About

Wanda Orlikowski is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Management at MIT Sloan School of Management, where she also holds a position in Information Technology and Organization Studies. She received her Ph.D. from New York University. Her research examines technologies in the workplace, with a particular focus on how digital reconfigurations generate significant shifts in organizing, coordination, and accountability. She is currently exploring sociomaterial practices in digital work. Orlikowski has published widely in leading journals such as ACM Transactions on Information Systems, Administrative Science Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Organization Science, MIS Quarterly, and the journals of the Academy of Management. She has served as an editor for Organization Science and MIS Quarterly, and currently serves on the editorial boards of Information and Organization, Organization Science, and the Annals of the Academy of Management. Her work has received numerous honors, including Best Paper awards, the Distinguished Scholar Award of the Organizational Communication and Information Systems Division of the Academy of Management, and the Lasting Impact Award from the ACM’s Computer-Supported Cooperative Work Community. In 2019, she was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Management, and in 2021, she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. She has also received an Honorary Doctorate in Economics and Business Administration from Copenhagen Business School, recognizing her distinguished scholarly contributions to Information Technologies and Organization Studies. Additionally, she was awarded the 2024 Samuel M. Seegal Faculty Prize for inspiring students towards excellence and the 2023 Lifetime Service Achievement Award from the Academy of Management Communication, Digital Technology, and Organization Division.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Business
• Marketing
• Public relations
• Process management
• Law
• Knowledge management
• Mathematics
• Engineering
• Industrial organization

Selected publications

• Exploring AI-in-the-making: Sociomaterial genealogies of AI performativity

  Information and Organization · 2025-02-13 · 40 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Recent interest in artificial intelligence technologies has led to much discussion about what the age of AI portends for how we live and work. And specifically for the present discussion, what it means for agency. In offering our contributions to these considerations, we build on approaches to treat AI not as a “thing” but as phenomena in-the-making. Such a framing orients us to doings, to practices, to enactments, and consequential outcomes. These considerations of AI-in-the-making are inspired by agential realism, a theory that calls attention to performativity and accountability. Based on these ideas, we propose a sociomaterial genealogical approach that we suggest is well-suited for the study of AI-in-the-making. In so doing, we provide qualitative scholars with a way of orienting their inquiries toward the performativity of ongoing AI reconfigurations and sociomaterial accountabilities. • Proposes treating AI not as a ‘thing’ but as phenomena in-the-making. • Offers a performative account of agency inspired by agential realism. • Outlines a sociomaterial genealogical approach for studying AI-in-the-making. • Discusses concerns surrounding responsibility and ethics of AI.

  PublisherDOI

• Conduite du changement : concepts-clés

  Dunod eBooks · 2024-02-07

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Displacing Purpose: How Public Libraries are Being Reconfigured in the Digital Era

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  How are public libraries being remade in the digital era? Cultural institutions are increasingly expected to encompass ‘digital’ and prior research on digitalization in other sectors suggests that this will structure ways of organizing. Using longitudinal qualitative data, we explore how digital practices are creating significant changes in public libraries — not just shifting processes and services, but also critically, the very notion of what a public library is. We theorize our findings using agential realism which focuses us on performative outcomes. We consider how digitalization led to multiple shifts in the library’s processes and services, generating direct changes in library work practices manifesting as intended and unintended consequences. We then extend our analysis to include the indirect corollary effects of library digitalization, examining how these dynamics are challenging core norms and values of the library. We find that digital transformation is displacing the central purpose of public libraries, with far reaching implications for the vital role that this cultural institution serves in sustaining communities. These findings shed a sobering light on the likely performative outcomes of digitalization for other cultural institutions.

  PublisherDOI

• The Digital Undertow and Institutional Displacement: A Sociomaterial Approach

  Organization Theory · 2023-04-01 · 79 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  As “the digital” becomes pervasive within organizations and industries, it is increasingly evident that how we live, work, connect, coordinate, and govern are being significantly changed by digitalization. Many of these digital transformations are highly visible and dramatic, involving a purposeful repositioning and restructuring of organizations and industries. But in addition to these direct and visible changes, we argue that processes of digitalization are also producing less visible transformations in core institutional values, norms, and rules, which are indirectly, yet more profoundly, reconfiguring how organizations and industries perform. Referencing findings from two different sectors, we posit that the corollary effects of waves of digitalization—what we conceptualize as the “digital undertow”—are generating a set of dynamics that are displacing institutional apparatuses from their positions of primacy and authority within industries. We further suggest that our conventional toolkits for studying organizational phenomena are not well equipped for examining such corollary effects of digitalization. In addressing this challenge, we consider how the relational and performative theorizing of strong sociomateriality provides a powerful analytic for investigating these effects and we highlight how it offers valuable insights into the institutional displacements arising in the digital undertow.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• ¿Qué es una cosa? Lecturas para una antropología material

