Paul S. Adler

This paper develops and deploys a theoretical framework for assessing the prospects of a cluster of technologies driving what is often called the digital transformation. There is considerable uncertainty regarding this transformation’s future trajectory, and to understand and bound that uncertainty, we build on Schumpeter’s macro-level theory of economy-wide, technological revolutions and on the work of several scholars who have extended that theory. In this perspective, such revolutions’ trajectories are shaped primarily by the interaction of changes within and between three spheres—technology, organization, and public policy. We enrich this account by identifying the critical problems and the collective choices among competing solutions to those problems that together shape the trajectory of each revolution. We argue that the digital transformation represents a new phase in the wider arc of the Information and Communication Technology revolution—a phase promising much wider deployment—and that the trajectory of this deployment depends on collective choices to be made in the organizational and public-policy spheres. Combining in a two-by-two matrix the two main alternative solutions on offer in each of these two spheres, we identify four scenarios for the future trajectory of the digital transformation: digital authoritarianism, digital oligarchy, digital localism, and digital democracy. We discuss how these scenarios can help us trace and understand the future trajectory of the digital transformation.

The climate crisis calls for a massive and rapid retooling of our economy and society, and we have reasons to doubt that capitalism, even reformed, could meet that challenge. As an alternative solution, authoritarian socialism such as it existed in the former Soviet Union or China would be neither attractive nor effective; by contrast, a democratic form of socialism might be both. In a democratic socialist society, we would govern democratically both our enterprises and our economy as a whole. Democratizing the governance of enterprises would help them make better tradeoff decisions and internalize some important externalities. But if they remain at the mercy of capitalist competition in product and financial markets, many enterprises will be economically unable to retool fast enough, so we also need to pool the country’s economic resources and manage them democratically, collectively, and strategically towards our shared environmental, social, and economic goals. Organizational research on corporate strategic management offers insights into how such an economic system could satisfy four key requirements for a successful fight against climate change—democracy, innovation, efficiency, and motivation.

This review aims to redress the growing gap between the receding discourse on bureaucracy and bureaucracy’s continuing presence as the predominant organizational form. Reviewing a century of organizational research on bureaucracy, we find three main perspectives, which developed in succession but persist in parallel: bureaucracy as an organizing principle, as a paradigmatic form of organization, and as one type of structure among others. We argue that these three perspectives should be brought into closer dialogue and expanded, so we can overcome the de-contextualized, reified, and atomized ways in which bureaucracy is often viewed. To that end, we offer three pathways to stimulate future research on bureaucracy in its wider context, bureaucracy in action, and bureaucracy’s interdependencies and configurations. Finally, we discuss how we can better understand the various guises in which bureaucracy continues into the 21^st century.