This paper examines why many small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) remain excluded from the digital and green transformations known as the Twin Transition. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann's social systems theory, it reconceptualises inclusion/exclusion not as a matter of resource deficits, but as a question of programmability, understood as the ability to generate communications that are intelligible within functionally differentiated social systems.
The study employs a qualitative, social systems theoretical approach grounded in second-order observation. It analyses an empirical case from a South Baltic Interreg project that developed a digital platform to support SME transformation. Rather than evaluating outcomes in managerial terms, the analysis observes how digital platform modules operate as meta-programmes that condition organisational decision programmes and structural coupling.
The findings show that digital platforms can function as socio-technical infrastructures that translate societal codes into organisationally useable semantic structures. By operating as meta-programmes, platform modules enable SMEs to reprogramme decision programmes related to digitalisation and sustainability, thereby enhancing their capacity to produce communications that resonate with multiple societal subsystems. Inclusion emerges as a semantic and programmatic effect rather than a direct out-come of access to resources
The paper contributes to Information Systems research by integrating Luhmann's distinction between code and programme into the analysis of digital infrastructures. It introduces the concepts of meta-programmes and programmable inclusion, highlighting programmability as a semantic condition of communicative connectability and extending current debates on socio-technical infrastructures, digital governance and organisational observability.
