Magnus Mähring

A new class of embodied technologies, defined as software or devices that aid individuals to increase, maintain, or improve their functional capabilities, is starting to blend or even fuse human cognition with technological affordances, promising to assist and enhance the lives of individuals. These devices have started to blend or even fuse human cognition with technological affordances, creating new levels of both empowerment and dependency as their use becomes increasingly interwoven into the fabric of the user's social life. We argue that existing conceptualizations of IS use need to be extended to account for the intricate ways in which both individual identity and social interaction of users are affected through the use of these devices. Theoretical development in this context could be foundational for advancing knowledge in the future use of brain-computer interfaces and AI integration in assistive and enhancing cognitive devices. Our qualitative study focuses on users and developers of smart assistive technology and devices for communication, which provide those who cannot physically speak with the means to communicate. We present a process model of technological intimacy, contending that this novel IS use pattern is habitually in a state of adaptation with continuous coping processes in ongoing cycles of human-technology engagement.

When hybrid work is adopted, organizations must enable coordination and connection across teams that have diverse configurations and needs. We extend prior work that largely studied distributed work at the team level, to explore how organizations manage diverse hybrid configurations simultaneously. Through a nine-month qualitative case study of Tech Co, a global technology firm that implemented a fully flexible hybrid policy, we identify a set of deliberate organizational practices that functioned as flexible scaffolding for hybrid work. Further, we found that these practices were customized by teams through corresponding emergent practices. Together, the deliberate organizational and the emergent team practices formed a dynamic system that enabled coordination and connection. Our study contributes to theories of hybrid work, local adaptation, and organizational learning. We challenge the assumption that hybrid work requires standardization to be effective and instead theorize how organizations can embrace structural and actor-level variation through adaptable systems that shape to their context.

Grand challenges such as climate change, global health crises, inequality, and biodiversity loss are persistent societal concerns rather than problems with clear endpoints or definitive solutions. Rather than being “solved,” these challenges must be continually engaged, managed, and navigated over time, as progress unfolds through ongoing efforts to mobilize action and coordinate across organizational and institutional boundaries. This ongoing engagement often proceeds in the absence of shared problem definitions, agreed-upon metrics, or stable criteria for success. This symposium brings together recent research on how organizations and institutions engage grand challenges when authority is limited, evaluations are contested, and expectations shift. The papers highlight that engagement is shaped by the social and institutional processes through which effort is mobilized, legitimacy is constructed, and value is assigned. Across cases spanning corporate pledges, meta-organizations, global evaluation systems, and prosocial certifications, the papers show how actors sustain collective action by recalibrating commitments, coordinating effort, and constructing legitimacy under contestation. Together, the symposium advances a process view of organizing for grand challenges by showing how legitimacy and value are continuously negotiated when formal authority and stable evaluation criteria are absent.


How Social Activism Shapes Corporate Sustainability Pledges

Author: Yeon Woo Cho; The George Washington University

How Western Norms Shape the Recognition of Non-Western Efforts

Author: Ryosuke Yokoya; The George Washington University

Identity Work through Prosocial Certifications in Hybrid Organizations

Author: Hyeonjin Cha; Bucknell University

Meta-organizations Addressing Grand Challenges as Effort Integrating Systems

Author: John-Erik Bergkvist; Stockholm School of Economics

Author: Anna Essén; Stockholm University

Author: Magnus Mahring; Stockholm School of Economics

Little is known about how division of labor and coordination unfold in partnerships addressing grand challenges, where no one has formal authority to direct efforts. This study examines how goal-frames direct the division of labor and coordination in grand challenge partnerships, leveraging longitudinal data on a Swedish-based GC-partnership with the system-level goal of transforming cancer from a deadly to a curable or chronic disease. We develop a process model of how discrete “behavioral modes” of dividing labor and coordinating efforts, with different skill-related coordination cost properties, via two behavioral mechanisms – jointholism and relational blindness – can result in deteriorating cooperation. Our model provides a behavioral foundational explanation for why grand challenge partnerships frequently fail to meet expectations and remain viable.

