Diffusion of institutional technologies: The case of blockchain
Ying‐Ying Hsieh, Anu Wadhwa · Academy of Management Proceedings · 2021
Organization theorists acknowledge that digital technologies can create affordances that foster novel forms of organizing, thereby shaping a symbiotic relationship between the technology and organization. In contrast to this treatment of technology and organization as separate entities, we argue that the blockchain innovation, as an institutional technology, for the first time, synthesizes both organizational and technological features in its system architectural core. A blockchain system core embeds an organizational architecture in a technology architecture, exhibiting a duality that tells blockchain apart from other digital technologies. Consequently, blockchain displays heterogeneous adoption patterns— actor-centric adoption driven by the diffusion of technology features (manifested as distributed ledger technology, DLT) versus technology-centric adoption driven by the diffusion of decentralized and self-governing organizational features (manifested as decentralized autonomous organization, DAO). We identify three diffusion patterns enabled (as well as constrained) by various boundary designs based on permeability and transparency. Taking an actor-oriented approach to theorize about the pathways leading to distinct adoption patterns, we shed new light on literature on innovation adoption by integrating organization design perspectives.