Project Details
Projekt
Organizational Implications of Digitalization: the Development of (Post-)Bureaucratic Organisational Structures in the Context of Digital Transformation
Applicants
Professorin Dr. Maja Apelt; Professor Dr. Stefan Kühl
Subject Area
Empirical Social Research
Term
since 2020
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 442109748
Digitalization places organizations under pressure to adapt. New digital technologies bring increased transparency, new opportunities for collaboration, and shared knowledge – as well as changes in pace necessitate faster decision-making. This pressure to act results in two important and mutually enforcing phenomena. Firstly, internal processes within organizations are digitalized. Here, it can be assumed that digitalization leads to bureaucratization. Secondly, in the context of digital transformation, more and more organizations are introducing new organizational structures labeled as ‘agile’ or ‘self-organised’. These post-bureaucratic models bring the promise of de-bureaucratization. While the management discourse addresses the introduction of both digital technologies and post-bureaucratic organizational models in the context of digital transformation, to date there has been very little sociological research on the link between them. Our aim is to examine the interdependent dynamics of the interplay between organizations and digitalization to make their mutual entanglement visible.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
