Distrust in Crisis: The Elimination of the Common Cognitive Basis of Technostructure in the 21st Century

Our research paper intends to tackle the question, how the technological development poses a challenge for experts to comprehend and test each others' professional knowledge, already specialised and differentiated from each other so distantly that - according to our hypothesis - a mutual trust among professions can be increasingly difficultly to achieve. This mutual trust was earlier the outcome of a common cognitive basis of different vocations, thanks to which physicians, physicists, engineers or biologists could understand and validate each others’ professional results. A lightning bulb, a successful surgery, or a running automobile was more than authentic and trustworthy evidence for the general functionality of specific knowledge, contributing to the Durkheimian ‘organic solidarity’ within representatives of different professions. The sphere of these experts – serving on an ‘in-between’ level below political decision-makers and above technical or administrative staff – can be called as ‘technostructure’, coined by John Kenneth Galbraith in a slightly different meaning, focusing solely on the business sphere and on corporative structures. Present research intends to broaden its denotation a bit, covering the totality of white-coller workers with specialized expertise within national economies as a whole. According to present research paper’s hypothesis, technological development – meanwhile enabling to explore the outer space or operate in the nano-world – has been partially undermining the common cognitive basis within this technostructure, therefore mutual trust and solidarity has been on the decline. The hypothesis has been tested with a survey among university students of ecological, economic and medical studies, who have to declare their own personal opinions about each others’ professions. These educational strands were chosen as being the cognitive basis for tackling climate crisis, financial crises and COVID crisis respectively. The survey among students has to reveal how specialised information about these crises – and proposals for their treatment – is accepted or neglected, or even denied by others.