key: cord-0069441-kv3g1tdp
authors: Björkdahl, Joakim; Kronblad, Charlotta
title: Getting on track for digital work: Digital transformation in an administrative court before and during COVID-19
date: 2021-10-23
journal: nan
DOI: 10.1093/jpo/joab015
sha: 8f8845715171404f422df6cacdaf2706f7f9bb90
doc_id: 69441
cord_uid: kv3g1tdp

This article analyses organizational change and new ways of working in one of our most institutionalized and professionalized contexts—the courts. Here, digital technologies and the implementation of digital work practices carry great promise as they enable more accessible and qualitative services to be produced more efficiently and effectively. While prior studies have shown that institutionalized and professionalized actors are reluctant to respond to change, attempts to change work practices through digital technologies remain understudied. In particular, we do not know how COVID-19 has influenced the motivation and implementation of digitalized work. This article draws on a large Swedish administrative court and its attempts to digitalize its work starting in 2018. We find that several barriers first inhibited a successful transformation of work practices. These barriers were connected to the institution of the court and the institutionalized profession of judges, which worked together in preventing organizational change. However, COVID-19 radically accelerated the digital implementation of work practices and gave rise to two separate re-assessment processes. The first established new motivations for digitalized work, and the second allowed for a new perception of value in digital work. These processes effectively broke down perceived barriers and substantially facilitated a more successful digital transformation of working practices.

Digital technologies are increasingly being implemented at workplaces with major effects on working methods (Adner, Puranam and Zhu 2019; Björkdahl 2020) . The effects are revolutionary, and in many settings, digitalization is comparable to the introduction of the steam engine, electricity, and compu terization (Schwab 2018) . Advances in digital technologies not only introduce new work practices (Kingma 2018 ) but may also give rise to a social shift in how we think about work (Johansen 2017) and disrupt previous ways of organizing work (Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014) .

While management often takes decisions to implement new technologies (Grant 2019) , it is the professionals at the workplace that collectively enact, adopt, or resist changes to their work practices (Muzio, Brock and Suddaby 2013; Heizmann, Mastio and Ahuja 2020) . Previous research has shown that some professions are more inclined to embrace digital technologies, while others are more reluctant (Susskind and Susskind 2015) . Resistance to changing work practices is particularly evident in contexts that are simultaneously highly institutionalized and highly professionalized (Kronblad 2020 ). In the highly institutionalized and professionalized medical field, prior research has, for example, reported on difficulties in transforming work practices by using electronic medical record (EMR) systems (instead of paper-based records). Here, several barriers to the adoption of new ways of working have been identified, including high investment costs, low perceived usefulness, time loss, reduced productivity, lack of data and software standards, and difficulty in using (see, e.g. Valdes et al. 2004; Scott et al. 2005; Anderson 2007; Nov and Schecter 2012) .

Although institutional and professional change have been explored in prior research (e.g. Leicht and Fennell 2008; Scott 2008; Suddaby and Viale 2011; Lefsrud and Suddaby 2012; Adler and Kwon 2013; Empson, Cleaver, and Allen 2013; Muzio et al. 2013; Noordegraaf 2016; Heizmann, Mastio and Ahuja 2020; Noordegraaf 2020) , there is limited knowledge about the interplay between institutional and professional barriers in the digital transformation of work practices (Muzio et al. 2013; Hinings, Gegenhuber and Greenwood 2018) . Indeed, it is becoming increasingly relevant to understand barriers to digitalized work as the pressures to implement digital work practices have increased, not the least because of societal efforts to combat the spread of COVID-19 (Kronblad and Pregmark 2021) . While the connection between efforts to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and the turn toward digital ways of working is relatively straightforward (in that digital technologies allow for social distancing), we only have limited knowledge about how COVID-19 has impacted digital transformation in terms of new behaviors and motivations toward adopting digitalized work. This article seeks to investigate organizational change by implementing new ways of working through digitalization in one of the most institutionalized and professionalized contexts-the courts. We aim to examine how digital ways of working have been implemented into this highly institutional setting, the barriers, and the role COVID-19 has played in the transformation process.

While courts are vital institutional actors, with work processes that are highly standardized and strongly influenced by legislation and regulations, the professionals performing the key activities in the courts are the judges (Ekelöf 2007) . The profession of judges is strictly regulated in most jurisdictions. However, judges have little guidance in legislation in regard to how they practice law. Instead, their professional autonomy is often regarded as a key element to ensure that justice can be served under the rule of law (Hodson and Sullivan 2012) . This autonomy can, for instance, entail freedom for judges to decide how to interpret the law and assess evidence, as they should be able to operate without being influenced by popular pressures. Moreover, this autonomy is claimed to entail a general aversion toward standardization, control, and formal organizational processes (Alvesson and Kärreman 2006) .

