Hybrid Epistemic Authority: A Framework for Understanding Professional Credibility on Digital Platforms

Professional communication increasingly unfolds on digital platforms where traditional credentials no longer guarantee credibility. This working paper develops an integrated framework of hybrid epistemic authority to explain how organizational leaders construct professional credibility in environments driven by algorithms. Drawing on theories of epistemic authority, platform affordances, and professional self-branding, I conceptualize authority as simultaneously institutionally grounded and performatively achieved. The framework identifies eight interdependent dimensions: traditional competence, digital communication skills, strategic authenticity, contextual adaptivity, institutional embedding, strategic restraint, reactive authority, and emotional labor.Preliminary findings from interviews with eleven senior executives on their LinkedIn use reveal that authority construction requires continuous negotiation between competing necessities. These include authenticity versus optimization, visibility versus protection, and personal versus organizational identity. C-level leaders navigate these tensions through strategic practices that balance genuine expression with platform-specific performance demands. This framework contributes to scholarship on digital leadership, professional expertise, and platform governance by demonstrating that contemporary authority is no more solely possessed by credentials or defined by performance. Rather, it emerges out of a delicate interplay of communication and the sociotechnical constraints that we can’t control. The model provides an analytical means of dissecting how digital platforms alter professional credibility and the implications for equity, career sustainability and organizational communication.