Organizational Theory

Organizations keep publishing AI governance policies they cannot enforce. Decoupling explains the gap. Isomorphism explains the copying. Neither explains why we...

Data governance fails not because the technology is wrong but because the politics of institutional arrangements make real enforcement impossible. Decoupling ex...

Why institutional theory and resource dependence explain platform imperialism better than headlines do.

Three posts on ERP failure, and none of them applied structuration theory. Giddens and Orlikowski explain exactly why the same SAP instance produces different o...

Open banking APIs are boundary resources, RegTech is institutional isomorphism, and DeFi is disintermediation. Finance journals borrow IS theory quietly.

Why 88% of organizations use AI while only 7% scale it is not a lag. It is a paradox built into exploration and exploitation.

AI handles the ostensive routine beautifully. But organizational value lives in the performative, where people improvise around what the process diagram never a...

Organizations adopt green IT policies because regulation, competitor copying, and professional standards push them toward it. The institutional logic explains w...

Shadow IT was about unauthorized tools. Shadow AI is about unauthorized autonomous agents making decisions on your behalf. Delegation theory explains why that d...

AI tools offload thinking, and the people using them lose the very capacity they need to evaluate whether the output is any good. This is not an individual prob...

Most organizations adopted AI. Almost none scaled it. Absorptive capacity is the theory that explains the gap between buying a tool and learning from it.

AI does not just automate tasks. It atrophies the very expertise organizations need to evaluate whether AI is any good. Absorptive capacity theory saw this comi...

Marketing departments spend billions on martech stacks but study none of it through an IS lens. TAM explains adoption, but not why the same Salesforce instance ...

Gartner puts worldwide IT spending at $6.31 trillion for 2026, growing 13.5%. After thirty years of IT value research, the question of what it all produces is s...

Gartner says only ~130 of thousands of AI vendors are genuinely agentic. The rest are rebadging. Institutional theory explains exactly why this keeps happening.

McKinsey says 88% of organizations use AI. Only 7% have scaled it. That gap is enormous, and IS research has a theory for exactly why it exists.

IBM's 2024 report puts the average breach cost at $4.88 million. As an IS researcher, the number I can't stop thinking about is $9.77 million in healthcare, for...

McKinsey puts the transformation failure rate at 70%. Only 16% improve performance and sustain it. IS research is very good at predicting adoption and much quie...

Gartner puts worldwide AI spending at $2.5 trillion for 2026. The number is real. Whether it produces commensurate value is a different and harder question.

Gartner says 63% of organizations have started implementing zero trust. Only 10% will have a mature program by 2026. The gap between those two numbers is an IS ...

Organizations buy expensive analytics platforms and learn nothing. The theory of absorptive capacity explains why prior knowledge, not capital, determines wheth...

An affordance is not a feature. It is an action possibility for a specific actor with a specific goal in a specific context. Most IS papers get this wrong.

Agency theory explains IT outsourcing and governance through principals, agents, and monitoring. AI rewrites the problem in a way the original framework did not...

Gartner says 40% of enterprise apps will have AI agents by end of 2026. The same firm says 40%+ of those projects will be canceled by 2027. As an IS researcher,...

Rogers, Granovetter, and Burt explain why the department with the AI champion adopts faster while the department across the building with the same budget does n...

TOE from Tornatzky and Fleischer explains why most AI investments fail while a few transform organizations: the three contexts must align.

The 80% autonomous resolution prediction is specific enough to be testable. As an IS researcher, the interesting question is not whether the technology can do i...

Organizations use AI to optimize existing processes while calling it transformation. March (1991) would call this pure exploitation, and the exploration gap is ...

Multiagent AI systems are not just tools being used. They act, and their outputs become part of the organizational structure that shapes the next cycle.

Meyer and Rowan predicted that organizations adopt structures for legitimacy, not performance. AI ethics boards are the most direct example I have seen.

Cohen, March and Olsen showed that solutions search for problems, not the other way around. Most organizations adopted AI exactly that way between 2023 and 2025...

AI outperforms radiologists at detection but hospitals do not adopt it. Identity theory explains why. The tools that succeed will verify professional identity, ...

