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This study focuses on how ideas of ‘digitalization’ are discursively constructed in the Swedish steel industry. Using a discursive psychology approach, we identify seven interpretative repertoires in the discursive practicing of digitalization: everyone-else, speed, competition, job loss, control, safety, and equality. Examining their functions and effects, we show that not only is digital transformation constructed as more productive, efficient, competitive, technologically advanced, safe, and equal, it also involves a shift towards the blue-collar worker being more vulnerable; a construction where she is able-minded but lonely, physically fragile, obtuse and unreliable, and a victim of a development beyond her control, forcing of her to acquire new competence. We conclude that this reproduces asymmetrical power relations between workers and companies, pushing the challenges of digital transformation to the workers. At the same time, we also see how these local discourses hold a possibility of tempering this asymmetry through the construct of togetherness of different contexts, bodies, and hierarchal levels, thus connecting steel industry workers of the future through the use of digital technology. 

Purpose The ongoing "digitalization of work" is one of the major phenomena shaping contemporary organizations. The aim of this study is to explore linguistic constructs of white-collar workers (WCWs) related to their use of digital tools. Design/methodology/approach The framework of ideological dilemmas (Billig et al., 1988) is mobilized to investigate the conflicting demands WCW interviewees construct when describing the ongoing digitalization of their office work. Findings This study shows how "digitalization of work" is enforcing an organizational ideological dilemma of structure and flexibility for WCWs. In the digital workplace, this dilemma is linguistically expressed as the individual should be, or should want to be, both flexible and structured in her work. Practical implications The use of language exposes conflicting ideals in the use of digital tools that might increase work-life stress. Implications for managers include acknowledging the dilemmas WCWs face in digitalized organizations and supporting them before they embark upon a digitalization journey. Originality/value The study shows that the negotiation between competing organizational discourses is constructed irrespective of hierarchical positions; the organizations digital maturity; private or public sector; or country. The study confirms contradictory ideological claims as "natural" and unquestionable in digitalized officework.

Planned work meetings are commonly used for gathering people to accomplish things together. The assumption that in organized meetings people come together is challenged once digital technologies become part of the performance of meetings. Understanding meetings in and with digital technologies requires investigation of how coming together is made possible in the first place. Thus, this study aims to contribute to develop knowledge on how coming together in planned digitally mediated meetings is enabled.

To this end, I mobilize a theoretical and methodological framework inspired by praxiography and sociomateriality, and I approach the purpose of the study by looking at, first, what work practices enact the planned digitally mediated meeting, and second in what ways such enactments enable coming together. To study these issues empirically, I performed observations of planned recurrent meetings of three teams within the multinational company, MultiCorp, as well as interviews with team participants. 

What emerges in the analysis is first that the often assumed-to-be already-organized frames for meetings – shared time, space, purpose, and participants – need to be constantly enacted in work practices. Instead of being matters-of-fact that frame the meeting before it occurs, these aspects also emerge as continuous sociomaterial work occurring during the meeting event. Second, the planned digitally mediated meeting event emerges not as one meeting but as many co-existing meetings, each of them with its local sense produced in situ. Therefore, what we might call technological flaws, such as disruptions and malfunctioning connections, make local sense to the meeting given that they are part of the assemblages continuously reproducing the multiple meetings during meeting events. Third, understanding agency as continuously flowing through practices, rather than as attributed to actors, sheds light on how coming together in the digitally mediated meeting is enabled, showing for instance how what I call sociomaterial blindness is due to more than the combination of human intention plus digital technologies.

Acknowledging planned digitally mediated meetings as continuously enacted sociomaterial spaces for exploration and creativity, rather than structured spaces controlled by humans, invites an understanding of meetings as ‘good’ also when they ‘only’ enable coming together. Enabling coming together understood as a matter of continuous enactments, both before and during meeting events, contributes to knowledge on how we can accomplish things beyond meeting enactment in digitally mediated meetings.  

This article considers the emergence of e-government in the UK and Sweden by conducting a structured document analysis of relevant government reports. The aim of the research was to examine differences in management planning practice – i.e. how change was planned and executed differently in both states. The key finding was that the focus of digital transformation shifted over time from digitalizing services to digitalizing internal departmental work processes. Both governments enacted change by identifying and supporting new roles and agencies deemed able to drive change. In so doing, both actively sought to balance macro-social and micro-social shaping forces. However, the ‘macro’ rationales and micro-level practices for digitalizing services also showed some differences of focus in each case.