Of blooming flowers and multiple sockets: infrastructure Integration and the Technological Imaginary

We analyze and discuss the use of two metaphors for integration work in the development of Zorgportaal Rijnmond (ZPR), an online portal for healthcare and wellbeing in the Rotterdam Rijnmond region of the Netherlands. We view these metaphors as elements of actor-networks, and follow them ʻin actionʼ. Drawing on ethnographical observations we contend that they are performative: they generate new realities and have the ability to reconfigure actors in a project. We show how they produced and reproduced categorizations and classifications in the ZPR project, and discuss how they demarcated technical and financial concerns from the organization of health care practices. In this paper we plead for a sociotechnical approach to infrastructure integration work that acknowledges the ʻtechnological imaginaryʼ as a constitutive part of emergent information infrastructures.