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This study sets out to shed light on those infrastructures underlying the ubiquitous, yet contested nature of governing by numbers. Investigating the 30-year long emergence of Germany’s “external quality assurance system” for hospitals, the authors show how methods for quantifying quality align with broader institutional and ideational shifts to form a calculative infrastructure for governance. Our study focuses on three phases of infrastructural development wherein methods for calculating quality, institutions for coordinating data and reform ideals converge with one another. The authors argue that the succession of these phases represents a gradual layering process, whereby old ways of enacting quality governance are not replaced, but augmented by new sets of calculative practices, institutions and ideas. Thinking about infrastructures as multi-layered complexes allows us to explore how they construct possibilities for control, remain stable over time and transform the fields in which they are embedded. Rather than governance being enacted according to a singular goal or value, we see an infrastructure that is flexible enough to support multiple modalities of control, including selective intervention, quality-based competition and automatized budgeting. Infrastructural change, instead of revolving around crises in measurement, is shaped by incubation periods – times of relative calm when political actors, medical practitioners, mathematicians, and many others explore and reflect past experiences, rather than follow erratic reforms fads. Finally, analysing infrastructures as multi-layered constructs underlines how they produce multiple images of care quality, which not only shift existing power relations, but also change the ways we understand and make sense of public services.

This paper aims to investigate two seminal market-scanning frameworks – the five-forces analysis and PESTEL environmental scanning tool – to assess their readiness for anticipating market-shaping acts.

Drawing on the market-shaping literature that conceptualizes markets as complex adaptive systems, this conceptual paper interrogates the underlying assumptions and “blind spots” in two seminal market-scanning frameworks. The paper showcases three illustrative vignettes in which non-industry actors catalyzed market change in ways that these market-scanning frameworks would not be able to anticipate.

Marketing strategists can be “blindsided” as seminal market-scanning frameworks have either too narrow an interpretation of market change or are too broad to anticipate specific types of market-shaping acts. The assumptions about markets that underpin these market-scanning frameworks contribute to incumbents being slow to realize market-shaping acts are taking place.

The authors extend market-scanning to include a type of managerial myopia that fails to register the socially embedded, systemic nature of complex contemporary markets. Furthermore, the paper provides an “actors-agendas-outcomes” scanning framework that offers awareness of market-shaping acts.

This paper is the first to consider market-scanning frameworks from a market-shaping perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the relevance and use of the concept “reverse salient” in ambitious infrastructural change. Thomas Hughes, in his seminal study of socio-technical system building, observed that the elimination of “reverse salients”, i.e. subsystems that because of their limited performance hold back further development, was a central driver for creativity and innovation. It is argued that in sustainable infrastructural transformations, however, reverse salients that resist change are more often neglected than addressed.

Higher education institution campuses combine laboratory-like conditions and sufficient internal complexity to be used as test-beds for ambitious sustainable change in the built environment. In this article, a neglected barrier to the transformation of a small campus into a zero emission campus is revealed, described and addressed.

In terms of substantive findings, first, it is demonstrated how parts of infrastructures that – often for good reasons – have been neglected in efforts to reduce climate impacts can be identified with the help of a historical exploration of the site and through close collaboration with local facilities managers. Second, a temporary low-tech intervention is presented that addressed the critical problems related to these “reverse salients”.

The limitations of a case study approach apply to this study. Particular caution has to be exercised in terms of generalisation. Moreover, the intervention would benefit greatly from stricter control and additional iterations of the intervention which have not yet been performed.

In addition to technology-focussed, top-down initiatives, which often struggle with actually reaching their ambitious goals in routine operation, neglected parts of campuses can contribute greatly to energy and emissions reductions. Moreover, it is demonstrated that and how local technical personnel has an important part to play in infrastructural transformations.

Concepts developed in the study of socio-technical system building have not yet been applied in the study and practice of sustainable infrastructural transformation. Their contribution is demonstrated. Moreover, living labs are notoriously difficult to evaluate. In this case study, processes and effects of an innovative living lab intervention are described and analysed. This enables a better understanding of restrictions and possibilities of experimenting in real-life settings.

