Digital Technologies within and beyond the Workplace: Impacts, Ambiguities, and Transformative Trends

Abstract

Digital transformation (DT) is increasingly establishing itself as a constant theme in contemporary academic and practitioner conversations (Hanelt et al., 2020). Organisation scholars are attentive to the role and impact of digitalisation (Hinings, Gegenhuber and Greenwood, 2018), investigating how digital technologies affect individuals (Zuboff, 2015; 2019), organisations and professions (Foer, 2017), entire industries (Taplin, 2017), and societies (Morozov, 2011). There is no doubt that digitally-enabled arrangements permeate and reshape industries and fields, challenging organisational models, HRM practices, power structures and meaning systems (Alvesson and Kärreman, 2011). Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the digitalisation of economy and organisations, anticipated many issues and transformations that would have taken longer to be addressed and posed unique demands in terms of conditions and scale of technology adoption at work (Wang et al., 2021). Thus, promoting theory and research development on this important substantive and methodological topic is therefore of foremost importance.