Promoting and consolidating the Office’s claims
to expertise
Building a claim to expertise is a continuous process. As Office auditors were developing expertise in measuring government performance, they made claims to promote their emergent expertise in documents and verbal statements on how performance measurement should be implemented in Alberta. As argued by Abbott (1988), claims of expertise are indissociable from prescriptions on how specific tasks (here, to measure the performance of government) should be conducted. This section examines the elements of the emerging and increasingly stabilized network in Alberta by which the claims of audit expertise about performance measurement were consolidated.21