We are happy to invite you to the ABRI Lunch Seminar Futuring blockchain for good. Institutional work and prospected technological affordances for societal change by dr. Paula Ungureanu (Technological Organization Processes Research Group, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy) organized by ABRI and the KIN Center for Digital Innovation.
The seminar will take place on Tuesday, January 28th, from 12:00 to 13:00 (NU-4B47). You can find more information below.
This is a lunch seminar; please register your attendance by accepting/declining your emailed invitation by Friday, January 24th, at 10 AM at the latest (for catering).
Abstract
Many times, emergent technologies are granted superpowers long before they are put to the tests of usage and adoption. Promises to radically disrupt existing institutional arrangements in pursuit of a better world play an important role in this process, but how such promises emerge and shape new technological fields, has received little attention so far. This study investigates how prospected affordances of blockchain -i.e., affordances which emerge with a constitutive force before the technology is market-ready or adopted- contribute to the emergence of new technological fields by means of multiple institutional logics work. Data draws on 371 projects proposing blockchain applications for societal change across very different domains. Findings show how these projects engage in institutional work at the boundaries of market, community and state logics to prospect a futuristic world of both differentiated (i.e., domain-specific) and universally shared blockchain affordances. Specifically, by prioritizing, neutralizing and hybridizing institutional logics, a blockchain world of societal disruption is constituted in the present as a multimodal anticipation of the future. This study theorizes on the relationship between prospected affordances, institutional work and multimodal anticipation at the interface of literatures on institutional logics, institutional work and technological affordances.