It may not yet warrant a place among Prevention Action explainers but the spectrum of “Stradivari Syndrome” will be familiar to many in the field: research centers, program developers and Type 2 translation researchers will know the symptoms if not the diagnosis.

The Stradivari in question is the seventeenth century Italian luthier Antonio, synonymous with everything rare, miraculous and valuable about craftsmanship.

Behind him was a collective enterprise, a workshop in Cremona, which "operated from dawn to dusk, with the work team literally rooted to the benches, since the unmarried apprentices slept underneath them on bags of straw”.

And Stradivari himself "was all over it, popping up unexpectedly everywhere – an imperious, even hectoring character who sometimes threw spectacular tantrums, oozing instructions and exhortations".

Woven from contemporary accounts, the description of the violin maker at home is by Richard Sennett, a distinguished Julliard School musician himself, but one better known as Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and, in the US, as a social and cultural historian of the city.

Sennett is here interested in Stradivari's weakness – which was by one reckoning knowledge transfer (too little attention given it ) or, by another, expertise (too much of the wrong kind).

Provocative probing among ideas about good work and expertise and into the important difference between them is a feature of The Craftsman, in which Sennett defends the quality of engagement in making, which Anton Chekhov, for example, applied equally and without distinction to his parallel lives as a writer and a doctor.

Sennett’s argument about conditions inside the workshop of Stradivari is that, while good work was undoubtedly done there, the master lacked the expertise to guarantee that it would endure without him – in his absence or after his death.

"He could not pass on his experience, which had become his own tacit knowledge."

To explain why the violins manufactured by the sons and lifetime disciples of Stradivari were not in the same league as those whose production the father oversaw, Sennett shrugs off the conventional wisdom that the skills of exceptional makers frequently die with them. He also sidesteps Robert Merton’s construction of the great scientist as one who provides giant shoulders for lesser followers to stand upon.

Rather, he argues that the decline of the Stradivari workshop illustrates a critical distinction, vital in an age of quality control and performance indicators, between the sociable and the antisocial expert.

"A well-crafted institution will favor the sociable expert; the isolated expert sends a warning signal that the organization is in trouble."

Antisocial expertise emphasizes inequality. It preoccupies itself with the difference between the stupid and the smart, arousing humiliation and resentment. Sociable expertise puts originality and repair on the same plain: it encourages and advises; it relishes “the thousand little everyday moves that add up in sum to a practice”.

And it is the antisocial expert who falls into Stradivari’s trap of believing that his or her expertise is ineffable. “Local family doctors – those reassuring figures in medical romance – seem particularly to suffer from Stradivari Syndrome,” Sennett suggests (Dr Chekhov here being the honorable exception).

But, crucially, he portrays the Syndrome as a two-way stretch, by quoting the sixteenth century judge-philosopher and advocate of civil disobedience Étienne de La Boétie: "So many men, so many villages … suffer under a single tyrant who has not other power than the power they give, who could do them absolutely no injury unless they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict him … It is therefore the inhabitants themselves who permit, or rather bring about their own servitude."

Looking for the music in the varnish

Of course, if it did not already recognize some of these pitfalls, translational research would not have invested so much in establishing the rules and requirements of successful “bench to bedside” replication, or counted among them the need to reconcile the authority of the scientist with the autonomy of the practitioner.

With the difference that program developers who try to guarantee the transfer of the methods they craft – and their way of crafting methods – are inclined to concentrate on writing codes of practice and setting out looser or tighter specifications for compliance.

Richard Sennett associates this preoccupation with recipes with the vain efforts in the centuries after the Cremona workshop lost its genius to replicate the original Stradivarius by analyzing the shape of the instrument and chemical composition of the varnish.

He would recommend equivalent interest in the value of “craftsmanship” for its own sake, and in cultivating in the laboratory, the office or the children’s center the ethos of sociable expertise, on the basis that there can be no substitute in any manual or recipe for a craftsman’s wholehearted and unconditional engagement with his or her work.

• As an intervention against Stradivari's Syndrome, Richard Sennett recommends Harvard's The GoodWork® Project, the creation of Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education Howard Gardner, which set out in 1996 to identify individuals and institutions that exemplify good work – “work that is excellent in quality, socially responsible, and meaningful to its practitioners” and to determine how best to increase the incidence of good work in society.

The Craftsman by Richard Sennett is published in paperback in the UK by Penguin Books.

Kevin Mount