Anna Fahlgård Lahache

Digital transformation has become a central ambition in public administration, offering a rich context for understanding how institutional change unfolds. As digital technologies increasingly permeate society, it is vital to examine how such transformation is driven within public organizations and how actors shape its direction.

This dissertation investigates how digital transformation missions give rise to institutional work in public administration. Drawing on a field study of a newly established digital government agency and a longitudinal analysis of a digital minister’s speech acts, it asks: How do different forms of institutional work play a role in the shaping of digital transformation in public administration?

Across three studies, I show how organizational identity work generates tensions that divert attention from core digital missions; how members’ temporal orientations underpin these tensions; and how narrative work enables institutional entrepreneurs to introduce new ideas despite institutional constraints. The dissertation reveals circumstances that hinder or propel change: maintenance work anchors digital initiatives in existing practices, disruptive work introduces new arrangements, and creation generates new “digital” identities, roles, or missions.

By uncovering the institutional work emerging around digital transformation, the dissertation equips practitioners to better anticipate and navigate its complexities.

The formation of organizational identity for new types of government agencies are especially challenging due to their institutional context. Drawing on in-depth longitudinal data from the first 2.5 years of an agency for digital government, we induce an empirically grounded model of how organizational identity is formed when hybridity is pre-defined and inelastic due to strict institutional boundaries. In this process study, our findings run counter to prevailing models of organizational identity formation who proposes a convergent process of dual logics, that through the enactment of practice experimentation end up with a blended identity. Instead, we found an organization that was assigned hybridity from the start by mission duality, with no way to escape the tension it brought with it due to the inelasticity provided by the institutional context. Our findings showed a divergent process emerging from an initial unawareness of hybridity and ending with structural separation. Our theoretical model of organizational identity formation in unaware hybrids has a number of direct implications for ongoing research on elasticity in hybrid organizations and organizational identity formation.

Organizations increasingly hybridize as a response to external competing demands and expectations. In doing so, they develop more complex and contested hybrid identities. Identity elasticity – an organizations ability to adapt its identity boundaries – is a key aspect of shaping and sustaining such hybrid identities, yet less is known about this process when elasticity is restricted. To understand organizational identity formation under less elastic conditions, we followed a public agency for digital government from inception over 3.5 years. We traced identity unfolding in an organization where opposing organizing principles of Bureaucracy and Openness clashed and there was no opting-out from that hybridity. Our empirically grounded model show how hybrid identity is formed in cases of limited adaptability. This process is characterized by mission complexity, tensions, and externally imposed shifts in resource allocations. Our model provides direct implications for research on hybridity, organizational identity formation and identity (in)elasticity.