Situating the shift: An exploration of context-specific digital transformation

Abstract

Digital transformation (DT) is a prevalent yet complex socio-technical phenomenon that unfolds differently across empirical settings. While prior research shows that DT reorients organizational identity, value propositions, and business models through combinations of digital technologies, much of the literature remains rooted in firm-centric, resource-abundant, and structurally stable contexts. To address this gap, this thesis explores DT across diverse settings, offering a contextualized and pluralistic theorization. It draws on three in-depth qualitative case studies across supply networks, not-for-profit organizations, and the media system supporting social activism. The first study investigates how a core firm exercises inter-organizational leadership to enact DT at the supply network level. It develops a framework of four mechanisms - strategizing, exemplifying, rallying, and assessing - through which the core firm progressively builds leadership for DT. The second study examines DT in a resource-constrained NFP organization, theorizing resource fluidity as a threephase process - identification, activation, and application - that enables DT through transient, accessbased resource configurations rather than ownership. The third study adopts Ingold’s conceptualization of knotting to explore how activist momentum emerges within a digitally transforming media system. It conceptualizes activism as a process of compound and concentrated knotting, whereby media action lines interweave across journalistic, technological, and public domains. Collectively, this thesis enriches the DT literature by providing nuanced, context-specific theorization that accommodates both structured and emergent conceptualizations of DT, underscoring the importance of context-sensitivity and ontological pluralism for understanding DT’s multifaceted dynamics.