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This research paper aims to examine how open innovation (OI) intermediaries facilitate knowledge collaboration between organizations and online user communities. Drawing on a Community of Practice (CoP) perspective on knowledge, the study lays out a framework of the knowledge boundary management mechanisms (and associated practices) that intermediaries deploy in enabling client organizations to engage in online community-based OI.

This research is based on an exploratory case study of an OI intermediary and 18 client organizations that engage with online user communities on the intermediary’s platform. Results incorporate both the intermediary and clients’ perspective, based on analysis of intermediary and client interviews, clients’ online community projects and other archival data.

Results reveal that OI intermediaries deploy three knowledge boundary management mechanisms – syntactic, semantic and pragmatic – each underpinned by a set of practices. Together, these mechanisms enable knowledge transfer, translation and transformation, respectively, and thus lead to cumulatively richer knowledge collaboration outcomes at the organization–community boundary. The findings show that the pragmatic mechanism reinforces both semantic and syntactic mechanisms, and is hence the most critical to achieving effective knowledge collaboration in community-based OI settings.

The findings suggest that OI intermediaries have to implement all three boundary management mechanisms to successfully enable knowledge collaboration for community-based OI. More specifically, intermediaries need to expand their focus beyond the development of digital platforms, to include nuanced efforts at building organizational commitment to community engagement.

Drawing on the CoP view, this study integrates the knowledge management literature into the OI literature to conceptualize the role of OI intermediaries in shaping knowledge collaboration between organizations and communities. In engaging with the interactive nature of knowledge exchange in such multi-actor settings, this research extends the firm-centric theorization of knowledge that currently dominates the existing OI research.

Undoubtedly, digital transformation is permeating all domains of business and society. We envisage this volume as an opportunity to explore how manifestations of digital transformation require rethinking of our understanding and theorization of institutional processes. To achieve this goal, a collaborative forum of organization and management theory scholars and information systems researchers was developed to enrich and advance institutional theory approaches in understanding digital transformation. This volume’s contributions advance the three institutional perspectives. The first perspective, institutional logics, technological affordances and digital transformation, seeks to deepen our understanding of the pervasive and increasingly important relationship between technology and institutions. The second perspective, digital transformation, professional projects and new institutional agents, explores how existing professions respond to the introduction of digital technologies as well as the emergence of new professional projects and institutional agents in the wake of digital transformation. The third perspective, institutional infrastructure, field governance and digital transformation, inquires how new digital organizational forms, such as platforms, affect institutional fields, their infrastructure and thus their governance. For each of these perspectives, we outline an agenda for future research, complemented by a brief discussion of new research frontiers (i.e., digital work and sites of technological (re-)production; artificial intelligence (AI) and actorhood; digital transformation and grand challenges) and methodological reflections.

Digital technologies, and the affordances they provide, can shape institutional processes in significant ways. In the last decade, social media and other digital platforms have redefined civic engagement by enabling new ways of connecting, collaborating, and mobilizing. In this article, we examine how technological affordances can both enable and hinder institutional processes through visibilization – which we define as the enactment of technological features to foreground and give voice to particular perspectives and discourses while silencing others. We study such dynamics by examining #SchauHin, an activist campaign initiated in Germany to shine a spotlight on experiences of daily racism. Our findings show how actors and counter-actors differentially leveraged the technological features of two digital platforms to shape the campaign. Our study has implications for understanding the role of digital technologies in institutional processes as well as the interplay between affordances and visibility in efforts to deinstitutionalize discriminatory practices and institutions.

In this paper, we explore the effects of emerging digital technologies on professionalization within organizations. Specifically, we examine how the emergence of data analytics as a new cross-functional profession rooted in new digital technologies is challenging human resources (HR) as an established organizational profession. Our qualitative study reveals how rhetorical work and material work have established a symbiosis between data science and HR. Rather than leading to de-professionalization, new technologies are enabling HR practices to be augmented and new actors to be integrated into the professionalization project, thereby elevating the status of HR. These findings contribute to the literature on the role of technology in institutional theory and its influences on the professionalization.