  UNED repository · 2023-09-01

  bookOpen access
  Publisher

• Sprawling Fieldwork: Tales of Many Fields

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2023-07-24

  article

  While many organizational phenomena may be largely contained within the boundaries of a program, organization, or industry, many more overflow those boundaries and spill substantially across diverse groups, organizations, communities, forums, and initiatives whose activities interact collectively. It has become almost inevitable today that organizational actors, including workers, must align their local activities to conditions produced elsewhere, and researchers interested in studying these boundary-traversing activities in a grounded way must contend conceptually and practically with a considerable degree of sprawl across multiple geographic, temporal, material, cultural, and conceptual boundaries. In these conditions, researchers need to engage in sprawling fieldwork--interviewing, observing, and engaging within and across many bounded spaces. To address the opportunities and challenges of this approach to organizational research, this symposium will include four empirical presentations that explore and extend our understanding of what it means to study sprawling phenomena with sprawling fieldwork. Traversing Boundaries when Studying a Novel Phenomenon: Tales from Fieldwork on Technology Reemergen Author: Ryan L. Raffaelli; Harvard Business School The Gig Economy as a Sprawling Field Site Author: Lindsey Cameron; The Wharton School, U. of Pennsylvania A Meandering Praxis: Wandering Fields and Stumbling Through Grapevines Author: Alan Zhang; MIT Sloan School of Management Navigating Ethnography’s Rough and Tumble Author: Mark de Rond; U. of Cambridge

  PublisherDOI

• Regenerative Coordination: Working with Algorithms to Produce Live Services

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2022-07-06 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  In an increasingly digital economy, a growing number of organizations are offering live services that deliver updated content and functionality continually during use. Producing live services requires managing ongoing algorithmic updates that occur unpredictably through the cloud from heterogeneous sources that are rarely aligned and prone to disrupt the service. These conditions present new challenges for coordination, which we examined in a 15-month field study of a precision agriculture company that delivers a live service providing analytics on real-time, global crop-imagery. We find that the work of producing this service enacts a regenerative form of coordination that leverages cloud-based, algorithmic updates to produce a consistent and continuous live service. We theorize these findings by explaining how the practices of regenerative coordination enable both ongoing improvements and rapid recovery from unpredictable disruptions, in conditions where the local cues, deliberation processes, and specified ends of traditional coordination are unavailable. Our study advances understanding of coordination in the digital era by articulating how cycles of continual regeneration constitute a dynamic capacity to effectively manage ongoing updates and emergent disruptions generated by cloud-based algorithms.

  PublisherDOI

• 9 Managing and Designing: Attending to Reflexiveness and Enactment

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2021-12-31 · 5 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Crowd-Based Accountability: Examining How Social Media Commentary Reconfigures Organizational Accountability

  Organization Science · 2021 · 68 citations

  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Public relations

  Organizational accountability is considered critical to organizations’ sustained performance and survival. Prior research examines the structural and rhetorical responses that organizations use to manage accountability pressures from different constituents. With the emergence of social media, accountability pressures shift from the relatively clear and well-specified demands of identifiable stakeholders to the unclear and unspecified concerns of a pseudonymous crowd. This is further exacerbated by the public visibility of social media, materializing as a stream of online commentary for a distributed audience. In such conditions, the established structural and rhetorical responses of organizations become less effective for addressing accountability pressures. We conducted a multisite comparative study to examine how organizations in two service sectors (emergency response and hospitality) respond to accountability pressures manifesting as social media commentary on two platforms (Twitter and TripAdvisor). We find organizations responding online to social media commentary while also enacting changes to their practices that recalibrate risk, redeploy resources, and redefine service. These changes produce a diffractive reactivity that reconfigures the meanings, activities, relations, and outcomes of service work as well as the boundaries of organizational accountability. We synthesize these findings in a model of crowd-based accountability and discuss the contributions of this study to research on accountability and organizing in the social media era.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Liminal innovation in practice: Understanding the reconfiguration of digital work in crisis

  Information and Organization · 2021 · 74 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Computer Science
  • Political Science
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• ITR: Social and Economic Implications of Information Technology: What Is Really Happening?

  NSF · $5.2M · 2000–2007

Frequent coauthors

• Susan Scott

  Unilever (United Kingdom)

  47 shared

• JoAnne Yates

  46 shared

• Natalia Levina

  12 shared

• Jack J. Baroudi

  University of Delaware

  9 shared

• Michael Barrett

  8 shared

• Kazuo Okamura

  The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, SOKENDAI

  7 shared

• Stephanie L. Woerner

  Indiana University

  6 shared

• Haridimos Tsoukas

  6 shared

Labs

• Wanda Orlikowski LabPI

Awards & honors

• 2024 Samuel M. Seegal Faculty Prize
• 2023 Lifetime Service Achievement Award from the Academy of…
• Fellow of the British Academy (2021)
• Honorary Doctorate in Economics and Business Administration…
• Fellow of the Academy of Management (2019)