Abstract
This dissertation explores how organizations navigate disruption and undertake strategic renewal in the context of digitalization and sustainability – two powerful and intertwined forces reshaping today’s business landscape. As organizations face growing complexity, they are increasingly required to manage competing demands, prioritize transformation efforts and navigate tradeoffs between short- and long-term goals. This dissertation asks: How do organizations strategically renew themselves in the context of digitalization and sustainability?
Drawing on five qualitative studies, this thesis adopts a process perspective to explore how strategic renewal unfolds across organizational, managerial, and employee levels. The studies examine how organizations reconfigure their business models, overcome resource rigidity, transform the workforce, and develop dynamic capabilities in response to disruption. The findings reveal that strategic renewal is not a singular decision or act, but an ongoing, multi-layered process involving both top-down and bottom-up initiatives, and often requiring engagement with actors beyond traditional organizational and industry boundaries. The research also demonstrates how digitalization and sustainability are not isolated change logics, but interdependent forces that shape and constrain one another. The analysis indicates that their interaction creates new tensions but also opens up opportunities for more integrated forms of renewal.
Together, the five papers offer novel theoretical contributions to the literature on strategic renewal, while offering insights and practical implications for organizations navigating the dual disruptions of digitalization and sustainability. In doing so, this thesis advances understandings of how organizations undertake strategic renewal in complex, shifting environments.