As Andrew Abbott argues: “Only a knowledge system governed by abstractions can redefine its problems and tasks, defend them from interlopers and seize new problems.” If one's expertise is tied to certain specific techniques, work processes or contexts (Abbott's example is the long-since defunct occupation of railway surgeons), one is liable to become obsolete when techniques change, new technologies are introduced, or other experts deploy abstractions to redefine what one does as merely one instance of a larger category of which they are in control. Expertise, thus, is doubly external to the
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