Organizational Implications of Digitalization: the Development of (Post-)Bureaucratic Organisational Structures in the Context of Digital Transformation

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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.