The Work of Infrastructure: A Systematic Literature Review of CSCW Scholarship on Infrastructure, 2010-2025

The concept of “infrastructure” is used in multiple, sometimes even contradictory ways within CSCW scholarship. Prior work has identified a set of “narrow” uses that apply the term to technical/physical systems, such as networked computing, and a set of “broad” uses that refer to entities or processes that provide support to other things. In this paper, we offer three patterns of use that parse the different kinds of analytical work that infrastructure does for CSCW : "making work visible," which uses infrastructure to reveal invisible labor, "making platforms critical," which interrogates the increasing embeddedness of platforms in everyday life, and "making users publics," which bridges CSCW’s classic user group and other collective publics. In all three cases, the openness and ambiguity of infrastructure bridges between classic CSCW methods and other scholarship on labor, platforms, and publics, while a persistent meta-pattern – what we term infrastructure’s technomoral imperative – cuts across these uses, encoding normative commitments around visibility, obligation, and public good. While different patterns of use manage the risks of infrastructure differently, the term’s interdisciplinary meanings have allowed it to function as a kind of bridging term, similar to "information" in the natural sciences, which helps traffic ideas across disciplines.