Infrastructuring as Bricolage: Thinking Like a Contemporary Knowledge Worker

Understanding Nomadic Practices of Social Activist Networks Through the Lens of Infrastructuring: the Case of the European Social Forum

“…the relevance of infrastructural competence for the sustainability survival of nomadic initiatives (Erickson and Jarrahi, 2016;Erickson and Sawyer, 2019;Sawyer et al, 2019). In so doing, we draw attention to a continuum of practices in which the specific features of a constrained resource in distributed community of volunteers form a distinctive point between the tradition organisational context and that of the individual nomadic worker.…”

“…In particular, the authors draw attention to the fact that in order to engage in these infrastructuring practices, people need to develop some sort of infrastructural competence, which would allow them to identify where infrastructural seams exists and how they can overcome them to achieve desired goals by means of infrastructural strategies devised from sociotechnical insights. The issue of infrastructural competence has been further elaborated by Erickson and Sawyer (2019), who looked at the work of knowledge workers in the context of infrastructural bricolage and Sawyer et al (2019), who went on to discuss a set of skills and ICT usage to appropriately engage in technologically mediated nomadicity.…”

“…As the empirical data highlights that ESF setting had issues in finding and using IT infrastructures mainly due to lack of technical and financial resources and majority of interventions were imposed mainly due to personal choice instead of needs assessment. In other words, they lacked infrastructural competence (Erickson and Sawyer, 2019;Sawyer et al, 2019).…”

“…There are significant demands on collaborators who have to engage in bridging, assembling, and circumventing to make the infrastructure work (Erickson and Jarrahi, 2016). In order to succeed, T-Nomads need to develop infrastructural competence so to be able to artfully overcome emergent difficulties: they must become bricoleurs (Erickson and Sawyer, 2019;Sawyer et al, 2019).…”

“…Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, no careful analysis has been carried out on how infrastructuring, as a notion, can help us to understand the practices of people engaged in the organisation of highly collaborative events on a volunteer basis. In addition to that, the aforementioned contributions to the literature and other related work (see e.g., Hemsley et al, 2020;Erickson et al, 2019;Rossitto and Lampinen, 2018;Su and Mark, 2008;Rossitto and Eklundh, 2007;Bogdan et al, 2006) usually focus on a small number of individual workers. Our contribution responds to this gap in the literature, bringing an infrastructuring perspective to the understanding of practices involved in the organisation of and development of infrastructures for large and complex collaborative quasi-nomadic events, where people from different parts of the world congregate to work together on a cause.…”