Wanda J. Orlikowski’s research while affiliated with Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other places

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Publications (164)


Displacing Purpose: How Public Libraries are Being Reconfigured in the Digital Era
  • Article

August 2024

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13 Reads

Academy of Management Proceedings

Wanda J Orlikowski

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Susan Scott


The Digital Undertow and Institutional Displacement: A Sociomaterial Approach

June 2023

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61 Reads

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29 Citations

Organization Theory

As “the digital” becomes pervasive within organizations and industries, it is increasingly evident that how we live, work, connect, coordinate, and govern are being significantly changed by digitalization. Many of these digital transformations are highly visible and dramatic, involving a purposeful repositioning and restructuring of organizations and industries. But in addition to these direct and visible changes, we argue that processes of digitalization are also producing less visible transformations in core institutional values, norms, and rules, which are indirectly, yet more profoundly, reconfiguring how organizations and industries perform. Referencing findings from two different sectors, we posit that the corollary effects of waves of digitalization—what we conceptualize as the “digital undertow”—are generating a set of dynamics that are displacing institutional apparatuses from their positions of primacy and authority within industries. We further suggest that our conventional toolkits for studying organizational phenomena are not well equipped for examining such corollary effects of digitalization. In addressing this challenge, we consider how the relational and performative theorizing of strong sociomateriality provides a powerful analytic for investigating these effects and we highlight how it offers valuable insights into the institutional displacements arising in the digital undertow.


Crowd-Based Accountability: Examining How Social Media Commentary Reconfigures Organizational Accountability

December 2021

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167 Reads

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42 Citations

Organization Science

Organizational accountability is considered critical to organizations’ sustained performance and survival. Prior research examines the structural and rhetorical responses that organizations use to manage accountability pressures from different constituents. With the emergence of social media, accountability pressures shift from the relatively clear and well-specified demands of identifiable stakeholders to the unclear and unspecified concerns of a pseudonymous crowd. This is further exacerbated by the public visibility of social media, materializing as a stream of online commentary for a distributed audience. In such conditions, the established structural and rhetorical responses of organizations become less effective for addressing accountability pressures. We conducted a multisite comparative study to examine how organizations in two service sectors (emergency response and hospitality) respond to accountability pressures manifesting as social media commentary on two platforms (Twitter and TripAdvisor). We find organizations responding online to social media commentary while also enacting changes to their practices that recalibrate risk, redeploy resources, and redefine service. These changes produce a diffractive reactivity that reconfigures the meanings, activities, relations, and outcomes of service work as well as the boundaries of organizational accountability. We synthesize these findings in a model of crowd-based accountability and discuss the contributions of this study to research on accountability and organizing in the social media era.


The Digital Undertow: How the Corollary Effects of Digital Transformation Affect Industry Standards

November 2021

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240 Reads

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64 Citations

Information Systems Research

Scholarship on digital transformation has centered on how waves of digitalization have moved through industries, producing strategic changes within and across firms and enabling new forms of value creation. In this paper, we argue that different but no less important processes of digital transformation are generated by the undertow produced by these waves. This digital undertow, a corollary effect of waves of digitalization, profoundly influences how firms operate by transforming the industry standards that coordinate and regulate their core business activities. Using a genealogical approach, we draw on findings from a longitudinal field study in book publishing to theorize the tensions and processes that constitute the digital undertow. We explain that when waves of digitalization transform firms’ core activities, they unwittingly affect how industry standards correspond with materializations of the phenomena they structure, thus influencing how standards perform in practice. A significant outcome of recent waves of digitalization in the book industry is the loss in correspondence between industry standards and novel digital materializations of the book. This is producing what we refer to as digital displacement, a process that is engendering an existential challenge to the capacity of standards to effectively coordinate and regulate industry operations in the digital age.



Liminal innovation in practice: Understanding the reconfiguration of digital work in crisis

March 2021

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126 Reads

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71 Citations

Information and Organization

As conditions of crisis disrupt established practices, existing ways of doing things are interrupted and called into question. The suspension of routine sociomaterial enactments produces openings for liminal innovation, a process entailing iterative experimentation and implementation that explores novel or alternative materializations of established work practices. We draw attention to three distinct tensions on the ground that arise in conditions of crisis — pragmatic, tactical, and existential — and show how these may be leveraged to produce liminal innovations in practice. While the process of liminal innovation can be challenging, it can also be generative, creating opportunities for the reconfiguration of digital work in conditions of crisis.


Figure 2: Interactions of MPS Trajectory with Local Trajectories in Kenya
Trajectory Dynamics in Innovation: Developing and Transforming a Mobile Money Service Across Time and Place
  • Article
  • Full-text available

August 2019

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817 Reads

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66 Citations

Organization Science

This paper examines how and why innovations are reshaped as they become implemented and used in locales that are distant and distinct from those where the innovation was initially developed. Drawing on an in-depth field study of the innovation process that produced a mobile money system for Kenya, we contribute an understanding of the particular dynamics that arise when an innovation trajectory interacts with local trajectories that constitute the local conditions and practices of specific places. We identify four distinct patterns of trajectory dynamics—separation, coordination, diversification, and integration—each of which has different implications for the innovation, its implementation, and consequences on the ground. Developing a model of trajectory dynamics in innovation, we theorize the processes through which innovations are transformed over time as they interact with multiple local trajectories and the specific innovation outcomes that are generated as a result. Such theorizing reconceptualizes traditional notions of innovation diffusion by explicating how and why innovations change in multiple and unexpected ways as they move to particular places and engage with local conditions and practices.

