Adopting a ‘Search’ Lens in Exploration of How Organisations Transform Digitally

As new forms of digital technologies continue to proliferate, Information Systems (IS) scholars argue that we are witnessing a paradigmatic shift in the nature of technologies and their potential in profoundly changing organisations and ways of working. Such technological shifts have also given rise to consumerisation of IT and thus creating more endowed consumers with changing expectations and practices. The black-boxed nature of digital platforms and their algorithms have imposed challenges for scholars to understand these changes. In this paper, we draw on the notion of ‘search’ and its use in the organisation and management literature to propose a new analytical approach in studying digital transformations. Unlike the existing use of search in enhancing organisational performance or introducing new products, we use search as an approach that organisations renew their offerings, processes and practices in redefining their value proposition. Through different reconfigurations of material enactments, search becomes the underlying logic of organising and the centralised control shifts to a de-centralised autonomy, which facilitates the ongoing adaptations of practices as organisations transform digitally