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Social media stage online patterns of social interaction that differ remarkably from ordinary forms of acting, talking and relating. To unravel these differences, we review the literature on micro-sociology and social psychology and derive a shorthand version of socially-embedded forms of interaction. We use that version as a yardstick for reconstructing and assessing the patterns of sociality social media promote. Our analysis shows that social media platforms stage highly stylized forms of social interaction such as liking, following, tagging, etc. that essentially serve the purpose of generating a calculable and machine-readable data footprint out of user platform participation. This online stylization of social interaction and the data it procures are, however, only the first steps of what we call the infrastructuring of social media. Social media use the data footprint that results from the stylization of social interaction to derive larger (and commercially relevant) social entities such as audiences, networks and groups that are constantly fed back to individuals and groups of users as personalized recommendations of one form or another. Social media infrastructure sociality as they provide the backstage operations and technological facilities out of which new habits and modes of social relatedness emerge and diffuse across the social fabric.

This chapter advances an articulation of the contemporary knowledge worker as an infrastructural bricoleur. The practical and pragmatic intelligence of the contemporary knowledge worker, particularly those involved in project-based work, reflects an ability to build adaptable practices and routines, and to develop a set of working arrangements that is creative and event-laden. Like Ciborra’s octopi, workers augment infrastructures by drawing on certain forms of oblique, twisted, flexible, circular, polymorphic and ambiguous thinking until an accommodation can be found. These workers understand the non-linearity of work and working, and are artful in their pursuits around, through and beyond infrastructural givens. Modern knowledge work, then, when looked at through the lens of infrastructure and bricolage, is less a story of failure to understand, a limitation in training or the shortcomings of a system, but instead is more a mirror of the contemporary realities of today’s knowledge work drift as reflected in individuals’ sociotechnical practices.

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, transparency became a rhetorical token used to provide a solution to financial problems. This study examines how transparency materialized in the context of the European securitization industry, which was largely blamed for the credit crunch. The authors show that although transparency was broadly associated with a political call for financial system reform, in the European securitization industry it provided the basis on which to repurpose its market infrastructure. The authors introduce the concept of transparency work to show that transparency is a market achievement organized as a standardization network of heterogeneous actors aiming at establishing a new calculative infrastructure for managing credit risk. Combining insights from information infrastructure research and Economic Sociology, the authors contribute to a distributed and networked understanding of information infrastructure development.

This chapter explores the concept of market infrastructure, which is tentatively defined as a materially heterogeneous arrangement that silently supports and structures the consummation of market exchanges. Specifically, the authors investigate the enactment of market infrastructure in the US grocery retail sector by exploring how barcodes and related devices contributed to modify its market infrastructure during the period 1967–2010. Combining this empirical case with insights from previous research, the authors propose that market infrastructures are relational, available for use, modular, actively maintained, interdependent, commercial, emergent and political. The authors argue that this conception of market infrastructure provides a powerful tool for unveiling the complex agencements and engineering efforts that underpin seemingly superficial, individual and isolated market exchanges.

The notion, technologies and organizational elaboration of traceability have become more prominent and more systematic in recent years in many different fields, notably food. This chapter argues that traceability has many faces: it is a programmatic value embedded in norms and regulations; it is a frontier of technology development such as blockchain, and it is a continuous processual and political dynamic of organizational connectedness, leading also to resistance. These different aspects make up “traceability infrastructures,” which embody a number of tensions and dynamics. Three such dynamics are explored in this chapter: the tension between organizational entities and meta-entities, problems of agency and the distribution of responsibility, and dialectics of connectivity and disconnectivity. These three dynamics generate three testable propositions, which define a prolegomena for a new subject of “traceability studies.” Overall, traceability is argued to be an ongoing process of connecting discrete agencies – a process of “chainmaking” – and is formative of more or less stable forms of distributed agency and responsibility.

Over the past three decades, new off-grid electrification infrastructures – as micro-grids and other solar solutions – have moved from innovative initiatives, conducted by NGOs and private stakeholders, to a credible model promoted by international organizations for electrification of rural areas in developing countries. Multiple conditions support their spread: major technological advances in the field of renewable energies (panels, batteries), intensive Chinese industrial production allowing lower prices, institutional reforms in Africa including these solutions in major national electrification programmes, and, finally, an opening to the private sector as a supposed guarantee of the projects’ viability. However, while the development of this market calls for significant investments, a vast set of calculations and a strong “micro-capitalist” doctrine, all involved in their design, experts admit that a large proportion of projects hardly survive or even fail.

This chapter investigates these failures by exploring the ecology of such infrastructures, designed for “the poor.” It discusses “thinking infrastructures” in terms of longevity by focusing on economic failures risks. The authors argue that the ecology of the infrastructure integrates various economic conversions and exchanges chains expected to participate in the infrastructure’s functioning. By following energy access solutions for rural Africa in sub-regions of Senegal and Madagascar, from their political and technical design to their ordinary life, the authors examine the tensions and contradictions embedded within the scripts of balance supposed to guarantee their success.