NGOs and the Sociology of Expertise

• In Event: 3483 - Open Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 13. Professionals, Organizations, and Institutional Expertise

Abstract

International nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) engaged in humanitarian development face challenges of sustaining the organization and its mission. On the one hand, disasters such as the earthquakes in Haiti and Nepal occur quite often and humanitarian NGOs must legitimate their ability to handle the aid delivered for relief. On the other hand, when NGOs are not engaged in urgent crises, they face what may be the harder challenge of acquiring donor’s funds for the development of where they work. Both of these situations require that NGOs convince others of their expertise in humanitarian development. To date, the sociology of expertise has not paid as much attention to how NGOs create an expert identity (Eden et al. 2006).
I draw upon the literatures of the sociology of professionalism and humanitarian development to explore the conditions under which NGOs legitimate their expertise. NGOs blur the boundary in what it means to be an expert which shows how cultural narratives enable the legitimacy of certain identities. The key questions I address are: how do cultural vocabularies of expertise inform claims to expertise made by workers for international voluntary non-profit organizations? How do individuals in volunteer NGOs construct a legitimate understanding of themselves as experts in development? I argue that the creation of expertise in NGOs indicates an explored mechanism in how NGOs acquire and maintain legitimacy.

Author

• Katherine Comeau, University of Notre Dame