This study aims to convey lessons learned from two sustainability initiatives at Norway’s largest university. This contributes to knowledge-based discussions of how future, sustainable higher education institutions (HEIs) infrastructures should be envisioned and planned if the fundamental uncertainty of the future development of learning, researching and teaching is acknowledged.

This study was submitted on 24 January 2023 and revised on 14 September 2023. HEIs, particularly when they are engaged in research activities, have a considerable environmental footprint. At the same time, HEIs are the main producers and disseminators of knowledge about environmental challenges and their employees have a high awareness of the urgent need to mitigate climate change and biodiversity loss. In this study, the gap between knowledge and environmental performance is addressed as a question of infrastructural change, which is explored in two case studies.

The first case study presents limitations of ambitious, top-down sustainability planning for HEI infrastructures: support from employees and political support are central for this strategy to succeed, but both could not be secured in the case presented leading to an abandonment of all sustainability ambitions. The second case study exposes important limitations of a circular approach: regulatory and legal barriers were found against a rapid and radical circular transformation, but also more fundamental factors such as the rationality of an institutional response to uncertainty by rapid cycles of discarding the old and investing in new equipment and facilities.

Being based on qualitative methods, the case studies do not claim representativity for HEIs worldwide or even in Norway. Many of the factors described are contingent on their specific context. The goal, instead, is to contribute to learning by presenting an in-depth and context-sensitive report on obstacles encountered in two major sustainability initiatives.

Research reporting on sustainability initiatives too often focuses descriptively on the plans or reports the successes while downplaying problems and failures. This study deviates from this widespread practice by analysing reasons for failure informed by a theoretical frame (infrastructural change). Moreover, the juxtaposition of two cases within the same context shows the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches to infrastructural change particularly clearly.

After many years’ practice and experiments, it was found that quantitative analysis systems with unequal quantitative effect cannot be extended into that with equal quantitative effect. While it is related to such epistemological viewpoints as irregularity and continuity systems, an infrastructural form comparison has shown universally scientific and methodological characteristics. In combination with evolution of weather systems, our infrastructural analysis involves applications of super low temperatures, reversed information order, rolling currents infrastructure in reversal weather change and long‐term weather forecasting.

This paper explores the major factors influencing multinational companies’ (MNCs) propensity to change the level of resource commitments during financial crises in emerging markets. Favorable changes in the host government policies, market demand, firm strategy, and infrastructural conditions are hypothesized to influence the MNCs’ decision to increase resource commitments during a crisis. The hypotheses are tested with data collected in a survey of 82 MNCs during the recent Argentine financial crisis (late 2002). While all the above variables are considered by the respondents as generally important reasons for increasing resource commitments during a crisis, only favorable changes in government policies significantly influence MNCs’ decisions to change the level of resource commitments during the Argentine financial crisis. The research, managerial implications, and policy‐making implications are discussed.

There is lack of knowledge about how the existing streets need to be redesigned and the infrastructural changes that need to be made to adopt autonomous vehicles. The purpose of this study is to investigate the infrastructure requirements of autonomous vehicles in terms of (1) lane widths, (2) parking spaces, (3) drop-off zones and (4) other facilities, followed by analyzing them and suggesting changes in the existing urban design of Msheireb Downtown Doha (MDD).

Mixed method of combining both qualitative (secondary research of analyzing the existing data about the urban design guidelines for an autonomous future, observations of the existing infrastructure) and quantitative methods (on-site measurements of pedestrian walkways and road lane widths) is used.

The outcome of the research consists of a series of major infrastructural changes with regard to lane widths, parking spaces, pick-up and drop-off zones and other facilities needed for the deployment of autonomous vehicles.

The results imply that Qatar can benefit by adopting the proposed urban design suggestions for the implementation of autonomous vehicles on the streets of MDD in particular, and smart cities of Qatar and the region in general.