Previously, courts have also taken a highly conservative stance on transforming work practices (Cooper et al. 1996; Muzio et al. 2013; Susskind 2019) . However, as part of the public sector, most courts face increasing demands for their services (administering justice) while being subject to budgetary constraints (Borge, Falch, and Tovmo 2008) . Given that the implementation of digital technologies in work practices can ultimately combine increased efficiency with quality (Schwab 2018) , this could result in more efficient utilization of public funding, and simultaneously improve the value created for the public (Noordegraaf 2016; Donahue 2018) . This implies that courts could be highly suitable for digitalized work and highly receptive to the promises carried by digital technologies (Susskind 2019) .

To understand the interplay between institutions and professionals in the context of digital transformation of work practices and the effects of COVID-19, we draw on a case study of a large administrative court with 500 employees. We followed the efforts to implement digital technologies and transform work practices in the court between 2018 and 2021, before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study draws on semi-structured interviews, internal documents, and data from workshops. We find that several internal and external barriers connected to the institutional actor (the court) and the professional capacity of judges initially worked together to preserve practices and prevent change. Despite substantial efforts by the management to implement and support new digital ways of working, the digital transformation progressed slowly before COVID-19, mainly because many judges were not motivated to adopt digitalized work and organizational structures and culture supported their professional autonomy. However, simultaneously, we find that under the impact of the COVID-19 crisis, the digital transformation radically accelerated and altered their ways of working. We find that the effects of COVID-19 enabled the professionals to reassess the purpose of digital technologies in terms of motivation and meaning. This was followed by a second reassessment of the value of using digital technologies for their work practices. Through these reassessment processes, key barriers to change were overcome. This article shows how change can be triggered by multiple exogenous forces simultaneously and that each trigger may open the way for opportunities to reassess current work practices. In this case, digitalization and COVID-19 can be seen as independent but still intertwined triggers. That digitalization and COVID-19 worked together in initiating two separate re-assessment processes teaches us that it is possible to change professional and institutional settings, but deliberate actions to digitalize such settings need proper motivation if barriers to change are to be overcome. This article stresses that change could not be obtained when digitalization was motivated as the goal but rather when it was framed as the means to another goal (preventing the spread of COVID-19). Our findings support both practice-driven (Smets, Morris and Greenwood 2012) and idea-driven (Reay et al. 2013 ) changes and show that in times of rapidly enforced practices, effective organizational and professional change reside in an overlap between underlying ideas and organizational efforts. In this way, our findings nuance previous conflicts between different models of change.

This section serves as a background to comprehend what is known about institutional actors and professions, focusing on the context of courts and digitalization as a driver to change working practices.

Institutional theory holds that actors are always affected by their institutional context (Scott 1987) , which is why we need to understand the context of courts to understand the actors' reactions and responses to change. In the general case, a context consists of formal and informal institutions. The formal institutions encompass laws, rules, and regulations, whereas informal institutions consist of norms, cultures, and ethics (North 1987) . The formal and informal institutions influence each other, as dominant norms in society become codified and established as laws, and these laws ultimately influence behavior and the building of future societal norms.

The individuals who populate these contexts (of formal and informal institutions) establish particular logics that guide how they act (Powell and Colyvas 2008) . The logics influence what paths of actions are available for the individuals in different contexts and how these individuals make sense of and legitimize their activities (Nigam and Ocasio 2010) . Logics thereby serve as cohesive systems of practices, assumptions, values, and norms created and recreated within particular contexts and strengthened by social relations (Powell and Colyvas 2008) . When certain behaviors and practices are collectively reproduced and repeated over time, certain logics become dominant, continuously shaping the actions in the given context, and determining how the individuals in a given context respond to novelty (Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury 2012) . This characterization is particularly applicable in professional contexts where professionals act as agents in the creation, maintenance, and disruption of institutions simultaneously as they adhere to the institutions of their profession (Muzio et al. 2013) .

While the logics perspective builds on a view that most practices are unref-lected and shaped by institutions, other institutional scholars claim that it is the work-the actual practices that take place at the workplace-that builds institutions and can initiate change (Lawrence and Suddaby 2006; Empson et al. 2013) . Aligning with similar reasoning (that also awards agency to individuals), Scott (2008) argued that professionals can be seen as agents of institutions and that it is professionals who choreograph changes. Hence, it is clear that different scholars provide different explanations for the mechanisms of change (Dacin, Goodstein and Scott 2002) . Some scholars stress that change is initiated by and justified in the actual work practices that are carried out (Powell and Colyvas 2008; Jarzabkowski, Matthiesen and Van de Ven 2009; Smets et al. 2012) while other scholars argue that it is ideas that drive changes, and that changes become manifested after micro-level theorizing, encouragement, and collective meaning-making (Reay et al. 2013 ). This tension between different models and different motivations of change makes it particularly interesting to study in a highly institutional and professional context.

