Creating New Opportunities from Old Resources through Contextually Determined Information Asymmetries

Abstract

Last time you used a credit card, did you stop to think about all the necessary activities performed, resources used and actors involved in order for you to get your money? Probably not. There are many services that we use every day without giving them a moment’s thought, and using our credit cards, either to withdraw money from an ATM-machine or to pay for our purchases in a shop, is one of them. Every time you use your card it triggers a process involving a number of activities, resources and actors. A technological change that makes your daily performance easier in small and almost unnoticeable ways — for example the fact that the electronic payments are nowadays mostly on-line, meaning that the line behind you at the register does not add up due to your choice of paying by card — can have a substantial effect on things we, as consumers, do not notice. Some of the changes that arise in a technological area, for instance electronic payments, are based on change processes started to exploit opportunities that are found because of the way the resources controlled by involved actors are combined. The necessary resources (and often even the industrial actors) behind a service of this type are normally black-boxed (Latour, 1987; Rosenberg, 1994).