hard influence tactics) are related with their management support, and how management support is related with their individual task proficiency (ITP). The purpose of this paper is to examine the moderating role of safety engineers’ expert power in this context.

Using an online questionnaire, survey data were collected from 251 safety engineers working in Austria.

Rational influence tactics are positively related to ITP via management support, whereas hard influence tactics are not. Safety engineers’ expert power moderates the relationship between influence tactics and management support and, consequently ITP. High (vs low) expert status strengthens the positive relationship of rational influence tactics on ITP via management support. For hard influence tactics, high (vs low) expert power buffered the negative relationship of upward appeal and pressure on ITP via management support.

Safety engineers should rely on rational persuasion when cooperating with management to obtain support and improve their own performance.

This study connects the effect of influence tactics in the context of safety engineers’ work performance with OST. It demonstrates that safety engineers’ influence tactics are related to work role performance through management support and that these relationships are moderated by expert power.

Knowledge‐based and expert systems are quickly becoming an important component of knowledge organizations, enterprise knowledge management, and core competences. They are being used in various applications ranging from usage in the US White House to chemical plants worldwide. Presents an overview of expert systems technology and then specifically addresses their use in a critical domain ‐ life support systems.

Drawing on Suchman’s conception of cognitive legitimacy and Boswell’s account of the political functions of expert knowledge, this paper aims to study the due process followed by the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) prior to the publication of the first version of the International Integrated Reporting Framework (IIRF). Specifically, the author analyses the lobbying strategies used in the comment letters sent by a subset of lobbyists, “the experts”, represented by accounting bodies and firms, regulators and academics.

From both a form- and meaning-oriented analysis, this paper focuses on how the experts resorted to the functions of knowledge when they took part in the IIRF’s public consultation. The author first carries out a quantitative content analysis of the responses to the 2013 Consultation Draft submitted by those constituents considered as accounting expert lobbyists. Then, the author analyse how these actors framed their comments under expert knowledge to legitimise the IIRC, the IIRF and the accounting profession itself.

The findings suggest that the expert groups welcomed the opportunity, not simply to legitimise the IIRC through their democratic support, but to provide a technocratic settlement that ensures the due process is based on the mobilisation of expert knowledge as a legitimate source. By drawing on the cognitive legitimacy of expert lobbyists, the IIRC drew on the political functions of expert knowledge to reduce uncertainty and gain stability.

Analysis of the lobbying strategies used by the accounting experts whose position could make a difference and receive more attention from the IIRC makes this contribution of particular interest, especially since the first version of the IIRF sought to guide disclosure and sustainable business practices around the world.

Experts as political actors play a legitimising role since they are capable of producing relevant knowledge that, due to its nature and scope, certainly affects policymaking and sustainable development.

This research provides a sociopolitical perspective to comprehend how some lobbying strategies, in this case, of expert actors, contribute to legitimising a standard-setter body and its endeavours in the context of voluntary standards.

Formal planning can yield many benefits for all types of companies but many companies are experiencing difficulties with marketing planning. It has been recognized that expert systems would bring benefits to companies by helping them make better strategic plans, but the development of expert marketing systems is difficult and time consuming. Discusses some important issues related to the development of expert marketing systems. These issues are associated with understanding the domain, identifying users’ problems, knowing the limitation of expert systems and designing user‐friendly interface. These issues seem to have not been addressed adequately from expert system developers. It is hoped that discussions herein would help others to understand these issues better and to develop more successful expert marketing systems.

This paper seeks to develop understanding of how competent practitioners develop into experts through learning expert thinking processes and how knowledge management initiatives can be used to structure this development.

A literature review‐derived research model underpinned the semi‐structured interviews with 21 acknowledged experts from a wide variety of disciplines and sectors. A qualitative exploratory research design was used to study how the experts go about developing other professionals in the field through showing them how they learn themselves and making visible their own thinking processes. The implications for KM programs were developed in conjunction with KM practitioners.