While the entire legal field is highly institutionalized, this is perhaps particularly true for the courts, as they act as the prime institutions of the judiciary with a crucial role in functioning democracies (Møller and Skaaning 2012) . The purpose of courts (in democratic societies) is to administer substantial justice within their jurisdiction, through fair, impartial, transparent, and predictable processes and where the judges are the key professionals trained to deliver on these aspirations (Susskind 2019) .

Professions can, in general, be described as particular forms of occupations that are tailored to complete specific tasks within the jurisdiction of specific professional knowledge (Abbott 1988). According to Hodson and Sullivan (2012) , professions are occupational groups that have succeeded in obtaining a perception that they: (1) are holders of abstract knowledge; (2) are autonomous; (3) have authority over external clients and internal subordinate occupational groups; and (4) have a certain degree of altruism connected to their work performance. Judges belong to such professional groups in which abstract knowledge, autonomy, authority, and altruism are highly present (Ekelöf 2007; Susskind 2019) . While judges reign in the courts (Moran 2015) and are the professional group, that is, the most associated with the court system, it should be noted that courts also consist of a range of other employees who perform a wide spectrum of tasks under different professional and occupational titles.

The court and the judges are subject to strict formal regulation under constitutional laws (Ekelöf 2007) . The administration of justice is subject to public acceptance and trust and strong formal and informal institutions (North 1987) . The professional status, relational networks, and personal expertise of judges make up the roots and legitimacy of their profession (Thornton et al. 2012 ) as judges share a particular, and symbolic, enactment of their professional identity employing professional dress codes, ceremonies, and rituals (Moran 2015; Siebert 2020) .

While the work tasks in courts are knowledgeintensive and rule-based (legally guided), the work is also highly individual and dependent on the ethical norms of each judge. This autonomous trait in judging can be symbolized by judges swearing an individual professional oath to administer justice and remain impartial and self-sufficient within the court (Ekelöf 2007) . However, such a preference for autonomy also comes with a particular dislike for standardization, control, and formal organizational processes (Alvesson and Kärreman 2006) . Similarly, the highly individual responsibility has promoted a professional and organizational culture that provides strong incentives to detect and contain risks (Noordegraaf 2016) . The elevated position of judges and their internal and external authority (Hodson and Sullivan 2012) are also important for their professional status as they are not only powerbrokers in the office of their institution but also preside over other institutions in their supervisory and governing capacity (Diver 1979) . This is particularly relevant within the context of the administrative court, as it aims to protect individuals from injustices on the part of public bodies and ensure just and fair institutions in society at large.

Digitalization as an exogenous driver of change Digitalization enables new communication patterns and provides new and cost-efficient means to connect through increased transparency, easier access, and increased predictability (Schwab 2018) . For example, applying digital technologies to large datasets allows previously unknown patterns to be identified (Cohen 2018; Donahue 2018 ). Automation can enable an organization to act upon and scale such efforts. Working in digital and virtual settings enables the workflow in an organization to be better structured and empower flexible and remote ways of working (Kingma 2018) . Digital technologies, therefore, carry a potential for more accessible, affordable, intelligible, and faster services in the court setting (Susskind 2019), including, for example, the possibilities of increased access to law with online judging and virtual courts as well as to build away any human bias in judging (Danziger, Levav, and Avnaim-Pesso 2011) .

However, digital transformation is more than the introduction of technologies. It is about people being involved in the implementation of technologies and building cultures that allow for further exploration of new digital technologies (Pasmore et al. 2019 ). Thus, digital transformation not only impacts the adoption of new technologies but the entire organization and its activities, processes, people, and culture (Björkdahl 2020) . While the transformation is enabled by technologies and the generation and analysis of data, technologies are simply the means, and not the objective, of the digital transformation process (Cohen 2018) . Considering that digital technologies can be classified as enabling technologies rather than pre-packaged solutions, it is up to the organizational members to accept, adapt, and engage with technologies and create capabilities to improve and innovate work practices (Bresnahan and Trajtenberg 1995; Teece 2018) . Where new technologies enable new systems and outputs, the organizational members adopt and make use of them. Hence, while digital transformation can be said to be enabled by technologies, the organizational members must sense and seize the opportunities and transform their work practices. This can be seen as an interplay between the exogenous trigger for change (digitalization) (Garud, Jain, and Kumaraswamy 2002) and the endogenous response by the organizations (Suddaby and Viale 2011; Jaadan 2019). Similarly, one can view COVID-19 (or rather the restrictions imposed to battle COVID-19) as an additional exogenous trigger for change that organizations respond to. However, COVID-19 also has a particular relation to digital transformation as it has increased the pace of change-where social distancing and quarantine regulations have increasingly moved physical workplaces into digital alternatives (Kronblad and Pregmark 2021) .

