„Wir haben keinen Plan B“: Chronik einer gescheiterten Digitalisierung

The article argues that behind the implementation of digital technologies in large companies old conflicts of interest can often be found. These old conflicts are intensified in the course of digitalization, shifting to new fields. In the dense description of an implementation process accompanied by participant observation, this article reconstructs the chronicle of a failed digitalization. In doing so, we point to the competing interests from the ‘top’ and the ‘bottom’ in the battle over the level of regulation as well as to internal strategies which are used to conceal the looming failure of the implementation process: Since the new digital technology is boycotted by the employees, the steering group erects facades in order to nevertheless sell it as a success within the company. Paradoxically, however, this very strategy provokes the construction of facades on the part of the employees as well. The organizational ethnographic case study thus points to a diversity of local rationalities in the internal digitalization conflict beyond the unambiguous discourse of digitalization on the company’s front stages.