Right Advice, Wrong Voice: Legitimacy Portfolios in Dementia Caregiving

• In Event: Sociology of Culture Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): 17. Trauma, Grief, & Caregiving

Abstract

Practical knowledge does not always consolidate into stable expertise can remain provisional despite demonstrated competence. This paper argues that the difference lies in the social structure of validation. Drawing on Glaeser's political epistemics, which establishes that knowledge claims require validation through socially structured encounters operating by different logics in different institutional spaces, I introduce legitimacy portfolios: configurations of validating relationships across credentialed, peer, and family domains whose approvals do not transfer between domains.

The analysis draws on cross-national qualitative research with 18 dementia caregivers in Italy and the United States, positioning dementia caregiving as a strategic site where the credentialing scaffolding typical of professional expertise is absent and the validation architecture becomes visible. Suchman's legitimacy criteria and Abbott's jurisdictional theory specify the audience-differentiation mechanism: different audiences apply structurally different evaluative standards, and recognition in one domain cannot substitute for its absence in another.

The study's most distinctive finding concerns normative filtering. Every participant articulated explicit principles for what good practice requires, and these principles appeared to function as active filters on incoming validation. Two practitioners receiving recognition from the same credentialed domain experienced opposite outcomes depending on whether the form of recognition aligned with their normative framework. Validation, the data suggest, must arrive not only from the right space but in a form compatible with the practitioner's own account of what good care demands.

The legitimacy portfolio concept extends political epistemics by specifying non-transferability as a structural feature of multi-audience validation and identifying normative filtering as a condition existing frameworks do not address.

Author

• Cameron Gabriel Beckett, University of Chicago