Platformization of professional governance and its implications for expertise, authority, and self-regulation

• In Event: Science, Knowledge & Technology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 5: Knowledge Production in the Age of AI

Abstract

This paper examines the platformization of professional governance and its implications for expertise, authority, and self-regulation in technologically saturated societies. It argues that digital platforms and artificial intelligence (AI) are not merely tools augmenting professional practice, but active intermediaries that restructure knowledge production, labor processes, and governance arrangements. Through algorithmic management, data extraction, and rating systems, platforms introduce novel mechanisms of surveillance and control that blur the boundaries between managerial oversight and professional autonomy.

The analysis presented in the paper highlights how AI simultaneously augments and displaces expertise, reshaping task design, skill requirements, and professional identities. Platformization alters traditional forms of social closure, educational credentialing, and state-based regulation, while fostering new forms of mediated self-governance, particularly in emerging platform-based professions. At the same time, corporate ownership of digital infrastructures and large language models raises critical questions about epistemic authority, accountability, and the governance of expert knowledge.

The paper concludes that professional governance is increasingly hybrid and contested, shaped by interactions between state regulation, market logics, and platform-based algorithmic systems. Safeguarding professional integrity in this evolving landscape requires renewed empirical and theoretical attention to the governance of AI-driven expertise.

Authors

• Seppo Poutanen, University of Turku

• Anne Kovalainen, University of Turku, Finland