Dependency Restructuring: How Technological Enactment Changes Organizational Requirement Relations

Digital technologies can change organizational work without changing the dependencies through which work is coordinated. This article examines the cases in which those dependencies do change. Dependency restructuring is defined as a change in what organizational activities require from one another, or from technological and external providers, after a technology is put into use. The analysis separates changes in activities from changes in dependencies and from the coordination needed to manage them. Individual dependency relations may be created, eliminated, or redirected to a different provider; previously separate sets of dependencies may also become connected. Two conditional propositions follow from this distinction. The first concerns situations in which local autonomy increases while reliance on a shared technological or external capability also increases. The second concerns situations in which different technologies produce similar coordination requirements because they generate similar dependency configurations under similar organizational conditions. Two evidence-based illustrations—enterprise cloud migration and artificial-intelligence integration in organizational workflows—show how the approach can be applied without treating the cases as tests of the theory. The result is a bounded meso-level account of when technological enactment changes what organizational activities require, from whom or from what, and how those changes affect coordination.