Institutional stance filtering in digitalisation opportunity-making

The fast evolving and emergent nature of digitalisation opportunities brings challenges for Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs). These challenges present the question of how SME owners/managers filter digital opportunities. In this study, we build a middle-range theory of institutional stance, shedding light upon SME owner/manager perceptions of what constitutes important digital knowledge in opportunity-making. In doing so, we demonstrate how SME owners/managers filter and therefore shape digitalisation opportunity-making. Specifically, we uncover two stance filters that SME owners/managers draw upon – a human pragmatist stance filter and a futurist stance filter – both of which are enacted in the pursuit of digitalisation opportunity-making. Moreover, our findings provide further fine-grained insights into how stance filters evolve via suspension of judgement, stance resonating thresholds and scarring remnants. We conclude that the digitalisation opportunity-making is not resolved with a binary or reductionist framing, but in understanding the evolutionary nature of the institutional navigation process.