Time Shall Tell: Temporally Rethinking Infrastructure Tensions in the Digitalisation of the Global Payment Infrastructure

Infrastructure takes time. As Star and Ruhledher (1996, p. 113, ) eloquently argue, infrastructure is “‘sunk’ into, inside of, other structures, social arrangements and technologies”— it is hard to change. These large-scale information systems wrestle in multiple contexts of use before they emerge in working relationships. However, new technologies break the status quo now and then, bringing innovation, qualitative changes, and giving rise to unforeseen consequences (Kallinikos et al. 2013; Sørensen 2024). As new technologies develop, infrastructure changes. In the midst of such presently lived change and the enduring nature of infrastructure, we find tensions. As opposition and constraint (Putnam et al. 2016), tensions show the dual and paradoxical nature characterising infrastructure (Hanseth et al. 1996; Tilson et al. 2010). Tensions help to convey the stable and chaining nature of infrastructure (Hanseth and Modol 2021), highlighting infrastructure emerges through relationships and is unbounded (Star and Ruhleder 1996). This means infrastructures do not reside within singled-out systems (Hanseth 2022; Monteiro et al. 2013). Instead, multiple relating systems give rise to infrastructure—thus the many infrastructure tensions. While meaningful and giving ground for infrastructure scholarship, tensions are devoid of a temporally long movement that one can also associate to infrastructure. Attending to tensions can overemphasise change, or lack of change (e.g., punctuated equilibrium), in infrastructure development. In addition, tensions often convey technology’s order at the expense of what technology does. This means infrastructure often constraints action instead of being part of flows of action (Mousavi Baygi et al. 2021). Said differently, tensions overlook the possibilities of existing infrastructure and its role in allowing for novelty and change because they emphasise constraint, stability, and conflicting change. Therefore, we ask, how does infrastructure render possible unprecedented change? To address this question, we interpret Bergson’s (2015 [1889]) notion of duration and conduct a field study. We studied unprecedented change in global payments (e.g., distributed ledger technology for programmable money, new organisational forms, and automation of reconciliations), looking into how the present global payment infrastructure allows for these. Such a study is based on situated accounts of four organisations set against historical accounts of reports and narrative accounts of experienced executives who also gave their prospective views for 2030. The data corpus comprises 116 reports, 9100 documents, 131 observation hours, and 50 interviews and accounts for 1973–2030. We defamiliarised ourselves from tensions through an abduction analysis (Timmermans and Tavory 2012). Drawing on narratives (Czarniawska 2004) allowed us to operationalise the temporality of infrastructure. Our premise is that temporal infrastructure processes give rise to unprecedented change, and show the temporally long movement of infrastructure. Three narratives convey the processes 3 we find. A narrative of granular homogenisation conveys how global payment objects (e.g., payment instruments) come to be and allow for global payment. A narrative of irreversible validation shows how global payment is realised (e.g., payment finality) and how such realisation emerges. Finally, a narrative of ubiquitous causation addresses how global payment results from action (e.g., payment margins) and how new forms of consequential actions occur. As a contribution, these findings add to existing research that emphasises sociotechnical processes (Hanseth and Modol 2021), temporally rethinking infrastructure tensions.