The changing agency of human and technological actors in digital transformation as a corporate entrepreneurship, adaptive capability

Stuart Cranney

doi:10.25907/00997

This thesis investigates how human and technological actors shape digital transformation (DT) as a corporate entrepreneurship (CE), adaptive capability. The research addresses two critical and inter-related knowledge gaps—namely, the underexplored role of cognitive technologies as co–agents in DT processes, and the mindset, routines, and structural changes required to overcome socio-cognitive barriers to transformation. To address these research gaps, three objectives focus the thesis. First, it aims to understand the DT firm environment wherein agency is shifting among human and technological actors; second, to identify the micro-foundations (mechanisms) of DT that drive inertia or adaptation as firm-level dynamic capabilities; and finally, to understand the influence of employee level mindset in enabling and impeding DT micro-foundations. In addressing these objectives, the thesis integrates key findings to advance theory related to the interplay of human and technological actors in DT and provide managerial implications. Adopting the critical realism paradigm, the research employs a multiple case study design across four large service-sector firms undergoing DT. Critical realism provides a robust philosophical foundation for this inquiry, as it acknowledges both observable phenomena and underlying structures or mechanisms driving them, aligning with the study’s focus on uncovering socio-cognitive tensions and unobservable dynamics such as employee mindsets or critical path dependencies that enable or impede DT. Case study methodology is uniquely suited to examine these layered interactions within real-world contexts, offering rich, granular insights into how and why adaptive capabilities emerge (or falter) during DT initiatives. In keeping with the objectives and paradigm of the research, findings from qualitative and quantitative data from the four case firms are integrated using retroduction. Retroduction enables underlying mechanism-based explanations for the complex phenomena to emerge moving beyond mere description or correlation. It is especially useful in realist evaluation to develop and refine understandings of context, mechanisms, and outcomes required by the research objectives guiding the thesis. Finally, by comparing and contrasting the four cases, retroduction also helps in abstracting from individual cases to more generalizable theories about underlying causal mechanisms that explain unobservable reality, as opposed to purely inductive theory building or bounded by the limitations of statistical generalization. In following this approach to the research, the thesis advances knowledge on how human and technological actors shape DT as a corporate entrepreneurship, adaptive capability. First, human and technological agency play distinct roles that are integrated and entwined as a non-trivial characteristic of the firm environment undergoing DT, extending corporate entrepreneurship literature that to date has not considered the role cognitive technologies play alongside employees, the human actors in DT, in shaping the firm environment. Second, DT processes occur in this new firm environment, shaped by varying degrees of technological agency and integrative knowledge, via comprehensible knowledge-based micro-foundations that are nested within sensing, seizing, and reconfiguration paradoxes leading to inertia or adaptation. Finally, the synthesis of findings from the thesis chapters culminate to reveal how firms’ ability to succeed in this adaptive endeavour is fundamentally enabled by employees’ integrative mindset that is both reflexive and formative in relation to the firm environment. Henceforth, the resulting multi-level model derived from synthesizing relevant literature and empirical findings depicts the integrated and dynamic layered reality of both the DT firm environment and integrative mindset. The thesis concludes providing managerial recommendations for firms to embrace the emergent human–technological DT frontier, suggesting future research avenues as a nascent, yet promising field of inquiry.

The changing agency of human and technological actors in digital transformation as a corporate entrepreneurship, adaptive capability

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