In the narrow lanes of medieval London, a cordwainer cuts soft Spanish leather by candlelight. Every cut is a decision: how much to take, where the material will yield, what the foot inside will need. The shoe is made once, by hand, for one person.
The cordwainer’s knowledge lived in his hands. It was transmitted through apprenticeship, recognised by the guild, and economically valuable because he controlled production. The shoe was not just a product. It was the materialised form of expertise that society had learned, through specific institutions, to see and reward.
Then the industrial revolution disassembled that relationship — not just between the worker and his product, but between the worker and his institutional recognition.
The history of work is also a history of how expertise is recognised — who gets to define it, who is permitted to claim it, and how institutions decide what it is worth.
The unmaking
Mechanisation transformed shoemaking from craft to industry. Machines cut, stitched, and shaped faster than any hand. Knowledge that had lived in the worker was extracted and embedded in workflows, production lines, and equipment. The guild’s autonomy dissolved into the rhythm of the factory floor.
The cordwainer did not simply lose his job. He lost the institutional arrangements through which his expertise had been visible and valuable. The guild that had regulated entry, transmitted knowledge, and conferred status was rendered obsolete. What remained was labour — hourly, interchangeable, priced accordingly.
This is worth sitting with. The expertise did not disappear. Skilled shoemakers continued to exist. What changed was whether the institutions around them could see the expertise, classify it, authorise it, and pay for it as something distinct from generic manufacturing work.
That distinction — between expertise existing and expertise being institutionally recognised — turns out to matter enormously.
The craft that survived
Not all of shoemaking was swept away. A specialist residue persisted: bespoke makers, repair craftspeople, and crucially, orthopaedic shoemakers who served people whose bodies could not be standardised. These were the workers the factory model could not replace.
Over the following century, that residue gradually reconstructed itself as a modern health profession: pedorthics — the assessment, design, and modification of footwear and foot orthoses for people with medical conditions affecting the foot and lower limb.
The lineage is traceable. The functions now associated with pedorthists have deep roots in the medieval shoemaking guilds. The craft knowledge survived; what was rebuilt around it was the institutional architecture of a profession — education, credentials, professional governance, access to healthcare markets.
In Australia, the title “pedorthist” emerged through the 1990s and 2000s as associations reformed. The Pedorthic Association of Australia formalised in 2013. The first university-level Bachelor of Pedorthics cohort graduated in 2015.
But here is where the story becomes instructive rather than simply historical. Pedorthics has rebuilt some of that institutional architecture. It has not rebuilt all of it — and the gaps are not incidental. They are where the profession remains most vulnerable.
Pedorthics now has formal education and a profession-led registration system. What it has less securely is industrial visibility — whether it appears as a distinct occupational category in workforce data, enterprise agreements, and industrial awards, or gets folded into “other health support workers” — and fiscal reach, meaning consistent access to the funding streams that translate professional recognition into economic viability.
This unevenness is not a transitional problem on the way to full professionalisation. It is the normal condition of a small, specialist occupation whose expertise is genuinely hard for institutions to see. The more completely expertise is encoded across education, regulation, industrial classification and funding, the more durable its professional recognition becomes. Where those encodings are partial, as they are for pedorthics, the profession’s recognition remains contingent rather than settled.
A small occupational group can possess highly specialised expertise, formal university training, and decades of established practice — and still be statistically invisible, inconsistently funded, and poorly understood by employers and workforce planners. The expertise and the institutional recognition of expertise are not the same thing, and conflating them is one of the persistent errors in how we think about workforce design.
The coder as mirror
Now consider the coder.
Early programming culture resembled artisanal practice: self-taught mastery, shared tools, open communities, strong norms of craft. There was no guild, but there was a culture of expertise — standards of elegance, pride in efficiency, the horror of bad code.
That culture is under pressure from a direction the cordwainer would recognise.
Generative AI is doing to coding knowledge something analogous to what mechanisation did to craft knowledge: capturing parts of it, formalising them, and embedding them in systems that can reproduce aspects of the work at scale without the original expert present. The individual judgment of thousands of programmers has been absorbed into training data and now operates, partially, without them.
This is not simply a story about job displacement. It is a story about where expertise resides — and whether the people who once held it retain the institutional arrangements through which it was recognised and rewarded.
The question for coders is the same question the cordwainer faced two centuries ago, and the same question pedorthics is navigating today: when the technology changes, can the people who hold the expertise rebuild the institutional arrangements through which that expertise is seen, valued, and paid for?
Coders do not yet have a settled answer. Some parts of the field are formalising through university education, accreditation and professional engineering frameworks. Others remain deliberately open, portfolio-based and resistant to credential closure. AI is arriving before those tensions have been resolved.
The question that persists
What the cordwainer, the pedorthist, and the coder share is not a professional structure. They share a vulnerability: the vulnerability of any worker whose expertise is real, substantial, and difficult for institutions to see.
The guild system resolved this problem imperfectly and often unjustly — controlling entry, conferring status, restricting access. Modern professional frameworks resolve it more openly but no less incompletely. Some professions are thoroughly encoded across every institutional mechanism that matters. Many are not. And the ones that are not tend to be the ones whose expertise is newest, most specialised, or most easily overlooked.
Technology does not make expertise obsolete. It relocates expertise. What follows — whether the people who hold the expertise retain visibility, autonomy and economic value — depends not on the technology but on the institutional arrangements built around it.
The cordwainer’s knowledge did not vanish when the factory arrived. It moved. The question was whether the institutions around him could follow.
Susan Nancarrow is a health workforce sociologist and Principal of HealthWorX Futures.
