Ecology of Games and Translation Processes in Internet and Computer Networks: Perspectives on Technology-Enabled Cross-Organizational Collaboration

This paper studies how social relationships are reshaped by the enactment of ICTs through the interplay of traditional and new actors. Building on the perspectives of an ecology of games and the sociology of translation, we propose a framework to study cross-organizational processes and technology-enabled reconfigurations of power and resources of the interrelated actors. We then illustrate the framework with the case of residential Internet infrastructure development taking place in a developing country context. The proposed framework is helpful to capture the complexity and unpredictability of cross-organizational interactions of the actors embedded in the mesh up of traditional and new actors embedded in the broader context of social, economic and power processes.