CONCEPT
Jurisdictional Claim
The sociological reading of Luddism as a defense of institutional ecology rather than opposition to technology — the claim of an expert community to continued jurisdiction over its domain of practice.
A jurisdictional claim is the sociological reformulation of what popular discourse misreads as Luddite resistance. Drawing on Andrew Abbott's theory of professions, the concept treats expertise not as an individual attribute but as a collective jurisdiction: a socially organized claim to authority over a particular domain of practice, sustained by training institutions, credentialing systems, quality standards, and economic arrangements. What Luddites defend, in this reading, is not a skill but the institutional ecology within which the skill has meaning — the guild, the apprenticeship pathway, the standards of quality, the professional identity that connects expertise to a way of life. The destruction of the ecology, not the devaluation of the skill, is what generates the characteristic emotional register of Luddite response.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The framework reframes the Luddite response documented in You On AI. Segal identifies the 'expertise trap' — the condition in which genuinely valuable expertise becomes economically irrelevant because the problem it