Blockchain for good, a prospect in action. How technological fields emerge through affordance-driven institutional work

Emerging technologies are often celebrated for their transformative potential long before they are put to the tests of usage and adoption. Promises to radically disrupt existing institutional arrangements in pursuit of a better world play an important role in this process, but how such promises emerge and shape new technological fields, is underexplored. This study examines the relationship between technological affordances and institutional work in the emergence of new technological fields, drawing on data from 371 ventures promising blockchain solutions to tackle grand societal challenges. Findings reveal the emergence of the “blockchain for good” field around a utopian vision of a fair, responsible, efficient, and platformed world governed by blockchain. Such vision is constructed in the transient space between present and future, through affordance-driven institutional work. Three institutional work practices -problematization, prospection, and reification- construct the field in the transient space between future promises and their actualization. Through these practices, ventures mobilize blockchain's prospective affordances to span boundaries across market, state, and community logics, showcasing future visions as present realities. By theorizing prospective technological affordances and their conditions of enactability, the study highlights how prospective affordances drive institutional work, shaping the early emergence of new technological fields even before a technology is market-ready or widely adopted. • Emerging technologies often give rise to new fields through promises of future societal transformation. • The Blockchain for Good (B4G) field emerges from ventures’ future-oriented vision of a fair, responsible, and efficient digital world. • Ventures mobilize blockchain’s prospective affordances —imagined possibilities for action—to critique existing institutions and propose alternatives. • Reification turns prospective affordances into credible technology bases aligning market, state, and community expectations. • Affordance-driven institutional work explains how technological fields emerge where multiple institutional logics intersect across past and present.