Prior literature has predicted that digitalization will challenge previously dominant work practices and logic within professional communities (Susskind and Susskind 2015; Donahue 2018) and carry a spark for institutional change (Gawer and Phillips 2013; Guillemette, Mignerat, and Paré 2017; Hinings et al. 2018) . This means that digitalization is expected to create tension in institutionalized contexts, particularly those where the behavior of actors is dominated by strong formalities as well as informal institutions and professional logic. A case that shows such a transformation is the newspaper industry, which has undergone major changes during the last decade. For example, Raviola and Norbäck (2013) showed that digital technology served as a trigger to change work practices in a business newspaper organization and illustrated how its professionals assessed and reassessed the new technology, which equipped the changes with meaning (regarding their old way of working). This supports the premise that the professionals and their deliberate actions to create, maintain, or disrupt institutions set the path of change (Lawrence, Suddaby, and Leca 2011) . Indeed, it has been shown that professionals sometimes also react to digitalized work by actively undermining the changes brought into their professions. A case that points to this is the adoption of EMR systems among healthcare actors. Prior research has shown a large resistance among physicians for adopting electronic records, despite many reported benefits (see, e.g. Valdes et al. 2004; Scott et al. 2005; Anderson 2007; Jha et al. 2009; Nov and Schecter 2012) . Consequently, the adoption of EMR systems among hospitals has been low (Jha et al. 2009 ). Jha et al. (2009) showed that the primary barriers to adopting EMR systems were mostly cited by physicians in hospitals without such systems. Hence, digitalization might not only create institutional complexity and de-institutionalized effects (Scott 2001; Greenwood et al. 2011; Hinings et al. 2018) , leaving room for new practices, but may also trigger institutionalized professionals to react to and resist changes by slowing down, or hindering, the implementation of new digital work practices. While this holds for any change, digital technologies are expected to have particular consequences for a certain type of established professions. In The Future of the Professions, Susskind and Susskind (2015) argued that digitalization may result in a decline in the importance and relevance of professions that build on expertise. They predict a dismantling trajectory for several professions when their practical expertise is replaced by increasingly capable and automated systems. We may therefore expect certain professionals to be reluctant to adopt new digital work practices and instead strive to keep their institutions and organizations, as well as their professions, intact.

Understanding barriers to change is critical if we want to understand how to change work practices in organizations using digitalization. While the digital transformation of firms, organizations, and work practices is not new, barriers to digitalizing work in such an institutional and professional domain as the courts have remained understudied. In addition, we do not know how the effects of COVID-19 have affected the motivation and perceived barriers among professionals, and their organizations, to adopting digitalized work practices.

This research is based on a case study exploring changes in work practices instigated by using digital technologies in a Swedish administrative courtwhere 500 employees serve the public with legal services-and how the court as an institution and its professionals resist or adopt changes. Case studies are particularly suitable when exploring a new phenomenon as they allow different perspectives to be analyzed and different voices to be heard (Eisenhardt 1989; Hodson and Sullivan 2012) . By using a case study to explore how new digital ways of working are recognized, enforced, implemented, rejected, and accepted, we can start to understand sparks of organizational change through the court as an institution and place of work, and digitalization as a mechanism for change within the professional space.

The main task determined by the chief judge with the help of a head of digitalization and a court advisory board on digitalization, starting in 2018, was to change from working predominantly with printed documents and manual signal systems that indicated where in the process the legal cases were, to working entirely in digital settings where all documents were kept in the cloud, to digital signal systems and the use and re-use of templates-being administered on a digital platform. Hence, the purpose was to scrap all paper documents and instead find ways to access all the necessary documents for every case in a computer-based setting, to be able to follow the progress of each case digitally and to ensure that the right person was informed when the case required a job to be done. While the chief judge was the person responsible for the transformation, the digitalization officer was the person that should design the model to be used for implementing digitalized work and make sure that the transformation happened. The role of the advisory board, consisting of a variety of employees, including several judges, should contribute with input and legitimacy.

We studied the court in its entirety (including its six departments covering different areas of jurisdiction) to transform work practices using digital technologies. The data collection and analysis of the study are explained below.

Our study draws on multiple data sources, including interviews, internal documents, workshops, and internal meetings (see Table 1 for an overview of the data). As a starting point, we were informed about the inner workings of the court in regard to the organization, governance mechanisms, organization of work, work processes, and tools. We also made several visits to the court to observe and understand how different professionals completed their work tasks.

