Permeability, Interoperability, and Velocity: Entangled Dimensions of Infrastructural Grind at the Intersection of Blockchain and Shipping

Blockchain can potentially be appropriated as a social computing technology, which enables transactions across people and artefacts via a large socio-technical information infrastructure constituted by the actions of multiple people and computers. However, Blockchain is not a social computing technology a priori; instead to emerge as one, much effort and work is required to radically transform existing domains, including wrestling with traditions, standards, and legacy. In this article, we expand on previous work on Blockchain as an information infrastructure, and on the notion of infrastructural grind. Infrastructural grind allows us to analytically explore how the emerging Blockchain technology is appropriated into established business domains, in our case the shipping industry. We present ethnographic data unpacking three different accounts of infrastructural grind taking place at the intersection of the shipping and the Blockchain information infrastructures. The results demonstrate that infrastructural grind occurs as a result of various infrastructuring activities taking place at different intersections between the two infrastructures and is constituted of the sum of these activities. We propose a framework in which infrastructural grind is constituted of three entangled dimensions: permeability, interoperability, and velocity. These socio-technical dimensions relate to infrastructural properties such as legacy, embeddedness, and standards, as well as to technical properties of specific solutions deployed at specific points of infrastructural grind. Our analysis shows that these dimensions are enacted differently along the shipping supply chain, and depending on the dynamic interplay between them at various points of infrastructural grind. At different points in time, the infrastructural grind between Blockchain and the shipping domain will thus manifest itself differently and at differential velocity.