"Trust in a Digital World": Creating the Responsible Supply Chain, Market Dynamics, and Trusted Infrastructures

This article investigates the sustainable evolution of a supply chain and makes the case for a Science and Technology Study-STS approach to analyze the institutional dynamics of markets. Thinking on the subject has its origins in a recent proposal for an EU directive on the extension of corporate sustainability due diligence (CSDD) in complex value chains and networks, developing from two exhibition projects curated by researcher-artists Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler: the Amazon Echo as a socio-technical system (an “Anatomy of an AI system”) and a cartography of AI frontiers illustrating how power and technology have been intertwined since the 1500s (“Calculating Empires”). This work suggests that a “sustainable supply chain” can be considered as a “market infrastructure” that assembles technological artefacts with human actors, social practices, organizations and knowledge around an activity. Emphasizing the socio-material side in the process of market dynamics, a market infrastructure is “a materially heterogeneous arrangement that ‘silently’ supports and structures the consummation of market exchanges”: (i) defined by forms of institutional work related to the introduction of “legal design” principles and practices (“using human-centred design in the legal domain”), (ii) supported by a “trust-based” institutional logic (and generated by the category of “responsible management”), (iii) and characterized by the contract as “a legal, economic, managerial and social artefact” (and grounded in the responsible use of digital technologies).