Institutional pioneers and articulation work in digital platform infrastructure-building

Abstract

Digital platforms are an important organising form in business-to-business markets and have mirrored increasing research in end-user customers' interactions with digital platforms. Much less studied are the digital platform infrastructures underpinning this customer interfacing activity which must be built and maintained for digital platforms to exist and operate. We explore how institutional pioneers attempted to build a new digital platform with a vision of the cashless society beyond the traditional payment methods. Our findings demonstrate the insightful role of institutional pioneers in digital infrastructure-building through energizing the direction, network goals, positioning with other market-actors in the backstage. We show how the tensions produced by the organizing and ordering activities in the digital infrastructure field are resolved through brokering, alignment and workarounds. We unravel the way institutional pioneers use articulation work to define a legitimate course of actions for all actors in their organizing of standards, structure and behavioural focus.