PhD defence by Karim Jabbar

​​​Title​

Infrastructural Entrepreneurship in the Context of Blockchain

Abstract

This PhD thesis investigates how entrepreneurial activities unfold in the context of the emerging Blockchain information infrastructure. Through a research approach based on ethnographic and interventionistic methods, the thesis introduces infrastructural entrepreneurship as a framework for better understanding the complexities of activities taking place in a context that is simultaneously entrepreneurial and infrastructural.

More specifically, the thesis unpacks the entrepreneurial actions performed by entrepreneurs and other infrastructuring agents in selected domains of Blockchain application. The thesis presents empirical accounts of Blockchain-focused entrepreneurial actions in the areas of Bitcoin ATMs, cryptocurrency trading, the energy sector, as well as in various projects within the shipping industry. The empirical accounts emerging from these participant-observant investigations, are the basis for an article collection consisting of 4 peer-reviewed publications, that have been published over the course of the PhD process, as well as a thesis essay bringing together the contributions of the papers into an overall framework for understanding entrepreneurship in the context of the Blockchain information infrastructure.

The proposed infrastructural entrepreneurship framework unpacks the entrepreneurial drive inherent in the sustaining and growing the Blockchain information infrastructure. It explains how this drive is simultaneously contributing to infrastructural creation, and how entrepreneurship performed in this context involves an ongoing and iterative creation of Blockchain assemblages that are used in relational alignments with stakeholders in the targeted domains of application. Finally, the framework also explains how this engagement will take the shape of a growing of new infrastructures, or grinding against established infrastructures.

Assessment Committee

Chairperson: Professor Jørgen Bansler, Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen
Associate Professor Louise Barkhuus, IT University of Copenhagen
Associate Professor David Ribes, University of Washington, WA, USA

Academic supervisor

Professor Pernille Bjørn, Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen
Moderator at this defense will be: Irina Schlowski, Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen

For an electronic copy of the thesis, please contact phdadmin@di.ku.dk