Abstract
Timbuk3’s 1986 hit ‘The Future ‘s so bright, I gotta wear shades’ is perhaps an odd starting point for a book review in Organization Studies, but its reception marks a curious point; what was intended as a song about an impeding nuclear armageddon was interpreted as an optimistic graduation theme song heralding a cheerful future. And indeed, tangential with the substance of the book at hand, it seems that as societies we enjoy an unstable relationship with our fears; be this the nuclear armageddon of the 1980s, the more contemporary climate warming or the currently strongly resurfacing artificial intelligence debate. Resonating with Bartunek (2018), Leodolter’s Digital Transformation is at first an unlikely volume to find its way into the pages of this journal; it is not seeking a dialogue with what we would consider contemporary anglo-saxonized organization theory. Instead, it charges between perspectives in a rather cavalier manner and it does not make an amazing eyebrow-furring companion for your choice indulgence on a stormy night. But despite its eclectic allowances the book attempts something quite brave; in a discourse dominated by distinctly aggrandized narratives about the, depending on your preference, soon-to-arrive artificial intelligence dystopia or utopia, Leodolter attempts to guide his pen somewhere between the extremes and examine the question of the digital transformation confronting both the modern organization and its managers with at least a modicum of pragmatism.
The book’s line of argument could be summarized as follows: first, our societies are currently confronted with a digital transformation that has the power to transmute several key aspects, such as decision-making, accountability and design, in the spirit of formal organizations (see e.g. Ahrne & Brunsson, 2011). Artificial intelligence, in its various forms, is perhaps the key technology driving this change, but it is not the only one and it does not act alone. The consequence of this digital transformation is that organizations develop subconscious minds when increasingly agential technologies mesh with processes, networks and inter-organizational knowledge. This results in organizations becoming hybrid intelligences, which expands the foci of managerial activity to areas such as moderating and inspecting the functioning of algorithmic decision-making. At the same time, current work routines and practices are going to become decisively different.
Leodolter illustrates these with fictional organizational micronarratives throughout the book. We get to meet, for instance, Sandra from the hospital, Frank from a steel mill and Mark who works in retail. The book presents a set of 40 guiding principles on how to manage the subconscious minds of organizations, e.g.:
Provide learning situations and a learning environment for the organization by skillful placement of methodological skills in thinking and self-discipline, by gamification and e-learning approaches and provide a climate of dealing constructively with deviations and setbacks, so that sense and intuition of the employees and the organization continuously improve. (p. 156)
Often these guiding principles come across as both functionalist and rather vague. Indeed, one cannot but read these principles with some sympathy for our fictional heroes. Fortunately, they are all characters in narratives of MacGyver-like benevolence where even the villains don’t get badly hurt. Alas, reality might have its Game of Thrones-like moments, too.
Leodolter’s arguments are not entirely easy to place into a rigorous organization theory context. If one was to accept the core gist of his writing, the book would qualify as grand theorizing of sorts. There is hardly an aspect of practical organizing that is not at least briefly touched upon, albeit, because it does so, it also often simply skirts around topics without going into any satisfactory detail. The entire book doesn’t contain more than a bare handful of references to our field, though then again this perhaps cannot even be demanded from an attempt at synthesis lest it becomes bogged down in ever-winding lists of references. But this does leave us with the question: What is the value of this volume for an Organization Studies readership? I will attempt different answers to this question, all of which potentially paradoxically do not exclude one another.
It could be argued that the roots of management studies as a scholarly field can be found in a kind of learning from a long journey type of book, be this the more analytical work such as Barnard’s The Functions of the Executive (1938, reissued 1968) or the more biographical line such as Sloan’s My Years with General Motors (1964). Filled with practical experience and personal reflection, the nature of these books was not in conforming to some theoretical orthodoxy, but rather to offer robust advice on how to manage the corporation. In what might seem like a surprising extension, this is also what Digital Transformation, crested with future-oriented speculation, attempts to do. It is, and rather importantly so, first and foremost an attempt at synthesizing the author’s insight into how the corporation of the future, confronted as it is on factory floor with all these new technological disruptions, should be taken care of. It is a practical chop-suey of advice, liberally scooping diverse viewpoints and insights into one grand construct. Hence, its value should be determined vis-a-vis its possibility to accomplish this practical goal. And just perhaps, in reverse, the book does raise the question of the practical value of contemporary, de rigueur management theory.
Because the alternative reading of the book is quite merciless. In its conceptual profusion ranging from Jungian psychology to systems theory, ethics of decision-making to organizational design, it ladles out concept upon concept and idea upon idea without properly considering any of them. Quite frankly, it is a theoretical mess. The book would struggle to be used as a proper academic reference for theory development, and it would have benefitted from engaging with at least the basics of contemporary organizational theory. Theories trying to illuminate the relationship between actors, organizations and technology spring to mind first. Its heavy focus on technology would have benefitted from interacting with classical sociotechnical systems research, sociomateriality, or actor-network theory (Leonardi, 2012; Orlikowski & Scott, 2008; Sayes, 2014). In giving explicit recommendations on organizational design, or the setup of work routines and practices, relevant bodies of theory would also have been valuable. In many instances, doing so would have deepened the insights that the book is able to provide, and perhaps prevented what does at times feel like reinventing the wheel. Also, the book doesn’t put enough emphasis on developing definitions for its core conceptual apparatus. While the book points out that even its core concept, the subconscious mind of the organization, should be understood metaphorically, I still struggle to put my finger on what exactly it means, having read the book. Thus, while I think it would be very welcome to read rigorous management and organization theory on the implications of, for instance, artificial intelligence, robotics or big data on the future of organizations and organizing, this is not the book for that.
I suspect that a good reason for reading Digital Transformation is that it still has the potential to inform as long as it is placed within a larger context. There have been many high-profile books of late dealing with humanity’s technological future, from the rather more accessible (Ford 2015; Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2014) to the outright quirky (Kurzweil, 2010; Bostrom, 2014). These works do not, however, predominantly seek to reflect on the organizational implications of digital transformations, which Leodolter does. While Digital Transformation has its shortcomings, its exhaustive breadth makes the book surprisingly good as a source of serendipitous reflection. While I’m not convinced that the subconscious mind of the organization is a captivating metaphor for what is happening in organizations, I do agree with the general sentiment in Leodolter’s work that organizations will face surprisingly large transformations if many changes driven by fields such as artificial intelligence and computational neuroscience fused with new post-bureaucratic ideals of organizing come to be. It is a transformation that we in the field of management and organization theory run the risk of not sufficiently appreciating insofar as we only see organizations and organizing as based purely in human interaction.
In this regard, Digital Transformation points toward questions, if at times implicitly, that are worthy of rigorous in-depth research. What is the future of organizations as we witness a profusion of both semi- and fully automated algorithmic decision-making? What are the ethical implications of this when viewed, for instance, in the context of organizational wrongdoing? What is work as we increasingly become ‘the human in the loop’ (p. 45), meshed in a net with increasingly capable technology? One cannot but join the author’s concluding plea that ‘People do not serve the structures but the organizations and their infrastructures serve the people’ (p. 245). But we cannot assume that this can be the outcome of anything else than a rigorous political process that regulates relationships not only between society and technology, but also between society and the ownership of technology. Because what is at stake is also the biggest stash of cash that the corporate world has ever laid its eyes on. Perhaps what we should be concerned about is actually the emerging artificial intelligence complex of corporate and state interests.