Rossi, Enrico;
Pujadas, Roser;
Venters, Will;
(2021)
Epistemic Mirroring: How firms’ governance of internal relations shapes the interpretation of a digital ecosystem architecture.
In:
UKAIS 2021 Conference Proceedings.
UK Academy for Information Systems
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Abstract
The mirroring hypothesis asserts a symmetry between how a firm organizes its activities and tasks internally (division of labour) and how technologies are logically partitioned into subcomponents and modules. Yet digital artifacts can violate fundamental properties of physical modular systems, such as the impossibility to univocally allocate functionalities to the various modules, due to their agnostic and generative nature. Although an increasing amount of works is starting to question the usefulness of classic modularity theory to understand how firms take decisions and organize their activities internally, there is still a scant literature on the topic. In this work we draw upon the mirror hypothesis, and complement it with the insight provided by the IT governance literature. By doing so, we suggest that a company’s epistemic interpretation of the modular nature of a digital system depends on the dynamics of its internal decision-making process, reflecting formal and informal patterns of authority among its actors. Our study is evidenced by an extensive case study of the roll-out of an advanced technology by a large global multinational. In this was we study whether, and how, is it possible to establish interdependence between the way in which a firm makes sense of, and resolves, the conflicting goals and objectives of its internal actors and the way in which it interprets and conceives of the architecture of the digital ecosystem it is part of. We term this epistemic mirroring.
| Type: | Proceedings paper |
|---|---|
| Title: | Epistemic Mirroring: How firms’ governance of internal relations shapes the interpretation of a digital ecosystem architecture |
| Event: | Proceedings of the UKAIS Conference |
| Dates: | 23 Mar 2021 - 24 Mar 2021 |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Publisher version: | https://www.ukais.org/ukais-conference/ukais2021/ |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions. |
| Keywords: | Mirror hypothesis, Digital innovation, IT governance, Modularity, Epistemic Mirroring |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > STEaPP |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10172391 |
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