Dependency Restructuring: How Digital Technologies Reconfigure Organizations

Digital technologies can change not only how organizational activities are performed and coordinated but also the dependencies through which those activities are connected. This article develops dependency restructuring as a meso-level organizational mechanism linking technologically enabled changes in activity configurations to changes in coordination requirements and organizational adaptation. Building on coordination theory, organizational information-processing research, interdependence theory, and information-systems research on technological enactment, we distinguish dependency restructuring from technological adoption, process change, and changes in coordination mechanisms. Four analytical transformations are identified: dependency creation, elimination, redirection, and recombination. Historical illustrations from centralized and personal computing, enterprise systems, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence illustrate the analytical applicability of the mechanism across heterogeneous digital technologies. The analysis highlights that eliminating or redirecting human-mediated dependencies can simultaneously create technological or interorganizational dependencies, such that greater local autonomy need not reduce system-level dependence. The article contributes to research on digitally enabled organizational change by bringing changes in dependency configuration to the foreground as a distinct analytical mechanism and develops propositions and directions for empirical investigation.