PERSON
Andrew Abbott
The sociologist who turned professions into an ecology—revealing that jurisdictional boundaries are not reflections of competence but political settlements, and that AI is not disrupting individual professions but the competitive system on which all professional authority rests.
Andrew Abbott spent his career insisting on the one truth his discipline preferred to overlook: that professions do not exist in isolation, they exist in relation to one another, competing for
jurisdictional territory in a living ecology. His landmark 1988 work
The System of Professions documented, through two centuries of evidence, that what we call professional authority is not a natural reflection of competence but a political achievement—maintained through credentialing, gatekeeping, and the careful construction of public belief that only those who followed the prescribed path may legitimately do the work. That construction rests on a single foundation: the scarcity of specialized knowledge. When AI arrives and makes knowledge abundant, it does not disrupt a profession. It removes the foundation on which every profession simultaneously stands. Abbott supplied the
processual sociology that makes this moment legible—a framework insisting that social reality is always mid-sentence, remaking itself through the competitive dynamics of groups vying for the right to claim a