A Symposium of the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management
This episode represents another edition of a standing series showcasing the enduring relevance of organizational research and management studies. This year we are presenting a recording of a panel symposium conducted at the AoM Annual Meeting in 2024, titled “Design Choices: Examining the Interplay of Organizational Structure and Digital Technologies.” The organizers were Adrienna Baer and Amanda Pratt from Stanford University and our own Pedro Monteiro, who also moderated the session.
There were a total of four presentations, of which one was virtual. Ileana Stigliani of the Imperial College of London opened with a brief recording on the importance of the topic given the ever-increasing digitalization of work. In her view, “organizational design is no longer confined to physical hierarchies but extends into the virtual realm.” Design thinking offers a way for organizations to navigate the complexities introduced by the tools presented.
Gerald Davis from the University of Michigan discussed his construct of the “institutional terroir” characterizing how the introduction of the same technology worldwide has led to vastly different organizational structures, institutionalized norms, and workplace cultures among different nations or localities. He focuses on the ways that contemporary digital technologies “militates in favor of markets over other organizational designs.”
The next presenter was Melissa Valentine from Stanford University who discussed how contemporary communication technologies enabled radical changes in organizational structures, “how work gets done …, how individuals interpret their roles and functions, and how these roles and functions get enacted.” She highlights how little attention has been paid to how the designs of digital technologies shape the formal and informal structures of organizations.
Finally, Elizabeth Gerber from the McCormick School of Engineering provides a practical perspectives on studying the design of digital tools through their use. She proposes a differentiating construct to separate “design research” from “design practice” and discusses the methodological differences between design research and other forms of research.
We are grateful to the speakers for their wonderful presentations and to the Academy of Management for the opportunity to conduct the workshop. We hope you enjoy this episode and help us continue the conversations on the impacts of digital technologies on the workplace!
You may also download the audio files here: Part 1 | Part 2 | Supplement
To Know More:
Davis, G. F. 2016. What Might Replace the Modern Corporation? Uberization and the Web Page Enterprise. Seattle University Law Review, 39(2).
Davis, G. F. and Sinha, A. 2021. Varieties of Uberization: How technology and institutions change the organization(s) of late capitalism. Organization Theory, 2(1): 263178772199519.
Valentine, M. A. and Hinds, R. 2022. How Algorithms Change Occupational Expertise by Prompting Explicit Articulation and Testing of Experts’ Theories. Stanford University Working Paper.
Valentine, M. A., Retelny, D., To, A., Rahmati, N., Doshi, T., and Bernstein, M. S. 2017. Flash Organizations: Crowdsourcing Complex Work by Structuring Crowds As Organizations. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 3523–3537, Denver Colorado USA. ACM.
