Book Chapter · 2023
Wang, G. (2023). Digital value and organizational change: It’s time to rethink organization for value-in-configuration. In M. K. Brohman, G. S. Dawson, & K. C. Desouza (Eds.), Digitalization and sustainability: Advancing digital value (pp. 174–191). Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781800888807.00017
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A firm improves a product, delivers it, and expects its features to determine its value.
Reconsider
Capabilities become actual through connections, including connections that the firm does not control.
Implication
Attend to changes on both the firm side and the user side, and adapt organisational arrangements accordingly.
Firm-centred, one-way accounts depict value creation as turning resources into offerings and delivering them to users.
The chapter proposes value-in-configuration: digital value is a relationist capacity, actualised when compatible capacities connect. Configuration can begin on the user side and change both a firm's offering and its internal digital technology.
Concept explorer
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The chapter's proposed lens treats digital value as a capacity realised through connections with other technologies, rather than a fixed property of one offering.
Drawing on DeLanda's existing assemblage theory, the chapter defines value through what a technology can do in relation to other technologies.
Firm-side and user-side configurations can change each other's value; the firm need not initiate the process.
The chapter positions value-in-configuration against value-in-exchange, value-in-use and value-in-context using property/capacity and substantialist/relationist distinctions.
PDF pp. 10–12; printed pp. 183–185.
The proposed lens generates research questions about how user-side configuration shapes internal organisation and how product architecture and organisational structure coevolve with their external environment.
PDF pp. 13–14; printed pp. 186–187.
Consider whether interfaces and configurations allow a product's intended capacity to be realised with the technologies users already have.
PDF p. 12; printed p. 185, including the smartphone/video-editing example.
The chapter calls for continuous attention to external technologies and user-side changes, rather than drawing an arbitrary boundary around the firm's own systems.
PDF pp. 14–16; printed pp. 187–189.
Why this matters
As products, services and organisational tools become interdependent, value creation extends beyond the technologies and actors a firm owns or controls.
Discuss this researchA conceptual argument with illustrative examples and a selective literature review, not an empirical test of performance benefits. Assemblage theory and the prior value concepts are foundations, not inventions of this chapter.
Develops and names value-in-configuration using existing assemblage-theory distinctions.
Research agenda and explicit managerial takeaway on continuous cross-boundary configuration.
This exploration is based on the author-supplied full text. It distinguishes the paper’s own contribution from established concepts it draws on. For formal citation, consult the publication.