Speaker: Roberta Bernardi – University of Bristol
Title: A story of change from the periphery: How members of an Online Health Community challenge the legitimacy of professional elites
For further information and to register for this seminar with Ticket Tailor please sign up here
Abstract:
This talk problematises the role of Online Communities (OCs) as social spaces for user-led production of knowledge, which traditionally belonged exclusively to the domain of scientific and professional experts or ‘professional elites’. It highlights how members of a diabetes online community question the legitimacy of medical professionals’ expertise and advice to legitimise alternative treatments of diabetes. This study advances our understanding of how peripheral actors who do not have legitimacy within an organisational field can challenge the status quo and drive change by contesting the legitimacy of professional elites. More broadly, it contributes to the contemporary debate of the democratisation of expert knowledge through the Internet by showing how legitimacy practices by the periphery can drive positive change but also fuel the loss of trust in expertise.
Bio
Roberta Bernardi is an Associate Professor of Digital Health and Innovation at the University of Bristol Business School. She earned her PhD from the University of Warwick in 2012 and has more than 10 years of experience researching digital innovation in healthcare. She has done research on the diffusion and adoption of health information systems and telehealth from various theoretical perspectives, including institutional theory, affordances, identity theory, and the sociology of professions. Her recent work focuses on the impact of online health communities and social media on medical expertise, medical knowledge, and healthcare innovation. An experienced qualitative researcher, Roberta is currently working on combining text analytics with the human interpretation of texts to advance the analytical as well as interpretative power of narrative methodologies in the analysis of social media conversations.