Professions In The Age Of Emerging Technologies: The Loss Of Professional Jurisdiction In Dentistry

Abstract

Whereas traditionally professionals used their expertise to claim control over an area of work, emerging technologies are associated with the promise of outperforming professional expertise and thus, are increasingly used to challenge professionals’ market turf. Yet, we know little about how the process of jurisdictional contest unfolds when emerging technologies are used to disrupt an established profession. Building on qualitative field data—including semi-structured interviews and extensive archival material—we show how over time, despite intensive efforts, the elite profession of orthodontists lost their established exclusive control over their market turf of teeth-straightening to teleorthodontics companies and dentists. Our process analysis shows how the jurisdictional contest initially centered around the outperformance claims of algorithmic technologies, but then eventually degraded into algorithms entering a “parasitic” relationship, in which technological capabilities derived a source of “living” and growth in a co-opted existing professional sub-group of dentistry. Our study makes contributions to the literature on professions and algorithmic technologies

Presenter

Anne-Sophie Mayer is an assistant professor at the KIN Center for Digital Innovation at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She holds a PhD in business administration and a master’s degree in international culture and business studies. Her research focuses on how emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence transform knowledge work in organizations. In this context, Anne-Sophie is particularly interested in changes between and within professions that emerge from the introduction of emerging technologies. Her work has been published in leading academic journals, including the Journal of the Association for Information Systems, Information Systems Journal, Information and Organization, and MIS Quarterly Executive.