Digitalization and globalization in a turbulent world: Centrifugal and centripetal forces

Abstract

Research Summary Digitalization has three fundamental characteristics, reprogrammability infrastructural elementality, and intangibility. Based on these characteristics, it is transforming how firms organize for value creation, delivery, and capture. Its intangibility and infrastructural character largely free economic and business activities from the constraints of physical geography like those imposed by transportation and collocation. Digital communication technologies typically reinforce the centrifugal forces that favor dispersing the firm's high knowledge activities. Digital in situ technologies strengthen the centripetal forces toward concentrating the firm's low knowledge activities. Location dependence and product modularity are crucial moderators for tangible products, while institutional barriers are important for intangible ones. Finally, digital technologies increase the resilience of firms during disruptive events that impose restrictions on the movements of people and goods, as during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Managerial Summary Digitalization is a general purpose technology on the scale of the steam engine and electricity, and affects every aspect of business and society. It is transforming how firms organize for value creation, delivery, and capture. Freeing businesses from the constraints of transportation and collocation, it increases their resiliency in the face of global disruptions like those associated with the COVID‐19 pandemic. Digital communication technologies typically reinforce the centrifugal forces that favor dispersing the firm's high knowledge activities. Digital in situ technologies like advanced robotics strengthen the centripetal forces toward concentrating the firm's low knowledge activities. Location dependence and product modularity are crucial moderators for tangible products, while institutional barriers are important for intangible ones.

COVID-19 and digitalization: The great acceleration

“…An early advance was basic automated document management systems, which paved the way for many organizations and individuals to search for and find documents with speed and greater accuracy, thereby eliminating various laborious tasks associated with finding documents (Smith, 2019). More advanced emerging technologies offered an effective mechanism for organizations to link teams and foster closer working relationships between headquarters and subsidiaries (Autio et al, 2021). Firms have gained new opportunities for digitalization as the cost of communications, storing information, and computers/devices has shrunk, whilst the capabilities of the latter have exponentially increased.…”

Exploring the Perceptions of Cognitive and Affective Capabilities of Four, Real, Physical Robots with a Decreasing Degree of Morphological Human Likeness

“…Not only is the appearance of social robots strategic but the issue of the uncanny valley also stands out. 1 Mori [61] hypothesized the 'uncanny valley' effect in human-robot interactions, demonstrating that there is no linear relationship between the robot's human-likeness and our affinity with them. The human likeness of a robot causes a feeling of affinity, but the affinity transforms into eeriness when a certain degree of human likeness is reached.…”

“…The appearance of movement in an object that should be inanimate suggests greater concern than does the reverse, that is, the stillness of a person while looking alive [20]. When the boundaries between the various spheres blur (i.e., human 1 Mori developed an idea in the robotic field that was already introduced in Germany in the psychiatric and psychoanalytic field at the beginning of the twentieth century. Jentsch [42] a German psychiatrist, stated, as Author [20] recalled, that the uncanny-valley effect originates when a person deals with an unfamiliar object or event.…”

“…[5,25,55]); the digitalization of the whole field of information, communication and entertainment (e.g. [1,38,63]), including mass media (e.g. [72]), and the diffusion of much more advanced social robots and virtual assistants in several sectors of society [3,22,30].…”

A Postdigital Perspective on Service Work: Salespeople’s Service Encounters in the Connected Store

“…The term ‘connected’ is used here to refer to the retail store being organised around digital service network systems to produce services, to oversee and modulate FSEs’ work, and to connect the store to other places and organisations. Adopting Autio et al’s ( 2021 ) categorisation of digital technologies, the connected service encounter involves interaction with digital in situ and communication technologies, such as the use of mobile point of sale (mPOS) in transactions at checkout.…”