Should the wheel be reinvented? Market-referencing in the electric vehicle market charging infrastructure

•Market-referencing is a stabilisation and legitimisation tool for new markets.•Referent practices act as transformational and stabilising infrastructural elements.•Infrastructural objects manifest referent market practices in a new market.•Market-referencing can be feral through accidental consumption-practice enactments.•New market practices supersede market-referencing to offset new market misfires. Market-referencing helps market actors learn from what has gone before – saving them from reinventing the wheel. While extant studies show that market-referencing is essential for stabilising and legitimising new markets, little is known about how market-referencing is used to infrastructure consumer serving markets. This paper reveals the mechanisms through which market-referencing enactments infrastructure a new consumer market, as a stable, legitimate, functioning market. Using a theories-in-use approach, we analyse how exchange, representational and normalising practices from a referent market are picked-up, extended, and modified to transform, the Electric Vehicle (EV) charge point infrastructure in the UK. Infrastructural objects (charge points, rules, and exchange terms) manifest referent market practices in the new market, resituating and entangling them with new practices and materialities. In the process, the EV market charging infrastructure is reordered to constitute a functioning market.