Digital Workplace Transformation: The Importance of Deinstitutionalising the Taken for Granted

Studies on digital workplace transformation (DWT) have shown that new technologies and practices supporting employee connectedness and responsive leadership form the digital workplace. Yet, for new workplace practices to emerge, some of the existing practices need to disappear. Investigating a car manufacturer’s (Auto) DWT, we conduct an ethnographic narrative analysis on documents that Auto composed and distributed to communicate its rationale for its DWT as well as its intentions and implemented changes to its employees. We identify actors and how their actions connect them to Auto’s DWT. Drawing on institutional theory and the concept of deinstitutionalisation, we identify institutional pressures that Auto constructs as rationale for its DWT. These institutional pressures extend the imperative for DWT beyond the technology imperative taken in extant studies on DWT. Further, the documents tell stories of DWT occasionally meaning abandoning established practices rather than adding more of the new (digital technology enabled practices).