Infrastructures in the Making: The Case of a Public Broadcasting Operator

This contribution explores how actors redefine infrastructures through an analysis of a project of “modernisation” in the making. Nowadays several companies undertake serious reflexions about their work environments, tools and practices according to the “Bricks”, “Bytes” and “Behaviours” motto (De Leede, 2017). Relying on digital solutions they aim to enhance more flexible work practices in time and space. For that purpose various strategic and operational actors contribute actively to foreseeing the future of both facility, technological and social infrastructures. By means of adjustment mechanisms such as coordination meetings and alignment speeches, the actors take various actions in order to ensure the continuity of the organisation; they perform what Ribes and Finholt named the “Long Now”, an ongoing work to generate a “sustainable future” (2009, p. 377).
Our interest lies in exploring simultaneously the incremental deconstruction of the existing infrastructures and the progressive construction of the forthcoming work environment. This innovation process may be seized by studying successive waves of problematisation using the actor-network theory. In the perspective of the ANT, an organisation is always a precarious agency made of both people and artefacts (Latour, 2005). Material issues, technological opportunities and constraints as well as power games emerge through the analysis of “controversies” which make parts of the infrastructures noticeable and subject to discussion and negotiation. Those controversies evolve through time, revealing various “range of visibilities” of people and things at different times in the process (Larkin, 2013, p. 336).
Our research shows how actors simultaneously make sense of the existing infrastructure while enacting its future developments. We point out how the actors themselves perceive, describe and draw on the infrastructure in order to make sense of the strategic objectives, to conduct the change project and to maintain their institution. We shed light on the process of redefining and reshaping the infrastructure itself through controversies and adjustments.