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Citations (82)


... In this regard, using institutional logic as an analytical framework can help understand the gap between the theoretical benefits and the actual use of construction robotics, highlighting how varying stakeholder logic can hinder technology adoption. Inspired by Orlikowski's (2010) "studying practice" approach, this study explores how loose couplings in the construction industry impede coordination and knowledge sharing, thus hindering innovation and productivity (Dubois and Gadde 2002a). This approach addresses technical, market, cultural, and institutional aspects critical for understanding innovation adoption in construction management research. ...

Reference:

Bug or feature? Institutional misalignments between construction technology and venture capital
Practice in research: phenomenon, perspective and philosophy
  • Citing Chapter
  • July 2015

... We engaged in specific research actions to make "the voices of marginalized groups heard by identifying and creating evidence of those who are rendered invisible" (Keating et al., 2021, p. 61), and to provide the designers with specific information, relevant to older end-users, prepared in a format that would inform the design processes . Research informs the design of technology artefacts (Hevner & Chatterjee, 2010;Orlikowski & Lacono, 2000;Vaishnavi et al., 2004Vaishnavi et al., / 2019, and can take the form of a needs assessment, which presents evidence of the problem, issue, gap, or concern for which an artefact solution is sought (Gupta, 2011). Such a needs assessment typically: (1) determines the needs of the target audience (older individuals in our case) in order to develop appropriate technology solutions that are fit for purpose; (2) assesses the attitudes of the target audience towards technology; and (3) serves as a baseline to measure and evaluate the impact of the intervention Tegart, 2019). ...

The Truth Is Not Out There: An Enacted View of the "Digital Economy"
  • Citing Chapter
  • September 2000

... Collaboration The second main type of the now traditional "new ways of working" is virtual collaboration in distributed teams and projects. Distributed or dispersed work also has deep historical roots [35]. Team members working in different locations and their geographical distances from each other constitute a distributed team [36]. ...

Distributed Work over the Centuries: Trust and Control in the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1670–1826
  • Citing Chapter
  • May 2002

... Organizational sociology has undergone a change of focus, with work now being the dominant point of scholarly interest (Barley & Kunda, 2001;Orlikowski & Scott, 2016). This has led to a situation in which scholars no longer treat organizations as a "distinct layer of social life" (Besio et al., 2020, p. 413). ...

Digital work: a research agenda
  • Citing Chapter
  • August 2016

... This paper proposes a conceptual and analytical frontier, by introducing speculative foresight as a novel approach to theorise future DTs, building on concepts from speculative design and foresight studies. The paper critiques current DT research for its reliance on empirical observations of present-day phenomena, drawing on works like Burton-Jones et al. (2021) and Orlikowski and Scott (2023) to argue that future-oriented conceptualizations are needed. Through speculative foresight, they propose an analytical framework that transcends current epistemic limitations, enabling researchers to explore alternative futures where digital technologies are ubiquitous and mundane. ...

The Digital Undertow and Institutional Displacement: A Sociomaterial Approach
  • Citing Article
  • June 2023

Organization Theory

... Here, we conclude that people are not idealized decision-makers who perfectly predict future experiences and therefore presume that subjective perceptions of negativity bias can be associated with variation in ESM-related outcomes, here perceived accountability (Treem, 2015) and social support (Li et al., 2021). Accountability is a fundamental aspect of organizing within society and the organizations that inhabit it (Hall et al., 2017;Karunakaran et al., 2022). Although accountability is defined in numerous ways in different disciplines, the concept, in general, refers to the "perceived expectation that one's decisions or actions will be evaluated by a salient audience and that rewards or sanctions are believed to be contingent on this evaluation" (Hall and Ferris, 2011, p. 134). ...

Crowd-Based Accountability: Examining How Social Media Commentary Reconfigures Organizational Accountability
  • Citing Article
  • December 2021

Organization Science

... Generative AI models already present a variety of implications at the personal, organizational, and societal levels, which is why such language models should be understood as important drivers of social change. This trend is evident in how successive waves of digitization and AI implementation contribute to shaping institutional displacement that determines various political, ideological, and economic changes (Scott & Orlikowski, 2022). Through various technological instances, such as Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF), models based on generative AI have the ability to constantly "learn" based on interactions with users and through iterative training on vast datasets. ...

The Digital Undertow: How the Corollary Effects of Digital Transformation Affect Industry Standards
  • Citing Article
  • November 2021

Information Systems Research

... This second group of studies have explored the processes and factors affecting technology acceptance by users and organizations [31][32][33][34], giving rise to the emergence of diverse valuable models and theories [35]. According to the technology acceptance model (TAM), system design features, perceived usefulness, and perceived ease of use appear as primary drivers of technology use [36]. ...

Liminal innovation in practice: Understanding the reconfiguration of digital work in crisis
  • Citing Article
  • March 2021

Information and Organization

... Variation concerns some form of team agreed adaptation of the rules or shared values in order to better 'fit' the perceived context and action. Communicative team norms include such things as agreed ground rules for running meetings, for recording or carrying out tasks or building team spirit (Yates, Orlikowski, and Okamura, 1999). ...

Explicit and Implicit Structuring of Genres in Electronic Communication: Reinforcement and Change of Social Interaction
  • Citing Article
  • February 1999

Organization Science

... It became a key metaphor in organizational research, generally referring to the "mechanisms, processes, systems, and relationships that link individuals and collectives" (Kolb, 2008, p. 128). Building on this, platforms not only change pre-existing business processes but are co-constitutive for novel configurations (Orlikowski & Scott, 2019). This potential is exemplified in the surge of entrepreneurial actors that create and market content on digital platforms such as social media under uncertainty and competition, aiming to be self-sufficient and make a living out of these activities (Ashman et al., 2018;Törhönen et al., 2021). ...

Performing Apparatus: Infrastructures of Valuation in Hospitality
  • Citing Chapter
  • August 2019