Call for Papers

As we look forward to promises of radical change in the future, emergent digital technologies related to artificial intelligence, blockchain, data analytics, robotics, and virtual reality are increasingly reshaping our society. To better understand this trend, this sub-theme calls for attention to emergent technologies as ongoing experiments of organization and institutional work.
 
By emergent digital technologies, we refer to artifacts, platforms, and infrastructures that use the power of computing in an attempt to solve problems through the hybrid orchestrations of physical objects, abstract algorithms, and social actors (Bailey et al., 2022; Faraj et al., 2018; Nambisan et al., 2017). The process of technology emergence stimulates experiments of transformation of present conditions under the future promises of positive disruptive change (Bailey et al. 2022; Hinings et al., 2018). For example, artificial intelligence heralds a world where machines will understand and catalog data in ways that outperform humans in a wide range of social and cognitive tasks (Faraj et al. 2018; Bailey et al., 2022). Blockchains promise to facilitate an integrated worldwide data warehouse where any format of data can be shared and understood by any device over any network (Jacobetty & Orton-Johnson, 2023; Davidson et al., 2018). Immersive and augmented reality technologies promise to transform the way we work and interact by translating into our daily environments objects, people, and places that are either distant or do not yet exist (Dincelli & Yayla, 2022). While these promises have fascinated humans for decades, many of them are still to be proven, but experiments of technological adoption are underway.
 
As new forms of organization such as cross-sectoral partnerships, digital platforms and ecosystems, online knowledge communities, open source development and digital commons try to find a place in the existing social order, they are often in conflict with existing arrangements, and end up eroding epistemic, organizational, and institutional boundaries. Within the framework of opportunities and challenges occasioned by emergent technologies, new questions thus arise about how organizing can and should happen in the future, especially in terms of coordination, power, professional roles and boundaries, socialization, communication practices, and much more (Gawer, 2022; Thomas & Ritala, 2022; Ungureanu, 2023; Vergne, 2020; Villani & Phillips, 2021).
 
Deepening our understanding of these issues, we argue, also requires investigation into how emergent technologies are altering the presence, combination, and equilibrium of institutional logics in different domains and generating new organizational and institutional arrangements. For instance, blockchain-based smart contracts promise to remove third-party intermediation, disrupting boundaries between traditional financial markets, the sharing economy, state and community logics (Davidson et al., 2018). While the literature offers various frameworks for conceptualizing digital transformation as an experimental process of institutional change, our analyses of the organizational mechanisms through which digital technologies become integral to institutional change remain limited (Gawer & Phillips, 2013; Faik et al., 2020; Gegenhuber et al., 2022; Hinings et al., 2018).
 
A promising direction (albeit not the only one) lies in examining the relationship between technological affordances, organizing, and institutions (Faik et al., 2020; Berente & Seidel, 2022). To better understand digitalization at large we need to inquire about how different stakeholders (e.g., digital entrepreneurs, firms, governments, citizens, policymakers, media) leverage technological affordances – possibilities for goal-oriented action that derive from a technology’s adoption and use – to create, mobilize, maintain, and/or resolve institutional pluralism in the pursuit of socially desirable futures. These questions are also prompting a rethinking of the taken-for-granted separateness between human and nonhuman, organization and artifacts, and action and effect, thus inviting the development of relational, performative, communicative, and socio-material analyses of organizing for emergent technologies (Leonardi, 2017; Bailey & Barley, 2020).
 
This sub-theme addresses scholars across a range of communities with a shared interest in advancing organization studies in the face of emerging technologies, including work and technology, management of technology and innovation, strategic management, organization behavior, organization theory, business ethics, entrepreneurship and more. We encourage submission of conceptual and empirical work that can help shape the way we understand the relationship between organizations, institutions, and emerging digital technology, for instance:

• How do new digitally enabled institutional arrangements emerge, diffuse, and are proposed as legitimate within institutional contexts?

• How does the rapid scaling of new technologies, such as blockchain or generative AI platforms, alter institutions and institutional logics?

• To what extent and why does technological change increase the compatibility of certain institutional logics and the contradictions and tensions among others?

