Start Date
11-12-2016 12:00 AM
Description
This study explores the mutual constitution of materiality and action in smart infrastructure context by focusing on technicians’ IT-enabled work with complex, distributed, and inherently unreliable smart power grid. Past research suggests infrastructures form a context and a topic unlike the dyadic interaction of humans and computers, and have provided accounts of the ways in which the smart infrastructures shape technicians’ work. This study develops a view of agency in smart infrastructure context in order to increase understanding on materiality of action. A concept of infra-acting is brought forth that situates action as part of (the material constitution of) infrastructure. Infra-acting posits that performing actions as part of infrastructures are (1) conditioned by material history; (2) dependent on mobilizing actors; (3) shaped by invisible and dynamic actors; and (4) riddled by vagaries. An ethnographic research provides an empirical illustration to foreground technicians’ actions corollary to the materiality of infrastructure.
Recommended Citation
Niemimaa, Marko, "Entanglement of Infrastructures and Action: Exploring the Material Foundations of Technicians’ Work in Smart Infrastructure Context" (2016). ICIS 2016 Proceedings. 12.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2016/ISOrganizations/Presentations/12
Entanglement of Infrastructures and Action: Exploring the Material Foundations of Technicians’ Work in Smart Infrastructure Context
This study explores the mutual constitution of materiality and action in smart infrastructure context by focusing on technicians’ IT-enabled work with complex, distributed, and inherently unreliable smart power grid. Past research suggests infrastructures form a context and a topic unlike the dyadic interaction of humans and computers, and have provided accounts of the ways in which the smart infrastructures shape technicians’ work. This study develops a view of agency in smart infrastructure context in order to increase understanding on materiality of action. A concept of infra-acting is brought forth that situates action as part of (the material constitution of) infrastructure. Infra-acting posits that performing actions as part of infrastructures are (1) conditioned by material history; (2) dependent on mobilizing actors; (3) shaped by invisible and dynamic actors; and (4) riddled by vagaries. An ethnographic research provides an empirical illustration to foreground technicians’ actions corollary to the materiality of infrastructure.