Successive industrial revolutions have reshaped contemporary organizational life in ways that go well beyond the introduction of new tools. They have changed how work is designed, how value is created and how people relate to machines, to information and to one another. Each wave, from mechanization and electrification through computerization to today's cyber-physical systems, has carried with it new productive capacities and also new institutional logics, governance arrangements and cultural assumptions about what organizing is for (Ghobakhloo et al., 2023). The current transition from Industry 4.0 to the emerging Industry 5.0 paradigm marks one such inflection point, and it has clearly intensified scholarly and practical interest in how technologies like artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, advanced robotics, big data analytics and digital twins shape organizational structures, processes and human experiences (Aydin et al., 2023). Industry 4.0 has largely been read through the language of automation, interconnectivity, data-driven decision-making and operational efficiency (Abdel-Basset et al., 2025). Industry 5.0, by contrast, articulates a more explicitly normative agenda: human-centricity, sustainability, resilience and genuinely collaborative human–machine interaction are treated not as side-effects of progress but as part of what progress is meant to mean (Xu et al., 2021). The shift signals a move away from a narrowly techno-economic framing of technology towards a broader view in which social, ethical and environmental considerations sit alongside productivity and competitiveness rather than behind them (Huang et al., 2022).
Despite this growing attention, much of the literature still treats digital transformation as a largely technological phenomenon, foregrounding questions of adoption, implementation and diffusion while leaving questions of meaning, power and context in the background. Behind this framing sits a fairly deterministic assumption: that adopting a technology more or less automatically translates into organizational change, productivity gains and competitive advantage. The problem is that this linear story misses the way technologies are actually taken up. Technologies do not arrive in organizations as neutral artefacts. They are read through existing routines, contested by competing interests, reshaped by regulatory frameworks and coloured by cultural meanings. That is why the same technology so often produces very different outcomes across firms, sectors and countries, outcomes that simply cannot be explained by reference to the technology itself (Grabowska et al., 2022).
This special issue (SI) takes up that gap by putting the idea of technological embeddedness at the centre of the conversation. Drawing on recent work that revisits embeddedness in the context of digital transformation (Bally et al., 2025; Ekman et al., 2020; Fürstenau et al., 2019), together with contemporary thinking on sociomateriality and socio-technical perspectives on Industry 5.0, embeddedness directs our attention to the ways in which digital technologies are not just installed but are continually interpreted, negotiated, contested and reshaped by organizational actors, structures and environments. This embedding happens at several levels at once. At the macro level, it is shaped by regulatory regimes, industry norms and national innovation systems; at the meso level, by organizational strategies, routines, cultures and power relations; and at the micro level, by everyday practices, professional identities and individual sensemaking. By holding this multi-level picture in view, the SI seeks to contribute to the Journal of Organizational Change Management with a more relational and context-sensitive account of digital transformation, one that takes the mutual shaping of the technological and the organizational seriously.
With that framing in mind, we are pleased to present a collection of papers that look at digital transformation across a wide range of empirical settings: universities, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), financial institutions, technology-intensive startups and cross-cultural organizational contexts. Methodologically the contributions are equally varied, drawing on quantitative, qualitative, configurational and process-based designs, which feels appropriate to a phenomenon that resists any single way of being known. Substantively, they bring out the multi-level and often dialectical character of digital transformation. They cover institutional dynamics, organizational processes and individual experiences while also surfacing the tensions that run through this terrain: between efficiency and humanity, between stability and change and between the opportunities and the harms that digital technologies generate. Read together, the papers offer a layered picture that is hard to reconcile with a simple progress narrative and that invites a more reflective engagement with how digital transformation actually unfolds.
Overview of the special issue
The SI begins with the paper by Labrana and Rodriguez Ponce (2026), which offers a theoretically rich conceptualization of artificial intelligence (AI) adoption in universities. Drawing on Luhmann's theory of decision premises and organizational learning theory, the authors show that AI is frequently absorbed into existing institutional arrangements, thereby reinforcing stability rather than triggering transformation. The key contribution of this study lies in introducing the notion of “invisibilization mechanisms”, through which organizations neutralize contradictions, and in identifying the conditions under which these contradictions escalate into paradoxes that enable deeper structural change.
The next paper by Chen and Hansen (2026) examines the role of internal corporate social responsibility (ICSR) in shaping employee outcomes during digital transformation. By empirically demonstrating the mediating role of organizational citizenship behaviour and the moderating role of CSR satisfaction, the study contributes by showing how ICSR operates as a micro-level stabilizing mechanism, enabling organizations to retain talent and sustain engagement in digitally transforming environments.
Following this, Fu et al. (2026) explore the darker side of digital transformation, focusing on workplace discrimination, toxicity and technostress. Using a cross-cultural qualitative design, the authors reveal how digital technologies may reproduce inequality through algorithmic bias and opaque systems. The main contribution of this study is its integration of cultural context into digital transformation debates, highlighting how socio-cultural differences shape the manifestation of digital harms.
The paper by Singh et al. (2026) shifts the focus towards Industry 5.0 by examining psychosocial safety climate, innovation capacity and attitudes towards change. Their findings demonstrate that technological readiness alone is insufficient and that psychosocial and attitudinal factors act as critical enablers of transformation. The study contributes by extending socio-technical systems theory into the Industry 5.0 context and offering one of the early empirical models of human-centred transformation readiness.
Extending the discussion to inter-organizational dynamics, He and Tsai (2026) investigate how startups develop knowledge supply chain partnerships in the commercialization of enabling technologies. Their process model identifies three phases (approaching, linking and communitizing) through which partnerships evolve. The key contribution lies in conceptualizing knowledge supply chains as dynamic, sensemaking-driven processes, particularly under conditions of technological ambiguity.
