2  Digitalization

🚧 This section is quite minimal at the moment 🚧

2.1 Digitalization

For our purposes, we will define digitalization in relation to the socio-technical consequences of digitization, the conversion of analogue streams of information into digital form (Brennen and Kreiss 2016; Bockshecker, Hackstein, and Baumöl 2018).

We will skirt the discussion on what a “digital” form of information actually means. It’s not as easy as it seems and things get very deep, very fast. See for example this working paper for some thought-provoking stuff, including a convincing argument for why an alphabet itself, without considering how it is consumed, is already digital: Haigh and Gießmann (2023).

2.2 The discoursive construction of digitalization

If sustainability transformations are socio-technical change process oriented toward the normative concept of sustainability - are there normative goals that digitalization is oriented toward?

This is an absolutely crucial question as what and how to digitize is always a decision and not an inevitability. As is the regulation or non-regulation of the socio-technical consequences.

As such, the most important thing to note here is that the direction of digitalization but depends on its discursive construction (Marenco and Seidl 2021). Current research on the discursive construction of digitalization has mostly found that it is framed in terms of technological inevitability (Henriksson, Witzell, and Isaksson 2019; Hallin et al. 2022).

This is strikingly evident in all sorts of “smart” approaches to doing things - who could be against something turned into its smart version, right?

Bockshecker, Alina, Sarah Hackstein, and Ulrike Baumöl. 2018. “Systematization of the Term Digital Transformation and Its Phenomena from a Socio-Technical Perspective–a Literature Review.”

Brennen, J Scott, and Daniel Kreiss. 2016. “Digitalization.” In The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy, 1–11. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Haigh, Thomas, and Sebastian Gießmann. 2023. “Defining Digitalities III: What’s Digital about Digital Media?”

Hallin, Anette, Eva Lindell, Bosse Jonsson, and Anna Uhlin. 2022. “Digital Transformation and Power Relations. Interpretative Repertoires of Digitalization in the Swedish Steel Industry.” Scandinavian Journal of Management 38 (1): 101183. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scaman.2021.101183.

Henriksson, Malin, Jacob Witzell, and Karolina Isaksson. 2019. “All Change or Business as Usual? The Discursive Framing of Digitalized Smart Accessibility in Sweden.” Transportation Research Procedia 41 (January): 625–36. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trpro.2019.09.112.

Marenco, Matteo, and Timo Seidl. 2021. “The Discursive Construction of Digitalization: A Comparative Analysis of National Discourses on the Digital Future of Work.” European Political Science Review 13 (3): 391–409. https://doi.org/10.1017/S175577392100014X.