Economists study macro displacement. IS researchers can study what actually happens inside organizations when AI changes specific jobs, roles, and power structu...

Star and Griesemer defined boundary objects in 1989. AI output fits the definition perfectly. And that is why every governance policy that treats it as a single...

Almost every large organization has run an AI pilot. Very few of those pilots make it to production. That gap is not a data science problem.

Almost every AI policy is a find-and-replaced IT acceptable-use policy. DiMaggio and Powell explain why that pattern is not lazy. It is institutional isomorphis...

Every major cloud vendor now sells GPU clusters. The hardware is commodity. The capability to use it is not. Here is what Carr and Barney teach us about AI moat...

The New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI is the Knowledge-Based View of the firm becoming visible in court and in every training data licensing negotiation.

Transaction cost economics predicts that when AI cuts coordination costs, organizations should restructure. But they are not. What gives?

Pfeffer and Salancik said dependence rises when resources are critical and concentrated. AI model providers are the most concentrated critical resource in IS hi...

Ocasio's attention-based view says firm behavior follows what executives notice, not what they intend. Attention is the scarcest organizational resource.

Star and Griesemer's boundary objects are plastic enough to serve local needs but robust enough to hold shared identity. That is why the spreadsheet survives.

Bricolage explains why organizations without the right tools often build something better than the official system. Making do with what's at hand is not failure...

When the iPhone became better than the company laptop, IT departments had to decide how much control was worth the fight. Neither option was clean.

Gartner's April 2026 CEO survey puts 80% of chief executives on record expecting AI to force operational overhauls. McKinsey's data shows only 7% of organizatio...

IS implementations routinely underinvest in change management. The technology budget gets line items. The people budget gets a rounding error.

Gartner's April 2026 forecast shows AI spending nearly doubling to $2.5T in 2026. CIOs are now expected to demonstrate returns on that investment. As an IS rese...

CIOs are expected to drive strategy and innovation. Many still report to the CFO. That gap is not accidental.

Coevolution means the relationship between technology and organizations is recursive and ongoing. What you build changes how you work, which changes what you ne...

Studying institutional theory for comps changed how I read the news. Every AI-first press release is mimetic isomorphism. I cannot unsee it.

I answered a practice comps question about coercive isomorphism completely wrong. That mistake reshaped how I study for exams.

I confused structuration theory's three modalities with institutional theory's three pillars for months. A study partner caught it, and getting corrected was th...

One page of sticky notes became a wall of connected IS theories. RBV, dynamic capabilities, structuration, affordances, institutional theory: the connections be...

McKinsey puts the long-term digital transformation success rate at 16%. After studying this for years, I think the number is stubborn for a specific reason.

The leadership gap in digital transformation is not a technology problem. It is a culture and authority problem that technology cannot fix.

Most companies claiming digital transformation are doing digitization. Vial, Wessel et al., and Bharadwaj et al. give you the tools to tell the difference.

Gartner says 60 percent of enterprise GenAI models will be domain-specific by 2028. But a domain-specific model cannot compensate for an organization that lacks...

Teece, Pisano, and Shuen's dynamic capabilities framework explains why having excellent systems today guarantees nothing about tomorrow.

88% of organizations say they use AI. Only 7% have actually scaled it. That gap is not a rounding error.

When ERP implementations fail, the postmortem always says the software was fine and the change management was missing. That phrase hides what actually happened:...

After decades of high-profile disasters, large organizations still repeat the same ERP mistakes. The problem is rarely the software.

The EU AI Act hits all three of Scott's institutional pillars at once. Here is why that makes it the most consequential IS policy since GDPR.

Cohen, March and Olsen showed that in real organizations, solutions arrive before problems. The AI strategy wave is the clearest recent example.

McKinsey estimates $2.6T-$4.4T in annual GenAI value. McKinsey also reports only 7% of organizations have fully scaled AI. That gap has a name in IS research.

Geopatriation is not a cloud architecture decision. It is an institutional choice about which logic dominates.

