Logic Multiplicity in Digital Business Models

Digital technologies permeate and shape almost all aspects of business and society. Building on these digital technologies, firms develop digital business models to drive their digital transformations and leverage the opportunities the digital era promises. Digital business models are increasingly complex, heterogeneous, and inherently sociotechnical phenomena. They connect various actors and blur the boundaries of markets, industries, and institutional contexts. Research has long established that institutional logics shape actors’ actions and sensemaking. However, information system research has thus far largely neglected the co-existence of multiple institutional logics that influence actors’ value co-creation and co-capture interactions. Understanding and analyzing logic multiplicity in digital business models is necessary to shed light on the complex and interconnected digital reality. This dissertation seeks to further the understanding of logic multiplicity in digital business models, analyze the multiple logics and controversies coordinating and constraining actors’ interactions, and develop a method to allow practitioners to design digital business models for pluralistic settings. The four research projects encompassed in this dissertation form a multi-perspective approach of conceptual, descriptive, and constructive epistemological perspectives to pay tribute to the complex nature of the phenomenon of logic multiplicity in digital business models and the anchoring of this research at the nexus of information systems with management and sociology. This research provides practitioners with a toolbox to understand the multiple logics impacting their value co-creation and co-capture interactions with stakeholders and to design digital business models in the face of conflicting worldviews.