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AbstractExpert knowledge is an essential component of modern society. It is also a potentially difficult topic for sociology because of the importance sociology attaches to culture and context. The sociology of science has emphasised the continuity between scientific expertise and more traditional forms of knowledge. Whilst this suggests an increasing 'democratisation of expertise' is desirable, it also risks erasing the idea of expertise itself. This might be particularly detrimental for sociology as it restricts the role of sociological inquiry to examining how expert status is attributed rather than understanding what expertise is. This paper describes these developments and contrasts them with other approaches in which expertise appears less important. It concludes by setting out a new approach to expertise that respects the role of culture in generating knowledge but, by stressing the importance of socialisation and experience, argues for a more nuanced conception of expertise as both real and unequally distributed.

Plagiarism by students is seen as an increasing problem. The fear is that students will use the internet to obtain analysis, interpretation or even complete assignments and then submit these as their own work. Electronic plagiarism detection services may help to prevent such unfair practice but, in doing so, they create a new problem: certifying the absence of plagiarism. This article reports the results of an evaluation of one such service within an interdisciplinary school of social sciences. The article describes how the system works and the experiences of staff and students in using the service, together with an evaluation of the data generated. The key findings are that the service did identify examples of poor scholarship and unfair practice that had been missed under the usual marking system but that rigorously checking every script for plagiarism was impractical. Trust and student honesty thus remain central to a successful academic system.

Given what we know about the nature of knowledge and scientific work it no longer makes sense to think of scientific knowledge as demarcated from "ordinary" knowledge through its methods or the characteristics of the scientific community. As the social studies of science have shown, boundaries become ambiguous when viewed close up so that science merges with ordinary knowledge. But does this mean that distinctions between knowledge claims rest on nothing more than social conventions, powerful as these might be? The articles in this special issue address this question from a variety of perspectives, while this introduction sets out this broader framework and highlights the themes that unite the individual articles. Our central argument is that although boundary work is difficult, complex, and contingent, it is too important to be left to chance or tradition. We need to rescue expertise from the antiessentialist consensus that there is nothing but attribution.

A one-period, simultaneous-offers bargaining game is analyzed in which, for each player, there is a small probability that his or her proposal will not reach the other player. The unique pure strategy equilibrium offers are identical to those of the Rubinstein (1982) infinite-horizon, alternating-offers bargaining game. This provides a novel interpretation of Rubinstein's result, as well as a new non-cooperative implementation of the Nash Bargaining Solution.

Though Social critics have often spoken of the "wage slavery" associated with modern capitalism, it is more common to believe that coerced labor was banished with the coming of modern standards of civilization. Thus the corvee of ancient China, the feudalism of Western Europe and Japan, and the New World enslavement of blacks in the 17th-19th centuries are seen as products of those earlier and less enlightened ages, mere way stations in the historical evolution of modern day economies.