Paper Short Abstract:

By exploring infrastructure through the lens of the creative work of telecommunication engineers, this paper aims to analyse a networked infrastructure as both a material-human assemblage and a product of a contemporary moment in capitalist accumulation.

Paper Abstract:

Drawing on PhD research into the technical labour which builds broadband networks, this paper will explore how political economy approaches to infrastructure will give rise to material and relational issues prompting questions about how ostensibly different approaches can usefully be integrated through ethnographic analysis. The starting point for the research was the oligopolistic behaviour of infrastructural capitalism in telecommunications, what has been called “rentierism” by Christophers (2020), and how economic logics played out in the upgrading of the UK’s broadband networks to “full fibre” (comprehensive fibre optic technology). It aimed to show how the labour conditions of the engineers who install and maintain the infrastructure would be affected by the upgrade. However, when the ethnography took an “archeological” approach, tracking the infrastructure through its historically-constituted objects and spaces — its telephone exchanges, wires and access boxes — it showed how these material “layers” were created and repurposed by engineers engaged in problem-solving work over time. These insights showed how working conditions were not only shaped by the logics of oligopoly in the sector, or the defensive responses of the engineers’ union, but also the importance of maintenance, repair and installation work. The engineers’ role is to stabilise the infrastructure, ensuring a functioning broadband service can “get to market”. The paper will critically evaluate a possible integrated approach to infrastructure, using examples of the engineers’ interactions with infrastructural objects, in the segment of the network known as the “Last Mile”, where the final productive activities which deliver broadband services take place.