Or­gan­iz­ing Di­git­al­iz­a­tion

Course content

Digitalization brings about new conditions for managing work. Organizing Digitalization creates a foundation for understanding this transformation by interrogating the challenges and dilemmas related to digitalization in relation to strategy, organization and leadership.

In the first part of the course, we will focus on new conditions for strategy-making, studying how digital technologies are seen as forces in an increasingly turbulent strategic environment, as changing the role of strategists, as tools for strategically engaging stakeholders, and as challenging the control necessary for strategy-making. We discuss how digitalization problematizes long-term strategies and creates a new need for attention to daily practices, agility, and experimentation. In the second part of the course, we look into organizational phenomena, which have potential to create value for organizations in new ways; co-creation, datafication, and interactivity. We will discuss how such phenomena are continuations of classical organizational phenomena like collaboration, knowledge and communication, and this sensitizes us to balance the hype and the conservatism often accompanying new tech phenomena, maintaining our curiosity about the ambiguities related to digital transformations. The final part of the course introduces common dilemmas and practical aspects of leadership and management in digitalized organizations. We will discuss issues related to data ethics, the management of changing professional roles, the handling of the visibility afforded by digital technologies, as well as leading and managing collaborations in a virtual context.

The course is grounded in recent social scientific developments and theories of technology. It rests on the idea that classical and contemporary organization theory can give us an extensive knowledge base on the basis of which we can understand the interrelationship between digital technologies and organizational features and organizing processes. By training analytical capacities in relation to technology and organization, the course strengthens students’ capabilities to productively and reflexively work with strategies and implementation processes related to digitalization.  

Overlap with the course Organizing Markets

Both Organizing Markets (OM) and Organizing Digitalization (OD) discuss recent social scientific developments that challenge how organization and digitalization are usually understood and analyzed. Drawing mostly on practice-based organizational studies of digitalization, OD discusses and analyses digitalization as interwoven with organization. OM uses recent developments in economic sociology and science and technology studies that challenge the traditional dichotomy between markets and organization. It presents work that analyzes, in different forms, how markets are organized. 

A first common workshop combining the two courses introduces to an interdisciplinary approach to contemporary business problems, in particular relating to digitalization and business platforms. Students are introduced to particular business models, new business opportunities, and challenges in relation to these forms of organizations, as well as the changing competitive environment businesses find themselves in in the digital age. Two other common workshops support students in their interdiciplinary project combining the two courses.