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This chapter discusses recent empirical studies of interactional expertise. Interactional expertise involves “walking the talk” of an expert community, which means using the language of the community in ways that are indistinguishable from the language usage of an expert practitioner. A kind of Turing test is conducted for interactional expertise, in which an audience of experts tries to distinguish between an interactional expert and an actual expert, based on their answers to the same questions. The chapter describes how other researchers can conduct such tests. It concludes with a reminder that acquiring interactional expertise takes substantial time and effort—a fact which organizations encouraging and funding collaborations should keep in mind.

This chapter examines whether service science, management, and engineering (SSME) will evolve into a distinct expertise community, or whether it will remain primarily an interactional expertise. The discussions cover the service scientist as an interactional expert; trading zones; creating IT that facilitates trading zones; when participants disagree on the type of trading zone; ethical issues in SSME; and whether SSME is an esoteric or an interactional expertise.

The first part of this chapter introduces the idea of interactional expertise, while the second part focuses on its implications for philosophical theories of the importance of the body in forming our conceptual world. The chapter argues that the way philosophers have dealt with the body turns attention away from the most important questions and that we cannot answer these questions without making the notion of socialization, and therefore interactional expertise, a central concept in our thinking. This makes language at least as important, and often more important than bodily practice in our understanding of the world. The notion of a disembodied socialized agent leads in the direction of interesting questions while the notion of an embodied but unsocialized human actor is unimaginable.

Trading zones and interactional expertise can help organizations avoid the problem of normalized deviance. Normalized deviance occurs when individuals within organizations, often skilled professionals, playing what they believe to be their well-defined professional roles, reclassify danger signals as within the bounds of normality—and continue a course toward disaster. This chapter shows how the formation of trading zones can prevent the kind of normalized deviance that contributed to the Columbia shuttle disaster and the collapse of WorldCom.

This chapter discusses the author’s efforts to bridge the chasm between molecular biologists and computer scientists. The author decided to go beyond the acquisition of interactional expertise by actually becoming a molecular biologist to see if dual training was the answer: Perhaps molecular biology and computer science should be combined. He made a deal to do computational work for biologists in exchange for being trained to do their sort of research—a very simple trading zone. The author succeeded in learning enough molecular biology to become a contributory expert, but spent most of his time doing computational work because the biologists did not become familiar with his expertise, at which point he became aware of the extent of the chasm between biology and computation. His next attempt was to design BioBike, a tool that biologists could use to perform their own computations. Although BioBike has been very useful to computer scientists helping biologists, it has not been picked up by the biologists themselves as a standalone tool, and has facilitated trading zones between biologists and programmers, acting as a kind of hybrid of a creole and a boundary object.