Organizations and Digital Innovation

The digital transformation of society is presenting organizations with ever growing challenges in ever briefer periods of time. Standardization, enhanced capacities to produce and analyse data, automation and technologies of application-oriented digitization are affecting the ways organizations communicate internally, cooperate, navigate their environments and conduct structural adaptations. Digital innovations modify the relationships of organizations and their clients as well, challenging the habitual perceptions and normative expectations about services, data and privacy.
Digital innovations encompass both specialised content solutions and technical, especially algorithmic logics. They claim to provide organizations with new ways to reconcile the heterogeneous requirements and conditions of their changing environment and to offer novel solutions for problems that previously had to be dealt with in analog and, presumably, less “efficient” ways. At the same time, however, digital innovations also entail new, further sources of heterogeneity that confront organizations with new uncertainties for themselves and their environment. Against this background, the following questions arise:

- How do digital innovations emerge in organizations? What organisational processes, challenges and preconditions give rise to the adoption of digital innovation?
- How and by what means do digital innovations influence and modify organizational processes and structures?
- What consequences do digital innovations have for the relationship between organizations and their environments?
- What are the effects of digital innovations in organizations on society and its normative expectations?

We invite presentations from organizational sociology, organization studies and complementary disciplines that contribute to the aforementioned questions.