Almost forty years ago, the publication in 1988 of Abbott’s seminal book, The System of Professions, clarified jurisdiction as the socially recognized link between an occupational group and a domain of work. Abbott approached this link through the triad of diagnosis, inference and treatment, i.e. as a theoretical device to understand dynamics of change surrounding professional practices and expertise. Although these insights came before the release of the World Wide Web, we argue they are still valuable for assessing the longer-term impact of digitalization on professions. We launched this Special Issue in 2021, before the arrival of generative artificial intelligence; as such, it was not aimed at examining changes linked to specific technologies. Instead, it focused on how digitalized information systems foster, inhibit, or otherwise transform professionals’ capabilities, and how such changes reconfigure boundaries of professional work. The articles published as part of this Special Issue provide critical insights into how digital templates organize quantification (Berlinski & Morales, 2024), how epistemic cultures shape relevance and control in data-driven environments (Knudsen et al., 2025), how digital platforms reconfigure public evaluation and emotional accountability (Morinière, Georgescu, & Bez, 2025), and how standardization underlying digitalization projects organizes autonomy at work (Chabanet & Noël-Lemaître, 2025). An Abbottian reflexive analysis of these contributions leads us to conclude that digitalization: 1) affects professions unevenly, through disturbances that impact specific domains distinctively; 2) reconfigures professional work particularly by targeting the inferences that shape expertise; and 3) expands arenas for critical public scrutiny while public and private organizations exploit data infrastructures to intensify standardization and performance management. In a way, this Special Issue constitutes a reminder that although technological change is often believed to have rapid and far-reaching effects, the social organization of expertise has its own inertia, politics, and vulnerabilities. The diffusion of technological tools can be swift, but the resettlement of professional jurisdictions is typically uneven and contested.