Abstract:

This study examines how firms in cultural and creative industries navigate digital transformation amid institutional plurality, where deeply embedded cultural logics coexist with and conflict with emerging digital logics. While prior research has primarily framed digital transformation as technological adoption or organization-level adaptation, it offers limited insight into how contradictory institutional logics are managed across levels over time, or how ecosystem actors mediate this process. Drawing on the institutional logics perspective, we conceptualize digital transformation as a cross-level institutional negotiation rather than a purely internal strategic adjustment. We introduce the concept of “leveraging without losing” to explain how culturally embedded organizations mobilize digital technologies and ecosystem partnerships while preserving core value-defining activities and the foundations of legitimacy. Rather than resolving tension through replacement or simple hybridity, organizations redistribute institutional strain through ecosystem arrangements that enable bounded digital integration. Empirically grounded in multiple cases from cultural and creative industries—a field characterized by strong professional autonomy and symbolic value—the study draws on interviews with cultural producers, technology collaborators, and institutional intermediaries. Cross-case comparison traces how digital logics are interpreted, translated, and stabilized across macro-level field pressures, meso-level ecosystem structures, and micro-level practices. The findings are expected to advance institutional logics and digital transformation literatures by shifting attention from static coexistence toward dynamic cross-level mediation. By theorizing ecosystem-enabled institutional adaptation, the study offers a novel explanation of how organizations engage digital transformation without eroding cultural identity, providing both theoretical refinement and practical insight for institutionally embedded industries.

Please choose your submission type: Developmental Paper

Primary Track: Strategy

Keywords: strategy;strategic change

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Prof Hsin-Peng Shiahhou