• How do emergent technologies employ sedimented institutional logics such as markets, professions, community or state to achieve promises of societal disruption and break from tradition?

• How do socio-material affordances and constraints of emergent technologies contribute towards institutional work and change?

• What is the relationship between the technological arrangements of the present and future promises of societal change and disruption? What are some intended and unintended consequences (e.g., self-fulfilling prophecies, delusion, deception)?

• How do emerging technologies reconfigure organizational and institutional boundaries, possibly transforming organizing and coordination within and across organizations?

• How are inter-organizational relations and institutional fields affected by the reliance on emerging technologies?

• How do organizations trust or verify the work of emerging technologies and how is that related to existing institutions and their transformation?

• How do organizational and institutional experiments with emergent technologies contribute to the creation of new technological fields?

• What is the role of emergent technology entrepreneurs in driving localized and large-scale organizational and institutional change?

References

• Bailey, D.E., & Barley, S.R. (2020): “Beyond design and use: How scholars should study intelligent technologies.” Information and Organization, 30 (2); https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infoandorg.2019.100286.

• Bailey, D.E., Faraj, S., Hinds, P.J., Leonardi, P.M., & von Krogh, G. (2022): “We are all theorists of technology now: A relational perspective on emerging technology and organizing.” Organization Science, 33 (1), 1–18.
• Berente, N., & Seidel, S. (2022): “Digital Technologies: Carrier or Trigger for Institutional Change in Digital Transformation?” In: Gegenhuber, T., Logue, D., Hinings, C.R., & Barrett, M. (eds.): Digital Transformation and Institutional Theory. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 83. Leeds: Emerald Publishing Limited, 197–209.
• Dincelli, E., & Yayla, A. (2022): “Immersive virtual reality in the age of the Metaverse: A hybrid-narrative review based on the technology affordance perspective.” Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 31 (2), 1–22.
• Faraj, S., Pachidi, S., & Sayegh, K. (2018): “Working and organizing in the age of the learning algorithm.” Information and Organization, 28 (1), 62–70.
• Faik, I., Barrett, M., & Oborn, E. (2020): “How information technology matters in societal change: An affordance-based institutional logics perspective.” MIS Quarterly, 44 (3), 1359–1390.
• Gawer, A., & Phillips, N. (2013): “Institutional work as logics shift: The case of Intel’s transformation to platform leader.” Organization Studies, 34 (8), 1035–1071.
• Gegenhuber, T., Logue, D., Hinings, C.R., & Barrett, M. (eds.) (2022): Digital Transformation and Institutional Theory. Leeds: Emerald Publishing Limited.
• Nambisan, S., Lyytinen, K., Majchrzak, A., & Song, M. (2017): “Digital innovation management.” MIS Quarterly, 41 (1), 223–238.
• Hinings, B., Gegenhuber, T., & Greenwood, R. (2018): “Digital innovation and transformation: An institutional perspective.” Information and Organization, 28 (1), 52–61.
• Jacobetty, P., & Orton-Johnson, K. (2023): “Blockchain imaginaries and their metaphors: Organising principles in decentralized digital technologies.” Social Epistemology, 37 (1), 1–14.
• Papadimitropoulos, V. (2023): “The digital commons, cosmolocalism, and open cooperativism: The cases of P2P Lab and Tzoumakers.” Organization, 31 (6), 970–993.
• Thomas, L.D., & Ritala, P. (2022): “Ecosystem legitimacy emergence: A collective action view.” Journal of Management, 48 (3), 515–541.
• Ungureanu, P. (2023): “Putting Space in Place. Multimodal Translation of the Grand Challenge of Regional Smart Specialization from Policy to Cross-sector Partnerships.” Journal of Business Ethics, 184 (4), 895–915.
• Vergne, J.P. (2020): “Decentralized vs. Distributed Organization: Blockchain, Machine Learning and the Future of the Digital Platform.” Organization Theory, 1 (4); https://doi.org/10.1177/2631787720977052.
• Villani, E., & Phillips, N. (2021): “Formal organizations and interstitial spaces: Catalysts, complexity, and the initiation of cross-field collaboration.” Strategic Organization, 19 (1), 5–36.