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.
