Expertise is ... never having to say you are sorry:Academic development and the artistry of improvisation

This chapter explores the relationship between improvisation and expertism through the lens of academic development. Data generated through epistolary collaborative auto-ethnography provides four examples which illustrate how academic developers negotiate the tension at the heart of academic development identity: both experts and improvisers. Using Bourdieu’s concept of cultural and social capital as a theoretical framework for analysis, the authors explore how these examples reveal the orthodoxies and heterodoxies which create the Academy and its inhabitants, sustained by shared investment in the ‘rules of the game’ – ‘illusio’. In so doing the authors open possibilities for dissent and change.