The Aristocracy of the Experts and Specialists

“The expert,� G. K. Chesterton wrote, “is more aristocratic than the aristocrat, because the aristocrat is only the man who lives well, while the expert is the man who knows better.�

In our day, aristocracy is out of fashion, but expertise is all the rage. And, increasingly, expertise means specialization. The trend toward specialization will probably continue for some time.

Peter Drucker, who is one of my favorite experts precisely because he is not a specialist, sees the trend in business:

“As more information becomes available, fewer levels of management but more specialists of all kinds are needed. Changes in the economic and social environment are pushing businesses in the same direction. Twenty years ago, high-level specialists were, on the whole, confined to research and to data processing.

Different Specialists

“Today, even a medium-size company may well have an environmental specialist, one assistant treasurer who does nothing but manage cash and liquidity and tries to protect the company against foreign-exchange losses, and another one who watches over costly benefits programs.�

Needless to say, specialization is more common, and narrower, in large organizations than in small ones. More than half of American workers work in organizations that employ more than 100 people; a third work in organizations that employ more than 500. We can admit that the chief cause of the trend toward specialization is the rapid growth of knowledge in many areas. But a subsidiary cause is bigness itself.

People working in a large organization will have more specialized functions than people working in a small organization simply because there are more people among whom the work has to be divided. It isn’t always easy to tell whether specialization is driven by function or size in a given case. But whatever the original cause, the process of increasing specialization often becomes self-perpetuating.

Tom Peters and Robert Waterman described it in “In Search of Excellence�: “Along with bigness comes complexity. . . . And most big companies respond to complexity in kind, by designing complex systems and structures. They then hire more staff to keep track of all this complexity. . . .�

The Bureaucrat

It is almost inevitable that as specialization grows an ever-larger proportion of specialists will, in effect, be specializing in specialization. Indeed, we have a name for those whose primary function is to administer, interpret and perpetuate organizational complexity. They are called bureaucrats.

It is a sign of the times that Mark Green and John Berry, in their book “The Challenge of Hidden Profits,� argued recently that the term bureaucracy is properly limited to government agencies. They proposed a corresponding term for the same phenomenon in private business: corporacy. Thus even the critics of excessive specialization seem driven to find specialized words to characterize the categories of specialization in which specialists who specialize in specialization specialize. So, I guess, it goes.

Specialization of language mirrors specialization of function. And, unfortunately, those experts who are least secure in their own expertise are most likely to use their specialized terminology as a protective covering. Outsiders can’t criticize what they can’t understand. Thus, the expert, perhaps even more than the aristocrat, can conceal all manner of corruption behind the cloak of authority.