Digital technologies have fundamentally changed organizations, industries, and even the society. Although institutional theory provides rich array of perspectives to both the content and dynamics of such changes, research at the intersection of institutional scholarship and digitalization has remained scarce. In this essay, I draw on the institutional logics perspective to elaborate digitalization as involving a new set of interconnected managerial beliefs and norms, organizational practices, and diverse material and social structures that together complement and challenge the established logics in organizations and institutional fields. I draw attention to two central organizing principles in the logic of digitalization: the pursuit of digital omniscience – the efforts to represent and conceive the world through digital data – and digital omnipotence – the efforts to bring activities inside and outside organizations under the control of information systems. I conclude the essay by elaborating how the institutional logics perspective can help understand organization-level efforts to leverage digitalization by incumbent corporations and new digital-native companies.

Digital transformations represent an increasingly salient empirical phenomena for institutionalists studying the processes by which institutions evolve, erode, or otherwise change. Yet, there have been few meaningful attempts to engage with insights from the information systems (IS) literature, despite digital innovation and diffusion falling squarely within its domain. This essay makes an initial attempt at integration by offering a two-by-two framework which crosses salient theoretical categories within the IS and institutional literatures. From the former, we draw on concepts of system acceptance and resistance, and from the latter, we draw on concepts of institutional maintenance and change. Each quadrant in our framework represents user responses happening because of, in reaction to, or toward various institutional dynamics. We illustrate each quadrant with data collected as part of a study of digital transformation in the field of public healthcare in Australia. We use our illustrative case to open up research questions which researchers might use to frame their own studies of digital transformations as a form of institutional change. We conclude with a discussion of what other theoretical advances or insights might be yielded from greater collaboration between institutionalists and IS scholars. This essay contributes to the nascent study of digital transformations as a form of institutional change through examining how complementary concepts of the IS and institutional literatures might be used simultaneously to understand the intersection of digital innovation and diffusion and the institutional arrangements governing the fields which they change.

We bring together the institutional theory literature on institutional logics and the information systems (IS) literature that conceptualizes a relational view of affordances to explore the digital changes unfolding in the delivery of professional services. Through a qualitative inductive study of the development of an app led by a clinician manager in an Australian hospital, we investigate how multiple institutional logics shape the design of affordances when an organization develops new digital technologies for frontline professional work. Our findings show how a billing function was designed into the app by the development team over four episodes to afford potential physician users with billing usability, billing acceptability, billing authority and billing discretion. These affordances emerged as different elements of professional, state, managerial and market logics became activated, interpreted, evaluated, negotiated and designed into the digital technology through the team’s interactions with the clinician manager, a hybrid professional, during the app development process. Our findings contribute new insight to the affordance-based logics perspective by deepening understanding of the process through which multiple institutional logics play out in the design of affordances of digital technology. We also highlight the role of hybrid professionals in this digital transformation of frontline professional work.

We analyze the structure and the dynamics of a field, drawing on data from organizational public behavior in the digital sphere. Organizational self-representations afford rich insights into how organizations position themselves with regard to their peers, both in terms of web page language and hyperlink affiliations. Our empirical example is the lively and important discussion of the social impact of nonprofit organizations. We follow how it has evolved from 2011 to 2018 and with what consequences. We begin with portraits of the discursive movements of powerful, individual organizations, where we observe extensive changes. These portraits show how influential organizations alter their public faces. We then analyze discourse at the field level, which is surprisingly stable even though individual organizations change their discursive and relational positions frequently. Finally, we turn to groups of organizations with similar positions and highlight their ability to integrate vocabularies of other groups. Here we observe that a lingua franca increases integration at the field level, while affording distinction with individual organizations’ positioning. We conclude with a discussion of complementary research avenues that can advance the relational and linguistic view we present in this paper.

Organizational legitimacy is a central concept in institutional theory and in the more recent stream of communicative institutionalism. Within this scholarship, there exists an elaborated understanding of how macro-level actors, such as news media, influence individual judgments at the micro-level through a top-down communication process. However, little is known about the upward process by which individual propriety judgments influence validity judgments of news media at the macro-level. In this paper, we propose that this upward process of the legitimacy loop is facilitated by the degree to which expressed propriety judgments by individuals create thematic broadness, which bridges stand-alone conversations. Through a study investigating a post-scandal phase in the financial sector, we show how propriety judgments in social media become pre-validated at the meso-level prior to their validation by news media at the macro-level. The presented theoretical framework and empirical insights based on time-series regression analysis provide new knowledge about the multilevel process of organizational legitimacy formation in a digital age and extend our understanding of how a consensus is revealed at the meso-level.