We performed two rounds of interviews. The first included interviews with 24 professionals during 2019. In this round, we interviewed professionals with various responsibilities, including the chief judge, associate judges, junior judges, legally trained court clerks, and administrators. We asked questions about the ongoing digitalization efforts to change work practices, how the interviewees made sense of the potential in digital technologies, how new ways of working affected their professional role, and their reasons for adopting, or not, the proposed new practices. Given that the interviews were held at the court, we were also able to engage with employees during coffee and lunch breaks and small talk in the corridors to pick up on the general feeling and atmosphere in the workplace. This increased the authenticity of the interviews and the validity of the data. In 2020 and 2021, we conducted a second round of interviews (eight interviews) to understand the impact of COVID-19 on the work practices and to what extent the pandemic accelerated and changed the patterns of organizational change. All interviews were semi-structured and lasted for 60 min. They were recorded and transcribed. Moreover, throughout the process (both before and during COVID-19), we had several meetings that allowed for informal interviews with the chief judge and the digitalization officer.

We also participated in a 3-h digitalization workshop with one department. The purpose of the workshop was to review and spread a new digital way of working. Additionally, we were provided with data, in the form of detailed notes, from workshops held with the other departments that the digitalization officer had already collected. Moreover, we participated in four meetings with the court advisory board on digitalization. We were able to discuss the preliminary results of the interviews during these meetings and their view of how the process of changing the work practices evolved. Detailed notes were taken at these meetings.

Looking at the data we had, we were struck by the difficulties that the court had experienced in finding and implementing new digital work practices. There had been many attempts to enable the transition from working mainly with physical documents and the use of physical signal systems in the work process to working in digital settings with digital signal systems using a digital platform. However, despite management support, these ambitions and attempts repeatedly failed. Thus, we became interested in what barriers to transforming the work practices existed and to what extent the court as an institution and organization, and professional rigidities, hindered a smooth digital transformation of work practices. The first step in our data analysis was to import our transcribed interviews into Nvivo. We subsequently used the procedures Gioia, Corley and Hamilton (2013) recommended to create a list of first-order codes on barriers to changing work practices and retained informant-centric terms and codes. We used these codes to search for existing literature that could help explain what we saw in the initial data coding. The data highlighted that the digital transformation challenged existing values, norms, and practices. The transformation would be dependent on a range of different actors, organizational structures, and professional values. This led us to review research on institutional theory and institutional logic, work, and change (e.g. Greenwood et al. 2011; Thornton et al. 2012; Hinings et al. 2018) . Drawing on this literature, we grouped our first-order codes related to specific barriers to changing work practices into mechanisms according to the type of barrier. We created six mechanisms and organized them into second-order codes (Corley and Gioia 2004 ). The first-and second-order codes and the empirical examples are presented in Table 2 .

In our analysis, we aimed for a multilevel approach where we looked at organizational change as well as work practices (as imposed and carried out within the different departments) and professional perceptions. This was because if we were to use an institutionalist lens, we needed to shed light on the organization as a whole and the inner workings of the organization (Greenwood, Hinings and Whetten 2014) . Hence, we strived to explore the digital transformation of work practices as a collective effort by professionals within an institutional organization and bridge different analysis levels.

At our initial meetings in 2018 and 2019 with the advisory board, the digitalization officer, and the chief judge, we were informed about several digital investment decisions, and various digital initiatives carried out. Examples included measures to increase the technological capability in the court, several pilot schemes in various departments and the successful implementation of a fully digital workflow in one of the departments. However, our observations led us to believe that most employees still worked with physical files and papers. During our first day at the court, we saw a woman standing in the hall moving physical files between bookshelves-thousands of files on migration matters. She told us that she had decided to spend the entire day on this to help her organize her workflow. She was an experienced judge and wanted the files arranged in order of urgency. We were surprised that organizing the workflow took the shape of such physical activity, but above all, we were surprised to see a judge devoting her time to completing this mechanical task. Most of these migration files had been available in digital form while stored at the Migration Agency; however, astonishingly, as soon as a decision was appealed, the digital files were printed out and sent over to the administrative court with a daily delivery truck. Thus, we realized that external and internal contexts mattered for transforming work practices at the court and that the management at the administrative court had met several different barriers to change work practices.

Identified barriers for the implementation of digital ways of work Why did professionals at the court not adopt digital work to a greater extent, and what hindered the court from transforming the work practices? Table 3 presents the identified barriers to changing work practices perceived by professionals at the court in 2019 and the frequency with which these came up in the interviews.

We found that some barriers were external to the court, some were internal to the court, and some were directly connected to the professional capacity of the judges. The first set of barriers regarded the court as an institutional actor in society, where change was difficult to manage and control, and barriers to change were external to the court. One of these barriers to digitalizing work emerged due to the court having limited power and autonomy regarding decision-making over technological investments (stemming from the court being part of a court system). For this reason, the court was unable to change or update the digital platform that was used but was 'stuck with what they got' (which most interviewees perceived as 'not up to date'). This Lack of incentives to implement digital ways of working 'We are quite busy, so it might not be the right time for a digital transformation'.

