Technology-mediated emergence of a competing logic in a mature field: The case of Bitcoin

Abstract

Emerging technologies, such as blockchain and artificial intelligence, are enabling new configurations of practices, roles, and meaning systems within mature fields that can disrupt institutionalized field arrangements and alter the centrality of institutional logics. Given the growing significance of this phenomenon, we aim to understand the constitutive role of technology's materiality in such processes. Through a historical processual analysis of Bitcoin, we propose a process model of disruptive institutional change, in which a challenger proto-institution emerges from the periphery and introduces a competing logic in a mature field. We identify four mechanisms underlying this process: inscription, field-anchoring, translation, and contestation. Our proposed framework highlights the dual role of the technology artifact: as a contra-institutional technology that carries a marginal conflicting logic into the mature field and, simultaneously, as a boundary object that remains interpretively flexible and affords agency to heterogeneous actors drawing on different institutional logics. We theorize that the marginal conflicting logic inscribed in the technology is instantiated and strengthened at the field level as diverse actors, drawing on different institutional logics, develop and adopt novel technology-based field practices. As a boundary object, the technology enables these distributed efforts by actors pursuing different goals. As a carrier of the marginal conflicting logic, it anchors the dispersed efforts to the strengthening of that logic and, consequently, toward its emergence as a competing logic in the field.