Community-owned digital infrastructures must adapt without a focal organization capable of directing system-wide change. Adaptation becomes more difficult as infrastructure development creates investments, rights, obligations, and service dependencies that cannot readily be undone. We examine how adaptive resilience is accomplished under these conditions through an abductive longitudinal study of Guifi, a community-owned telecommunications infrastructure. Drawing on assemblage theory, we develop a process model comprising four organizing configurations: Anchoring, Opening, Rupture, and Renewal. The model shows how initially workable alignment between material infrastructure and governance comes under strain as new technologies, actors, and investments enter. When governance fails to keep pace with these changes, control and dependency become unevenly embedded in the installed base, creating misalignment and a credible risk of fragmentation. This risk can prompt actors to renegotiate rights, responsibilities, and governance arrangements around the infrastructure on which they continue to depend. We conceptualize adaptive resilience as the relational accomplishment of reconstituting workable material-governance alignment while sustaining continued operation. We also introduce cumulative infrastructural commitments to explain why infrastructural development makes reconfiguration increasingly consequential and only partially reversible. The study extends assemblage theory by showing that relations may remain contingent and detachable while their reconfiguration becomes unevenly feasible, costly, and collectively consequential.
Emerging technologies, such as blockchain and artificial intelligence, are enabling new configurations of practices, roles, and meaning systems within mature fields that can disrupt institutionalized field arrangements and alter the centrality of institutional logics. Given the growing significance of this phenomenon, we aim to understand the constitutive role of technology's materiality in such processes. Through a historical processual analysis of Bitcoin, we propose a process model of disruptive institutional change, in which a challenger proto-institution emerges from the periphery and introduces a competing logic in a mature field. We identify four mechanisms underlying this process: inscription, field-anchoring, translation, and contestation. Our proposed framework highlights the dual role of the technology artifact: as a contra-institutional technology that carries a marginal conflicting logic into the mature field and, simultaneously, as a boundary object that remains interpretively flexible and affords agency to heterogeneous actors drawing on different institutional logics. We theorize that the marginal conflicting logic inscribed in the technology is instantiated and strengthened at the field level as diverse actors, drawing on different institutional logics, develop and adopt novel technology-based field practices. As a boundary object, the technology enables these distributed efforts by actors pursuing different goals. As a carrier of the marginal conflicting logic, it anchors the dispersed efforts to the strengthening of that logic and, consequently, toward its emergence as a competing logic in the field.
We study how a large German automotive manufacturer built an in-house, proprietary generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) solution to assist their employees with everyday work tasks. Using Simon's view of design as problem-solving as our interpretive scaffold, we examine the GenAI development initiative as a configurational search process in which both the problem space—use cases and user needs—and the solution space—the capabilities of the GenAI solution—are initially unknown and iteratively co-evolve as developers and users explore and gradually align both spaces. We suggest this process begins with affordance-led decomposition and unfolds through a heuristic search loop that involves probing through provisional solutions, capability re-basing, and governance-bounded configuration. Through this loop, a satisficing and bounded design configuration emerges in the form of a GenAI solution that is relevant to some but not all potential use cases and leverages some but not all GenAI capabilities. Our analysis draws attention to decomposition as a pragmatic organizational configuration mechanism for GenAI solutions and identifies transferable configurational heuristics that explain how developers and users jointly search for satisficing alignments between organizational problem and technological solution spaces when both are initially unknown and dynamically evolving.
Management research and practice commonly assume that data are assets that represent facts about an organization or its environment. Yet, organizational data do not come into existence by themselves. Information systems research has addressed the creation of data mainly as a problem of conceptual modeling, while how novel data are created in practice remains undertheorized. We call this data design and articulate it as a sociotechnical process through which organizations configure data-producing arrangements that allow them to produce data points about events, entities, and people. We then propose that the impact of data design on organizational data can be analyzed in terms of constitutive rules. Constitutive rules are conceptual statements that describe how cultural conventions, institutional orders, and technical constraints embedded in a data-producing arrangement make it possible to turn an aspect of an organization or its environment into data. Using a case vignette of a gender identity data project at a large U.S. university, we illustrate how analyzing the reconfiguration of a data-producing arrangement in terms of constitutive rules helps specify the ways in which data mediate organizations and their actions. We further argue that data design can amount to innovation if it enables the production of data that are uniquely valuable to an organization.
This study examined how platform ecosystem governance mechanisms, as enacted through human intermediaries, influenced the formation and institutionalization of new practices among smallholder farmers in an ICT4D context. We conceptualize platform ecosystems as sociotechnical systems comprising platform owners, complementors, intermediaries, and end-users whose interactions shape governance through digital and physical interactions. Drawing on a mixed-methods design, we investigated eKutir, a platform-based social enterprise in India that employed local micro-entrepreneurs to mediate interactions between farmers and a digital platform. A quasi-experimental difference-in-differences analysis showed that after one year, farmers in intervention villages (n = 120) experienced an increase (beta = 0.32, p = 0.014) in confidence using digital agricultural technologies, relative to control groups (n = 120), signaling the early institutionalization of new practices. Qualitative data from interviews (n = 12) and focus groups (n = 83) enabled the development of a six-phase process model tracing governance mechanisms that shaped the emergence and institutionalization of new practices: (i) forming digital and physical connections, (ii) gaining legitimacy, (iii) establishing inter-field resource dependencies, (iv) distributing power, (v) standardizing practices, and (vi) sustaining changes in practices. Micro-entrepreneurs played a central role in enacting platform governance on the ground by translating rules, facilitating connectivity, and enabling access. This study contributes to literature on platform governance by showing how governance influenced practices through intermediaries and their digital and physical interactions. It also extends ICT4D research by theorizing how development platform ecosystems embed durable change, shifting focus from adoption outcomes alone to the process of change among marginalized communities. Practical insights for sustainable development and policy are discussed.
