Abstract

Digital platform research has explained how architectures enable coordination, participation, and value creation, yet the question of how affordances are actualised when infrastructural, capability, and institutional conditions are only partially present remains theoretically underdeveloped. Prior work has examined affordance enactment in constrained contexts. Yet these studies remain tied to specific settings. We argue that constraint is a distinct theoretical condition. It is not just a contextual boundary. Existing affordance actualisation frameworks (e.g., Volkoff and Strong, 2013) assume socio-technical stability. Such stability cannot be assumed in nascent platform settings. We therefore draw on and extend constrained affordance actualisation to explain platformisation in resource-limited contexts. Building on affordance theory in IS (Leonardi, 2011), affordance actualisation as a process (Volkoff and Strong, 2013), and installed-base thinking (Hanseth and Lyytinen, 2010), we ask: how are digital platform affordances actualised under infrastructural, capability, and institutional constraint? We draw on a longitudinal qualitative study of a nascent platform venture in Indonesia. In this context, institutional voids and infrastructure asymmetries shape platformisation in ways that remain underexplored in mainstream IS research (Heeks et al., 2021). Our early findings show that affordances were actualised unevenly across the user base. Workable functionality emerged through three linked phases: reconfiguration, compensation, and stabilisation. These phases connected intended platform design with users' practical capacity to engage. The study is ongoing, and these findings will be developed further. We argue that this study can contribute to a process theory of constrained platformisation, enabling IS scholars to explain platform development trajectories that architecture and governance-centred interpretations do not fully capture, particularly where infrastructural, capability, and institutional constraints co-occur.

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