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The Future Is Now: Non-Linear Temporality in Blockchain Organizing

  • This cumulative dissertation advances management scholarship by studying the novel phenomenon of Blockchain organizing. Blockchain is an emerging technology that facilitates the maintenance of data across networks of computers, as opposed to more traditional central servers. These distributed data maintenance capabilities may have wide-ranging consequences. Ever since Blockchain’s inception in 2008, a discourse identifying this technology as an enabler of radically new and decentralized modes of collective and societal coordination has gained traction. “Blockchain organizing” refers to practices in which such Blockchain technology artefacts are being developed, implemented, and/or utilized by organizations. Studying these practices presents a unique opportunity to further management scholarship; particularly subjective time research following the neo-institutional tradition. Blockchain is not only an emerging technology associated with significant future expectations, but further a meta-organizational technology whose very raison d'être is the transformation of entrenched organizational structures. When organizational actors develop, implement, and/or utilize Blockchain technology, bureaucratic ways of organizing that have been established in the past and continue to be legitimized in the present may become reevaluated in light of bold visions for an organizational and societal future that looks radically different. The dissertation at hand utilizes this Blockchain context as an exemplary case to develop theory on how transformative future visions and expectations associated with emerging technologies may become instantiated within the present, and conceptualizes this phenomenon as “present-future convergence”. Developed based on a field-level pilot study that led to an 18-month ethnographic engagement with one Blockchain start-up, the three papers gathered in the dissertation utilize an interpretivist approach to explain how present-future convergence is rooted in conjoined processes of intra- and inter-subjective temporal experience. Furthermore, the papers highlight the counterintuitive consequences that present-future convergence may have for processes of technological, organizational, and societal change. In doing so, the dissertation opens promising research avenues at the intersection of temporality, performativity, and sociomateriality, and contributes to scholarly understanding of Blockchain organizing. Practically speaking, the dissertation helps answer the question of how actors may “pull” the future into the present to realize transformative future visions like those associated with emerging technologies.

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Metadaten
Document Type:Doctoral Thesis
Language:English
Author(s):Moritz J. Kleinaltenkamp
Advisor:Gerhard Hammerschmid, Shahzad (Shaz) Ansari, Johanna Mair
Publication year:2022
Publishing Institution:Hertie School
Granting Institution:Hertie School
Thesis date:2022/08/03
Number pages:101
DOI:https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-5487
Release Date:2024/06/20
Notes:
The second paper of the dissertation is currently under review at a journal. To protect the blind peer review process, the paper has been taken temporarily offline.

This document temporarily replaces the original dissertation (Serial No. 10/2022): https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-4498
Hertie School Research:Publications PhD Researchers
Centre for Digital Governance
Licence of document (German):Creative Commons - CC BY - 4.0 International
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