Lack of time to implement new things 'First, I use the digital space to find out where the physical file is, and then I double-check that the digital file corresponds to the physical, and so there is a lot of printing and recording and so on'.

Barriers connected to organizational culture 'Some people want to show that they work digitally, but it is going too fast, as some tools are not in place yet'.

'There is a worry that you will lose your work, it is so easy to just click somewhere, and then everything is lost'. The interviewees also stated that the court had no control over the number of matters requiring their service. For example, a large migration wave hitting Europe in 2015 resulted in a surge of appeals a couple of years later. The court consequently suffered from a backlog that made it difficult to adopt new work practices simultaneously. Moreover, the cases coming into the court displayed varying degrees of digitization where 'The tax cases are digital' but 'The mental health cases [compulsory commitment] are held at the hospitals, and we cannot take computers with us. . . We only take a phone to receive text messages'. A similar variation in digital maturity was also expressed in relation to the parties that sought justice at the court. The parties could be the highly digitized tax authority, an elderly citizen without access to digital technologies for communication, the migration agency that delivered physical files, or a small municipality that still used a fax machine. 'We receive the cases digitally from some parties, but then there are citizens that send in papers by post'. This meant that it was difficult for the court to implement a standardized work practice that would apply to all cases and all parties. The common perception was that the large variation among the level of digitization in the cases and digital maturity among the users of the court services made it impossible to treat them in the same way and with the same work processes.

Another set of barriers identified concerned the internal environment of the court. These barriers are related to governance and organizing for new work practices, the culture institutionalized at the workplace and managing the available digital technologies. We were told that the court had launched several pilot schemes for digitalized work but that all the departments still worked differently. Several interviewees stated that the wide variety of ways of working created an unfocused context where it was not clear what practices were desired or encouraged. A lack of incentives for the departments to adopt new Second-order codes Ordered in themes think, that is, indicative of how we work. We turn the staff against us in this instead of getting them to go along with us'. 'You do nt work at a court unless you are a responsible person and believe that what you do is important. Appendices cannot get lost in cyberspace; no, we need to trust that the digital tools will work and that they will improve quality, that is, in our pride in the profession'.

Professional pride (altruism)

Barriers connected to the profession of judges Professional 'We love paper documents'. Judges are used to traditional ways of working 'Judges are free to judge and work in the way that they want, and the chief judges are free to administer the work in their department'.

Judges are used to working independently (autonomy)

'Change at a court is impossible if you do not get support from the judges'. ways of work was also mentioned. The interviewees said that they perceived a lack of communication concerning what was to be achieved, why, and in which departments. Many pointed to this lack of focus on the part of management, who they said had failed to communicate their ambitions for the future of work. Hence, several interviewees claimed that it was hard to understand what the management wanted, as they launched numerous projects simultaneously 'with no focus or direction'. The management team also described communication problems and said it was difficult to prepare the workforce for new ways of working: 'For the staff, it often feels like something we pulled out of a hat, even if we feel that we are prepared'. Although the interviewees experienced problems and uncertainties in the transformation, they were critical of the lack of mechanisms to pick up on these. They stated that the culture did not encourage a lively discussion about the transformation and that negative opinions were rarely voiced. Instead, the skeptics remained quiet and resistant to implementing change. In some departments, the problems with the implementation of new work practices were not raised at all, which created difficulties in identifying a coherent way of working and moving the implementation forward. The result was that some departments simply did not implement any new practices. This created confusion among the employees that served all departments. It was especially problematic for court clerks that rotated between the different departments. The organizational culture was described as siloed, with significant differences in norms, practices, and beliefs among the six departments. There were also technological barriers related to the internal environment, as the professionals believed that they lacked the skills and competencies for digitalized work. The third set of barriers was directly related to the judges in their professional capacity. The judges had a strong position in the workplace and expressed a professional pride and purpose based on altruism and being autonomous and independent from the court in their judging. One of the judges in the court emphasized: 'Judges are free to judge and work in the way they want'. While the judges declared that they were highly personally involved in their work and saw an altruistic purpose in judging, they also said they felt a great sense of responsibility for their professional work. The interviewees pointed to the specific training of judges-through law school and at the workplace-in having built a particular professional knowledge base that was considered highly abstract and complex.

