The Room Where It Happens: The Hidden “Business” of Infrastructure in Social Science Data Archives

• In Event: The Invisible Aspects of Digital Infrastructure

Abstract

There has been an increasing interest in the sustainability of data infrastructures, including a late 2017 report released by the OECD on business models employed by data archives to stay sustainable. However, there is little agreement on what constitutes a business model and from the STS perspective, there has been almost no discussion of the term and its enormous (if hidden) shaping of work.

Drawing upon our ongoing comparative study of institutional sustainability and longevity in Social Science Data Archives (SSDA) in the US and UK, we draw on John Law’s approach to organizations as “bundles of resources and capabilities” to examine the invisible work of creating “the business model” imaginary. We focus our analysis on three distinct SSDA which we have been studying through organizational documents, interviews, and reports, created over fifty years. By empirically examining the organizational practices of SSDA over time, we show how arguments around value and valuation, stakeholders relations, and the management of revenue are deployed, enacted, and modified by actors to maintain their respective infrastructures over time. We synthesize these findings to provide an integrated approach to understanding business models in other information infrastructures.

Our paper contributes to an STS-inflected approach to organizational studies that foregrounds finances, value, and business – terms that need critique but invisibly and visibly influence the choices actors make in infrastructure creation, deployment, and maintenance. In short, the “business” of infrastructure is a fruitful (and still underdeveloped) are of STS scholarship and infrastructure studies.

Authors

• Kalpana Shankar, School of Information and Library Studies, University College Dublin

• Rachel Williams, Simmons College

• Kristin Eschenfelder, University Of Wisconsin-Madison