The proposed changes can work as a reference and serve as a possible setting for addressing Autonomous Vehicle preparations in emerging cities.

The proposed urban design changes can be adapted for an autonomous future in emerging cities.

The chapter analyses the role of smart grid technology in the German energy transition. Information technologies promise to help integrate volatile renewable energies (wind and solar power) into the grid. Yet, the promise of intelligent infrastructures does not only extend to technological infrastructures, but also to market infrastructures. Smart grid technologies underpin and foster the design of a “smart” electricity market, where dispersed energy prosumers can adapt, in real time, to fluctuating price signals that register changes in electricity generation. This could neutralize fluctuations resulting from the increased share of renewables. To critically “think” the promise of smart infrastructure, it is not enough to just focus on digital devices. Rather, it becomes necessary to scrutinize economic assumptions about the “intelligence” of markets and the technopolitics of electricity market design. This chapter will first show the historical trajectory of the technopolitical promise of renewable energy as not only a more sustainable, but also a more democratic alternative to fossil and nuclear power, by looking at the affinities between market liberal and ecological critiques of centralized fossil and nuclear based energy systems. It will then elucidate the co-construction of smart grids and smart markets in the governmental plans for an “electricity market 2.0.” Finally, the chapter will show how smart grid and smart metering technology fosters new forms of economic agency like the domo oeconomicus. Such an economic formatting of smart grid technology, however, forecloses other ecologically prudent and politically progressive ways of constructing and engaging with intelligent infrastructures.

The expected benefits of newly developed transportation infrastructures are the saving of travel time and further promoted transport economics. There is a need for a methodology of travel time estimation with acceptable robustness and practicability. Macroscopic fundamental diagram (MFD) represents the overall traffic performance at a network level by linking average flow, speed and density. MFD can be used to estimate network state and to describe various traffic management strategies. This study aims to describe the effect of new infrastructure development on the network performance using the MFD framework.

The scenarios of Islamabad Road network before and after the infrastructure construction were simulated, in which the floating car data set (FCD) for multiple modes was extracted. MFD has been formed for the whole region and partitioned region, which was divided on the basis of infrastructural changes. Moreover, this study has been extended to calculate travel time for multiple modes using the MFD results and the Bureau of Public Roads (BPR) function at a neighborhood level.

MFD results for the whole network showed that the speed of traffic improves after the construction of new infrastructure. The travel time estimates using MFD results were dependent on the speed estimates, whereas the estimates obtained using the BPR function were found to be dependent on the traffic volume variation during different intervals of the day. By using the FCD for multiple modes, travel time estimates for multiple modes were obtained. The BPR function method was found valid for estimating travel time of traffic stream only.

This paper innovatively investigates the change in network performance for pre-construction and post-construction scenarios using the MFD framework. In practice, the approach presented can be used by transportation agencies to evaluate the effect of different traffic management strategies and infrastructural changes.

The objective of this paper is to offer a validated framework for the analysis of (future) risks and uncertainties involved in the decision‐making process concerning the upgrade and roll‐out of large infrastructural projects, e.g. broadband networks. The framework classifies risks and uncertainties based on the nature of the risks, levels and sources.

The approach takes the form of conceptual as well as qualitative and quantitative empirical analyses.

Telecommunications operators are faced with various types of risks and uncertainties in their decision‐making process concerning the upgrade and roll‐out of their broadband networks. In one respect, these risks and uncertainties have to do with the characteristics of large infrastructural projects, while, on the other hand, being caused by (unknown) competitor behaviour, (unknown) end‐user demand, rapid technological development and different development paths available to operators. Framing risks and uncertainties into a typology provides greater insight into the categories, characteristics and sources of the risks and uncertainties, as well as being a first step in finding ways to deal with them.

The paper presents and validates a framework for the analysis of risks and uncertainty. It also offers empirical data on how operators manage risk and uncertainties.