Furthermore, most judges articulated that they are professionals who are used to doing things their way, without being subject to any directives from above in regard to trying new things. Moreover, a judge emphasized that they wanted to work in traditional ways because 'we love paper documents' and several judges expressed this desire to work in traditional and proved, nondigital, ways. Compared to the nonjudges in the organization, the judges also said that they perceived 'big risks in going digital'. They stated that if they were to implement new practices, they would first need to be Hierarchical position of judges 5 satisfied that the tools and technologies had been tested and reached an acceptable standard. For example, one judge explained: 'Appendices cannot get lost in cyberspace; no, we need to trust the digital tools to work and that they will improve quality, that is in our pride in the profession'. There were only a few judges that were positive toward digitalized work and typically, they were the ones that belonged to the pioneering departments that had implemented new working practices, or they were part of the advisory board. Most judges were resistant to change, and their autonomous and elevated position at the workplace made it difficult to enforce new technologies on them. They did not adopt any new practices as they were introduced, and they could do so because they had the autonomy and power within the organization. Indeed, they did not have a specific strategy not to adopt digitalized work. The data do not stress that they were particularly negative toward any specific activity but that they were hesitant toward the entire chain of new activities that digitalized work would entail-from going through all their documents on a desktop computer to the use of a digital signaling system and to using the digital platform to perform all necessary activities, including the difficulties to make notes that should not show up on a final file and to use and contribute to standardized templates. However, one judge in the advisory board frequently stressed that all departments should work the way they wanted, including working according to the old way. This opinion was voiced in discussions to explain that imposing a common strategy for digitalizing work would challenge the autonomy of the judges. As this autonomy was seen as a key feature of their professional jurisdiction, efforts could only be made to influence and motivate the judges to change but not to force them. As claimed by several interviewees, digitalized work would be 'impossible if the judges were not on board'.

Re-assessment of the meaning of, and value in, digitalized work We witnessed many different attempts to change work practices through digitalization before COVID-19. Indeed, there was a digital platform to be used, and all employees attended workshops. There was the formal work of the court advisory board on digitalization and the practical initiatives by the digitalization officer, who was very committed and active at the workplace and tried to become familiar with and make an impact within every department. Nonetheless, the identified sets of barriers prevented a successful and coherent implementation. Some departments were less interested in transforming the work practices, and many professionals were working in the environment (physical, digital, or a combination of them) they thought was the best for them.

Returning to the court after the initial impact of COVID-19 in 2020, we instantly noted that something had changed. First of all, we observed that there were not as many people at the workplace; many worked remotely from home. This meant that the previous physical signaling systems of moving actual paper files to the persons next in line in the work process no longer worked. Instead, the workflow had been moved onto the digital platform, with a digital signaling system to accompany it (i.e. each person involved in the work process of a court case received a digital notice when they had work to be done).

Despite the presence of all identified barriers, we could see that organizational change had somehow been achieved. In exploring how this had happened, we found that the impact of the COVID-19 crisis had triggered these changes to work practices as the judges had started to reassess the meaning and value of going digital. Indeed, if the judges in one department resisted digitalized work, it would imply an increased exposure to the virus for all department employees. This is why all judges turned toward and accepted new digital work practices. As one of the judges expressed it: 'I do not think that digitalization carried enough promise in itself. . . but when another motivating factor came in, the barriers became much lower, and it just happened'. Another judge explained that 'When we adopted them [digital working practices], we got a lot of help from COVID-19. Without digitalized work, it was difficult to work from home, so out of loyalty to our colleagues, everyone became eager to adopt the new working practices'.

Our interviews in 2020 and 2021 also found that the second round of re-assessment started after the professionals had adopted the new digitalized ways of working. In this process, the judges expressed a realization of other benefits connected to digitalized work practices. As one of the judges stated: I realized that it is so much faster to do the work today, and you get a much better overview, with a list of the tasks to do. When I went out to look at the shelves before, it was untidy, and I could not see how long they had been placed in each step of the process, so the information now is much faster, and it is more tangible. Previously you had to guess more, and you had to interpret handwriting and so on. . . Now you do not forget to do the tasks when they are in the system. It [the work] has become more unified and easier to grasp.

Even the judges most resistant toward digitalized work experienced that the perceived deficiencies in digital technologies, and the flaws associated with adopting the new way of working, were not as bad as they had anticipated. Simultaneously, the digital transformation of society at large had speeded up. One judge stressed, 'a lot more documents arrive at the court as digital files' and 'most trials are conducted online'. Furthermore, some of the judges expressed that they had found ways to mitigate, what they had perceived as, risks with digitalized work. As one of them explained: 'Well, we have made some mistakes, but we have created better routines and instructions to mitigate risks. We have become a lot better at doing the best with what we have. So, for instance, we added a routine of emailing in addition to the automated process in the most urgent cases'. Having tested and become used to the new ways of working, none of the interviewees expressed a desire to go back to the old way of working as they no longer saw digitalized work as a threat to their autonomy. One judge stated: 'I think that COVID-19 has helped us to understand the benefits of working digitally'. The judge added: 'Without any discussions or protests, we have taken large steps forward'. Another judge addressed the longevity of changes and stressed that: 'We have seen many examples of things over time being possible that we previously thought were impossible. That creates a cultural change'. It seems that the risk averts trait, innate to the profession of judges, had been overcome. While the judges had previously perceived risk in digital work, to the quality of the work itself and to the jurisdiction of their profession, the actual implementation of digital work showed that neither of these risks materialized. The judges themselves stressed their opinions, and adopting digitalized work was not a conflict in behavior. Instead, the effect of the pandemic was that the judges could make real assessments of the new working practices.