The experts used various methods to make their thinking visible through demonstration of practice and direction of structured learning activities. KM's contribution to this form of expertise development lies in structuring approaches to making work in progress more visible (through technology and process) and through introducing a coaching framework that enables and supports reflection on practice.

The specific context of expertise development that has been studied is those situations where generalized principles and explicit knowledge cannot be readily captured in artifacts. Further research is needed to show how this can be combined with other approaches to developing and retaining expertise. Confirmatory research is also needed to refine and further validate the proposed recommendations for KM practice.

The paper prepares the ground for integrating an important aspect of expertise development within KM programs.

The paper extends KM's contribution to expertise retention and development to include structured support for the development of expert thinking processes.

Expert systems are computer software packages that experts in specific fields enrich with their knowledge by distilling their expertise into a set of laws for the system. The development of expert systems and the contribution they can provide in banks, whereby financial experts can produce application programmes to help lesser experts solve problems in specialised fields by responding to program queries, eg. with regard to loan approval, cross‐selling, risk analysis, treasury operations and so on, are discussed.

Process facilitation as part of a complex intervention for changing or improving practices within workplaces is becoming a common work method. The aim of this study was to investigate what characterizes the process-facilitating role in a complex intervention.

The present study focuses on a complex work environment intervention targeting eight organizational units (workplaces) in the Swedish healthcare sector. The study applies a mixed-method approach and has been carried out in two steps. First, a qualitative process evaluation was performed. Secondly, an evaluation was conducted to see to what extent these identified conditions and mechanisms affected the quantitative intervention effect in term of sickness absence.

The analysis shows that the facilitating role consisted of three overlapping and partially iterative phases. These phases involved different activities for the facilitating role. Depending on how the facilitating role and the intervention were designed, various supporting conditions were found to significantly affect the outcome of the intervention measured as the total sickness absence.

It is concluded that the facilitation is not static or fixed during the change process. Instead, the facilitation role develops and emerges through the process of support during the different implementation phases.

The facilitative role of performing support is based on a combination of support role activities and expert role activities. The support role focuses on support activities, while the expert role includes capacity building through knowledge- and legitimacy-oriented activities.

This study contributes to earlier research by developing a methodological approach for carrying out process facilitation in complex interventions.

This paper addresses the performance, training and organisation of expert valuation witnesses in the UK. Previous research, based on analysis of professional negligence cases in the UK courts, had found that expert valuation witnesses do not always perform rationally, for example informing courts that valuations can be undertaken within acceptable tolerances of valuation accuracy, while giving expert evidence that differed by more than these tolerances. There was evidence that, while well aware of their overriding duty to the court or tribunal, expert witnesses were frequently producing client‐biased valuations. Such findings provoked questions as to whether standards would be improved by two recently proposed alterations to current practice: either the introduction of a system of compulsory training and accreditation for such witnesses, or a change from the process by which expert valuation evidence is normally presented (one expert witness for each party to a dispute) to the use of a single expert, appointed either by the parties jointly or by the court. A case analysis is performed and conclusions discussed.

Public procurement is a major driving force that can be used to advance societal goals such as sustainability. The lack of strategic management and top-level commitment have been found to be major hindrances to the promotion of sustainable public procurement (SPP). This study aims to examine the functioning of a successful Finnish SPP development programme, the KEINO Academy (2019–2020), that tackled these challenges in a holistic way.

The article is mainly based on qualitative analysis of interviews with 24 municipal representatives.

The KEINO Academy advanced SPP management through the following functions: legitimising SPP development work, structuring SPP development work, offering expert support and facilitating peer support. The functions were mainly able to meet the key challenges experienced by the participating municipalities. However, some challenges cannot be directly solved by an intermediary such as the KEINO Academy. These challenges include, for example, a lack of resources.

On the basis of the study, SPP development programmes should: build a holistic working model; respect the versatility of the participating organisations; involve all the key people in the organisations, including the directors; and sustain change.

The main theoretical contribution is the combination of two streams of literature, those of SPP management and intermediary functions. Further, the article makes an empirical contribution by studying the KEINO Academy as a pioneering SPP development case.