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Short abstract:

Organizations are often seen to lose relevance in the course of digital transformation. I contrast these expectations with the empirical observation that—although social coordination is undergoing differentiation—organizations are by no means losing their role as anchor points of transformation.

Long abstract:

According to recurring expectations in social science discourse, formal organizations (e.g., companies, foundations, NGOs, state administrations) are anticipated to lose socio-economic relevance in the course of digital transformation and to increasingly fade into the background compared to other modes of social coordination (e.g., technically-mediated communities and networks).

In my presentation, I would like to contrast these expectations with the empirical observation that—although social coordination is undergoing further automation and differentiation as a result of digitization—formal organizations are by no means losing their role as anchor points of social order or as agents of transformation.

This applies to the dominant digital platforms and ecosystems as everyday coordination and communication structures of contemporary society, whose development is primarily determined by the corporate actors behind them, the activities of civil society organizations, and state regulatory bodies.

And this also applies to innovation- and transformation-oriented niche initiatives (e.g., open source, open science, or commons projects), which, from a certain degree of growth and societal relevance, cannot do without the formation of formal organizational structures or the association with umbrella organizations.

These examples particularly indicate that formal organizations are entering into a variety of new interrelationships with other modes of social coordination (e.g., networks, platforms, communities, forms of partial organization) in the course of digital transformation, which are successively changing their role in phases of socio-technological change, but by no means diminishing their position as agents and anchor points of societal transformation.