When and how do professionals incorporate input from lay audiences? | WIP Seminar with Valerio Iannucci

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Meeting ID: 884 5862 9462 
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Abstract | Professionals routinely draw on input from expert audiences such as peers and critics, but have historically been more hesitant to engage lay audiences who lack knowledge and skills. In recent years, however, shifting cultural and market dynamics have expanded lay audiences’ expectations to participate in professional decision-making, even in high-stakes domains. This study examines when and how professionals incorporate input from lay audiences, and with what consequences for expert judgment. Drawing on a 15-month ethnographic study of cancer treatment decision-making in a U.S. hospital, I analyze 84 consultations in which patients sought to revise recommended plans of care. I find that professionals’ responsiveness to lay input hinges on the composition of the lay audience and the experienced sense of accountability it triggers. When accountability heightens, professionals tend to reject lay input in order to prevent what they perceive as foreseeable errors. By contrast, when accountability shifts away from professionals and toward lay audiences that witness, endorse, or advocate alternative courses of action, input is more likely to be incorporated. Overall, this study advances a novel understanding of professional accountability as interactionally experienced and fluctuating, and recasts lay audiences as collaborators rather than mere evaluators of professional work.

Valerio Iannucci is a doctoral candidate in the Management & Organizations department at Questrom School of Business (Boston University) and in 2025 was awarded the "Outstanding Research Award" by the Questrom PhD Program. He use ethnographic methods to study how laypeople contribute to work, professions, and organizations and, during his doctoral studies, he has examined the grassroots response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of alternative, polarizing experts in society. In his dissertation, he explores the making of shared care plans between clinicians and patients in breast, prostate, and thyroid cancer clinics at a large teaching hospital in the U.S. He also reviews for the OMT division of the Academy of Management, and serves as an ad-hoc reviewer for the American Journal of Sociology, the Journal of Management Studies, and the British Journal of Sociology.