PhD student project

Linnéa Carlsson, PhD student, University West

Through the work within AHIL, this thesis aims to advance the understanding of the underlying aspects of organizational capabilities in manufacturing organizational contexts within the strategic work of implementing digital technologies. This research has three objectives:

1. To uncover how managers' perceptions of industrial digitalization affect manufacturing organizations' strategic work.

2. To uncover how employee’s perceptions of industrial digitalization affect manufacturing organizations' strategic work.

3. To understand how the implications of individual and shared understandings of digital technology, based on the outcome of the first two objectives, affect strategy formulation.

Given that digital strategy formulation has been actualized in research over the years and a main part of the AHIL project, one may expect that managers’ strategic work of industrial digitalization would be consistent..

In this thesis, findings indicate that managers are desperately seeking an orientation toward industrial digitalization. Strategy formulation remains a disparate action in a closed area within an organization's formal and informal structures. There is a lack of organizational enablers to face industrial digitalization within the following domains: organizing and maintaining an adaptive culture, learning, and competence.

Thus, this thesis emphasizes a more human-centric perspective in forming organizational capabilities in manufacturing organizational contexts toward implementing digital technologies.