Michel Anteby & Valerio Iannucci (2025). Beyond professional experts: The rise of lay, counter-, and neo-experts as alternative claim-makers

Scholars and commentators alike have documented growing mistrust towards professions. Increasingly, the public is turning away from their prescriptions in favor of alternative, less formal guidance, fueling what has been labeled a crisis of professions. This article first sheds light on the nature of alternative claim-makers whose growing influence challenges professional experts’ standing. We present three types of such claim-makers and distinguish them based on how they muster support for their pursuits, lay experts (e.g., patient activists) who convince audiences based on extensive experiential familiarity with a particular domain, counter-experts (e.g., anti-vaccination advocates) who rely on a collection of counterevidence to disprove established knowledge in a domain, and neo-experts (e.g., sleep coaches) who build on the practical know-how developed via repeated interactions with their audiences in areas where formalized knowledge is scarce. We then argue for the need to re-link the ecologies of expertise and professions to better make sense of the relationships among all these experts. We detail the constitutive elements of both ecologies, their intersections, their temporalities, and why their frictions contribute to the crisis of professions.

By surfacing the variety of experts and drawing attention to the interstitial actions and spaces between them, we spotlight the critical need to rethink who qualifies as an expert and the relative efforts needed for each expert-type to maintain its standing. Overall, our article more fully captures the threats and opportunities surrounding the erosion of professions today while raising timely implications for the future of professions, careers, and society. Read the publication, Beyond professional experts: The rise of lay, counter-, and neo-experts as alternative claim-makers, here.