The construction of market infrastructure is a key component of market formation. In this article, we explore when and how this process leads to the fragmentation of a nascent market. We study the emergence of new markets in the context of social and impact investing in the UK during the period 1999-2019. We identify a recursive process of building the cultural and material infrastructure of the market, which we label cultural and material scaffolding, that drives collective learning by envisioning alternative futures and conducting institutional trials. We show how this scaffolding process explains the split between the social investment and the impact investment markets, which we theorize as market speciation. We identify two scope conditions under which we expect speciation to occur: field overlap and material anchoring. The paper contributes to the literature on market formation, and to the empirical understanding of how social and impact investment have emerged.

市场基础设施建设是市场形成的重要组成部分。在本文中，我们将探讨这一过程何时以及如何导致新兴市场分裂。我们研究了 1999 年至 2019 年期间英国社会和影响力投资背景下新市场的出现。我们确定了构建市场文化和物质基础设施的递归过程，我们将其称为文化和物质脚手架，通过设想替代未来和进行制度试验来推动集体学习。我们展示了这个脚手架过程如何解释社会投资和影响力投资市场之间的分裂，我们将其理论化为市场形态。我们确定了我们预期物种形成发生的两种范围条件：场重叠和材料锚定。