Increasingly, immersive digital spaces are being developed that have the potential to combine rich visualization with high computational power and access to information. Despite billions of dollars of investments in immersive digital spaces, companies have yet to realize the full benefits of using these environments, and thus far only a few online video games have retained long-term popularity. The difficulty lies in the novelty of these environments. Immersive digital spaces are different from non-immersive digital spaces (such as online forums, mailing lists, and social media) because they are characterized by spatiality, i.e., participants experience space in three dimensions, yet they are different from physical reality. Participants engage with immersive digital spaces differently from how they engage with non-immersive digital spaces, but we know little how they navigate them and how they derive meaning or value from their experiences. To fill this knowledge gap, we conducted a three-year qualitative study of the online science-fiction multiplayer game EVE Online. Our findings suggest that immersive digital spaces become sites of interest that participants regularly navigate and create meaning and value within when they can make sense of space, manipulate the visibility of space, and manipulate the components of space. We also provide theoretical insights about behavior in immersive digital spaces.

We use a sequential mixed methods approach to explore the relationship between long-term orientation (LTO), learning capabilities, and digital product innovation in firms with varying degrees of family influence. Although extant research has emphasized the relevance of digital innovation for long-term success, little is known about how firms can draw on LTO as a prevalent dominant logic and learning capabilities to create business value. More specifically, we find empirical evidence for a mediation effect with a positive association between LTO and learning capabilities on the one hand and learning capabilities and digital product innovation on the other. Surprisingly, and in contrast to our hypothesis, we find a negative moderating effect of family influence on the relationship between LTO and learning capabilities. To complement the large-scale statistical analysis and to explain the underlying mechanisms of this counterintuitive empirical result, we build on a qualitative investigation of family-influenced firms. Our qualitative findings suggest that the role of LTO and learning capabilities in the digital economy is more nuanced than previous literature suggests. Specifically, we reveal six impeding mechanisms that are associated with family influence. With these insights, we extend previous knowledge on digital product innovation, family influence, and learning as a crucial dynamic capability.

Incumbent firms typically face significant risk of losing the relevance of their physical core when facing industry disruption driven by digital technologies. Existing literature emphasizes a digital first approach, whereby firm offerings are fundamentally redeveloped from a digital point of view, from the point of conception. While this prescription can help accelerate innovation, it does not tell us how incumbents might safeguard the relevance of their traditional physical core resources when going digital first. This is important, since major discontinuities in strategic repositioning, while often celebrated in digital innovation and transformation literature, create significant risks to firm survival. To this end, we conduct a grounded analysis of a European automotive firm’s innovation journey over an eight-year period. We contribute to the digital innovation and transformation literature by developing a process model explaining how a digital first approach can be employed in a way that also safeguards the physical core.

Digital innovation work is typically driven by short, rapid, and iterative development cycles involving flexible recombination of digital assets. While digital innovation often involves drawing on external assets, the literature is surprisingly silent on the role of sourcing relationships in this context. Interestingly, the IT outsourcing (ITO) literature, including recent work on strategic innovation and sourcing, predominantly understands sourcing relationships as evolving from transaction-based towards collaborative and innovation-oriented, with long-term relationship development a prerequisite for collaborative innovation between providers and their customers. This apparent temporality mismatch leads to the question of whether and how firms pursuing digital innovation through flexibility, speed, and scaling can innovatively leverage more dynamic sourcing relationships. We pursue this topic through an in-depth case study of an incumbent firm integrating dynamic and flexible sourcing practices into its digital innovation work. We identify a set of dynamic sourcing activities that allow onboarding sourcing partners directly into collaborative innovation work and then transitioning the collaboration to efficiency-focused deployment and contract-based scaling. Our study thus articulates the role of dynamic sourcing in digital innovation and disconfirms core assumptions about ITO relationship evolution.

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.

Firms developing smart and connected products and service systems face challenges related to coordination and integration of multiple design, technical and organizational arrangements. Specifically, the co-existence of and coordination between several different design paradigms become salient when embedded software, sensors, and connectivity are employed to connect the firm’s products, services and operations with databases, application platforms and the firm’s product cloud. This study aims to explore and theorize integration and coordination of design, development, and production paradigms in response to organizational tensions arising in this context. We do so through a case study of a large global incumbent firm developing complex mechanical products engaged in creating integrated product and service systems enabled by digital innovation processes. Specifically, we identify the change of work practices relating to IT and digital services resulting in the emergence of new forms of organizational and technical arrangements that diverge from established firm-wide organizational structures and technical design principles. This divergence is counteracted by bridging the gap between bounded product arrangements and new emerging unbounded digital services in the pursuit to form new organizing logics of smart and connected products and service systems.