Pfeffer and Salancik predicted this. When one supplier controls access to a critical resource, power concentrates. NVIDIA at 80% GPU market share changes everyt...

Most technology resistance is not about the technology. When a tool threatens who someone believes they are, rejection is identity-consistent, not irrational.

Herbert Simon said we can't process everything. That was 1947. We've spent 80 years building systems that prove him right every single day.

Institutional theory explains why organizations conform. Institutional entrepreneurship explains who breaks that conformity and rewrites the rules everyone else...

Most organizations adopting AI are not making rational decisions. They are responding to coercive, mimetic, and normative pressure that makes copying feel like ...

Different institutional logics give people different definitions of rational. Market logic says grow fast; clinical logic says do no harm. When they clash in he...

When employees spin up unauthorized cloud accounts and build their own tools, they are being intrapreneurial. The question is whether organizations can harness ...

Digital infrastructure consumes significant electricity. IS researchers studying digital transformation should be asking who measures, reports, and governs the ...

Organizations outsource IT, run into problems, bring it back in-house, then outsource again. The cycle is predictable. The reasons it repeats are not mysterious...

Nonaka's SECI model explains why most knowledge management systems only solve half the problem, and the easy half at that.

Organizations sometimes adopt technology not because it works but because not adopting it would look bad. Legitimacy theory explains why this is rational.

The same path dependence and absorptive capacity dynamics that explain organizational learning traps also explain why models degrade when trained on their own o...

No-code platforms lower the floor for simple tasks. They don't raise the ceiling. When the use case gets complex, the citizen developer needs an engineer.

March (1991) called it the competency trap: organizations get so good at what they currently do that they stop investing in what they will need to do next.

March's exploration-exploitation tradeoff applies to IT strategy more directly than almost any other management domain. Bimodal IT was an attempt to solve it. H...

Culture operates below the level where IS implementations are designed. Schein's three levels explain why EHRs and ERPs keep running into invisible walls.

Smith and Lewis (2011) built a theory around organizational tensions that are simultaneously contradictory and interdependent. The goal is not to resolve them. ...

Quantum hardware is real, but enterprise-ready it is not. Here is what the IS field should be watching anyway.

Most IT purchases fail the VRIN test. The interesting question is what IT-related resources actually are hard to imitate.

Pfeffer and Salancik said dependence on external resources shapes power relationships. In IT sourcing, that means vendor lock-in is not a contract problem. It i...

Feldman and Pentland (2003) showed that routines contain the seeds of both stability and change. IS implementations often change the documented process while le...

Weick's sensemaking theory says people act first and make sense later, preferring plausibility over accuracy. That explains everything from the Twitter rebrand ...

Employees are pasting internal documents into consumer AI tools. The risk profile is different from shadow IT, but the pattern is identical.

Ferneley and Sobreperez's workaround types explain why employees bypass official AI tools. Shadow AI is task-technology fit failure, not compliance failure.

Spence (1973) showed that costly observable signals communicate unobservable qualities. Technology choices do this constantly. What you run says something beyon...

Social capital theory says the network around a system determines whether the system works. IS treats this network as a constant. It is not.

The origin story of sociotechnical systems theory is not a feel-good tale about teamwork. It is a cautionary tale about what happens when you optimize only the ...

While the consumer metaverse flopped, enterprise AR kept growing quietly. Apple Vision Pro brought spatial computing back to the headlines, but the real story s...

Enterprise knowledge systems capture what can be written down and miss everything else. Argyris, Nonaka, and Cohen tell us why.

We keep spending more on technology and expecting more productivity. The same trap keeps catching us. Here is why the IS research community saw this coming deca...

The TOE framework explains why identical technology adoption fails in one organization and succeeds in another: context is not background, it is the whole story...

Gartner's bimodal IT concept is appealing in theory. The execution is where things get complicated, and expensive, and politically strange.

Gartner projects one million vulnerabilities annually by 2030. Patching cannot scale. The only move is to reconfigure how the firm approaches software risk.

Ferneley and Sobreperez argued workarounds are not user failure but evidence of system-task misfit. The workaround is the real requirements document.