In the context of SMEs, Yang et al. (2026) examine the relative influence of technological breakthroughs and organizational change. Their configurational analysis demonstrates that digital transformation emerges through multiple pathways and that organizational change becomes increasingly important over time. The study contributes by introducing the concept of “inertia alleviation” within resource orchestration theory, offering a novel explanation of how SMEs overcome resistance to change.
The role of leadership is addressed by Akarsu et al. (2026), who examine digital leadership as a micro-foundation of digital transformation. Their findings show that digital leadership influences organizational outcomes through technology adaptive capability. The main contribution of this study is its multi-level integration of leadership theory and dynamic capabilities, demonstrating how individual-level capabilities translate into organizational performance outcomes.
Building on this leadership theme, Cao et al. (2026) examine digital transformation leadership in Canadian retail banking, testing a moderated mediation model that links leadership to business performance through digital transformation capability. Their findings show that digital transformation leadership does not improve performance directly; instead, it works indirectly by strengthening internal capability, and even this indirect effect weakens once leadership becomes excessive. The main contribution of this study is twofold: it defines and validates digital transformation leadership as a distinct construct that extends transformational leadership theory into the digital era, and it surfaces a “dark side” of overly dominant digital leaders, identifying a threshold beyond which leadership starts to crowd out the very capability development it is meant to enable.
From a technological application perspective, Fantozzi et al. (2026) explore the integration of digital twin technology in technology transfer processes. Their study proposes a hybrid project management methodology combining agile approaches with digital tools. The contribution of this paper lies in demonstrating how digital twin technology can operationally overcome knowledge and coordination barriers, bridging theory and practice in complex industrial settings.
At the sectoral level, Zheng et al. (2026) analyse the relationship between digital transformation and bank risk-taking. Their findings reveal that digital transformation reduces risk through improvements in management efficiency and credit structure. The key contribution of this study is to reveal how digital transformation can reduce the risk-taking of commercial banks through management efficiency and credit structure.
Finally, Rahman (2026) examines the role of e-human resource (HR) management (HRM) in shaping employer branding in the UK. The study shows that digital HR practices not only improve efficiency but also influence organizational identity and employee perceptions. Its main contribution lies in bridging e-HRM and employer branding literature, demonstrating how digitalization reshapes both operational and symbolic dimensions of HRM.
Conclusion
Taken as a whole, this SI brings together a wide set of perspectives on digital transformation and develops a multi-level account of how technologies become embedded in organizational life. The contributions show, in different ways, that digital transformation is not just a matter of deploying new tools and platforms. It is a relational and context-dependent process shaped by institutional structures, organizational practices, professional identities and human agency. Read across the issue, several cross-cutting tensions come into focus. Organizations both absorb and resist new technologies. Productivity gains sit alongside risks of discrimination, technostress and inequality. Global technological imperatives meet local socio-cultural realities. And the symbolic dimensions of digitalization shape not only what organizations do but also what they are seen to stand for.
Theoretically, the issue moves the conversation forward in a few connected ways. It sharpens the concept of technological embeddedness by showing how it operates at institutional, organizational and individual levels at the same time and by naming some of the mechanisms through which it actually works in practice: invisibilization, inertia alleviation, sensemaking-driven partnering, adaptive leadership capabilities and the threshold effects that mark the limits of leadership-driven change. It pushes socio-technical systems theory and resource orchestration theory into the Industry 5.0 context, and it brings critical perspectives on power, culture and inequality more squarely into the mainstream of digital transformation research. The cumulative effect is to nudge the field away from yes-or-no debates about whether technology causes change and towards more useful questions about how, for whom and under what conditions digital transformation produces particular outcomes.
There are also practical implications for the people who actually have to navigate this terrain. The contributions suggest that successful transformation depends less on the sophistication of the technology adopted than on the fit between that technology and the institutional, cultural and human systems it is embedded in. For leaders, this means paying attention not only to technical readiness but also to psychosocial safety, ethical governance, inclusive design, the slow work of building adaptive capabilities across the organization and the recognition that strong digital leadership has to be balanced with sustained internal capability development rather than substituted for it. For policymakers, it points to the importance of regulatory and institutional frameworks that can take the edge off algorithmic bias, protect workers in more exposed positions and keep participation in the digital economy reasonably equitable.
The collection also opens up a fairly rich agenda for future research. Longitudinal and processual studies could usefully trace how embeddedness changes over time. Comparative work across institutional and cultural settings could test where existing theories hold and where they start to strain. The darker side of digital transformation, including its psychological, ethical and ecological costs, deserves more sustained empirical attention, as do the human-centric promises of Industry 5.0, especially in places where the optimism is currently running ahead of the evidence. Methodologically, there is plenty of room for mixed-methods, multi-level and configurational designs that can do justice to digital transformation as a situated, dynamic and often contested process.
Our hope is that this SI contributes to ongoing debates in organizational change management by encouraging scholars to move beyond technology-centric approaches and to engage more seriously with the social, ethical, cultural and institutional dimensions of digital transformation. More than that, we hope it supports a reorientation of the field towards a different kind of question: how digital technologies can be designed, governed and embedded in ways that serve not only organizational performance but also human flourishing, social justice and long-term sustainability.
Finally, we want to thank the authors who trusted us with their work, the reviewers whose careful and generous reading has clearly strengthened the contributions and the editorial team at Emerald Publishing, in particular the editorial leadership of the Journal of Organizational Change Management, for their guidance, patience and steady support throughout the development of this special issue. We are also grateful to the wider community of scholars whose ongoing conversation continues to shape this area of research, and we look forward to the discussions that the papers gathered here will hopefully prompt.
