Managing Fashionable Organizing Visions: Evidence From the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure

Grand visions for organizational transformation increasingly build on fashionable information technologies. Organizational leaders may be tempted to adopt these visions due the high degree of legitimacy and mobilization they afford. However, their fashionable nature makes adoption risky. In this paper, we explore how organizations can manage this risk and successfully navigate the adoption of fashionable organizing visions. Specifically, we track how over the last five years the European Blockchain Partnership adopted a self-sovereign identity organizing vision based on blockchain. We find that successful adoption requires dynamic coupling and decoupling between vision and IT – both on a discursive and the material levels. Moreover, it requires effective management of ‘sensegiving’ and ‘sensebreaking’ by the innovation community.