Rethinking Work: Pathways and Practices in Business and Society. Introduction to the Special Issue.

Abstract

The recent acceleration of technological change and its rapid penetration into all economic sectors means that organizations need the capability to innovate continuously and therefore to maintain, develop and adapt organizational structures, practices and behaviours (Bruni and Parolin, 2014). There is an urgent need to address questions about the scope, influence, interests and power of organizations and the potential and real benefits of these technological transformations for society. There is also a need to reflect on future avenues for research into digital technologies in organizational and human resource management (HRM). The relationship between work practices and technology has long been studied across different disciplines and approaches, from the roboticization of factory lines (e.g., Grint and Woolgar, to the integration of information and computing technology into knowledge work Organization studies are in Studi 2017; Grandori, The tools and the methods through which work practices are accomplished have dramatically in the last decade (Hamel, 2007, Some authors (Bondarouk and Olivas-Luijan, have shown that the integration of digital technologies, including The papers analyse the issue of “Rethinking Work: Pathways and Practices in Business and Society” in different contexts, using different methodological and epistemological approaches. Taken together, they show an original and relevant snapshot of the complexity of work practice redesign processes in contemporary organizations.