Wanda Orlikowski

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…

Research topics

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

Selected publications

• 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 transfor…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Digital Undertow: How the Corollary Effects of Digital Transformation Affect Industry Standards

  Information Systems Research · 2021 · 79 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Digital transformation research shows how waves of digitalization produce strategic changes within and across firms, enabling new forms of value creation. We argue that different but no less important processes of digital transformation are generated by the undertow produced by these waves. Digital undertow, a corollary effect of waves of digitalization, profoundly influences how firms operate by transforming the industry standards that coordinate and regulate their core business activities. Thi…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

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

  Information and Organization · 2021 · 74 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Trajectory Dynamics in Innovation: Developing and Transforming a Mobile Money Service Across Time and Place

  Organization Science · 2019-08-09 · 69 citations

  articleOpen access

  This paper examines how and why innovations are reshaped as they become implemented and used in locales that are distant and distinct from those where the innovation was initially developed. Drawing on an in-depth field study of the innovation process that produced a mobile money system for Kenya, we contribute an understanding of the particular dynamics that arise when an innovation trajectory interacts with local trajectories that constitute the local conditions and practices of specific place…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

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

  Organization Science · 2021 · 68 citations

  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…

  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)

Similar researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Thomas W. Maloneh-60
• Sinan Aralh-44
• Stuart Madnickh-40