“How Do We Replace Concrete?” Building Sector Professionals Addressing Knowledge Asymmetries about Climatewise Housing

Abstract

The aim of the article is to explore how housing and construction field experts give advice concerning climate-wise housing in a professional magazine, and what types of potential knowledge asymmetries are connected with the advice. By potential knowledge asymmetries we refer to situations in which experts writing to other experts in a professional magazine indicate differences in the depth, scope, or type of knowledge possessed about a topic by offering advice to the readers. By offering advice, the authors position themselves as having epistemic authority on the topics they address. Based on argumentative, editorial-type texts in a Finnish building and construction field magazine, a pragmatic discourse analysis combined with qualitative content analysis of ways of advice-giving and sources of potential knowledge asymmetries in the context of climate-wise housing was conducted. The findings reveal that (1) all combinations of explicit-implicit and targeted-not-targeted advice-giving are present in the data, but explicit and not-targeted advice are most prevalent; (2) there are five main sources of potential knowledge asymmetries concerning system-level phenomena: technical, legal-regulatory, political, economic, and expertise-related. The paper concludes by discussing the potential and limitations of advice-giving in written expert-to-expert contexts in contributing to advancing climate-wise housing.