It was stressed among the interviewees that a vital factor for the swift adjustment during the pandemic was that the transformation and substantial preparation had begun before the pandemic. As stated by the chief judge: 'Before COVID-19 we started to digitalize, we made this move, and we went as far as we could. Now, when we must all work digitally, this means that we can. So, we are really happy that we made that investment'.

Our study examines the barriers to implementing digitalized work in an administrative court and highlights COVID-19 as a trigger in the transformation of work practices. While prior studies on professions and organizations have shed light on new ways of working (see, e.g. Susskind and Susskind 2015; Donahue 2018; Kingma 2018) , apart from research on the use of some discrete technologies, for example, AI, to solve specific problems (Armour and Sako 2020) , there is a gap in our understanding of the transition to digitalized work in highly institutionalized and professionalized settings, such as courts. Moreover, there has been a lack in our understanding of how COVID-19 has affected the transformation of work practices, where there was previously a strong resistance among professionals to adopting digitalized work. Our study shows substantial barriers, and severe difficulties, to implementing digitalized work practices and illustrates how new motivations, and the professionals' engagement in trying out new practices, can drastically remove barriers to change. We contribute to the literature on professions and organizations in three distinct yet interrelated ways.

First, we find support for the importance of professional agencies for implementing digitalized work, and hence corroborate prior research in its centrality for institutional and organizational change (Scott 2008; Suddaby and Viale 2011; Muzio et al. 2013) . Although judges played a key role in the change, we find that they should neither be seen as agents of the institution nor as choreographs of institutional change (Scott 2008; Lefsrud and Suddaby 2012) but rather as representatives of their professional institution that co-exist alongside their organizational and institutional context. However, the professional barriers related to the judges were the largest obstacle in the transition to digitalized work. For example, we found that the perceived barriers of the judges overruled the set direction and the willingness of the top management team to invest in and implement digital working practices. A common explanation for the difficulty of implementing new working practices is siloed organizations. They create difficulties in coordinating work and sharing knowledge and information across the organization (see, e.g. Singh and Hess 2017; Warner and Wäger 2019). We found that the siloed organization of the court hampered a common transformation but can conclude that the siloed organizations also empowered the autonomous aspect in judging and made the resistance from the judges stronger. The autonomy awarded to judges and their hierarchical position in each department gave rise to micro-cultures, where only some judges in charge of the departments adopted the new working practices. Given that the judges were used to deciding how to perform their work on their own and continuously wanted to do so, and the organization was built around this autonomy, the digital transformation of work practices proved to be particularly difficult.

Second, we find support for the premise that motivation is important for professionals to adopt digitalized work. Indeed, change is possible in professional and institutional settings (e.g. Raviola and Norbäck 2013) , particularly in times of institutional complexity (Greenwood et al. 2011) . Prior research has emphasized that proper measures are needed to help organizational members understand why they should change and why new working practices would be meaningful (see, e.g. Dahlander and Wallin 2018; Björkdahl 2020) . Our study corroborates these findings. We find that the norms, beliefs, and behaviors concerning digitalized work developed during the pandemic stand in sharp contrast to the situation before COVID-19. While efficiency gains were the motivating factor for the management team to digitalize work, the altruistic traits to the profession of judges made such a factor less relevant. Most were not interested in digitalized work, and they were rigid in their behavior toward new digital working practices. They also had the autonomy and the power within the organization to behave in such a way. The behavior change appeared during the pandemic because of an act of 'loyalty' where every judge wanted to allow the employees in their department to work remotely, which made them reassess the reasons for digitalized work. Put simply, the purpose of making work more efficient was not perceived as meaningful enough by most judges before COVID-19. Instead, another goal of digitalized work needed to be presented to motivate the judges to adopt new working practices. The notion that professionals at least test and assess digital working practices seems critical because we find that professionals re-evaluate the value of digitalized work once they use digitalized work and that this evaluation may give rise to changes in their professional logic (Thornton et al. 2012; Hinings et al. 2018) .

Third, and finally, we contribute to, and shed light on, the debate on the origins of institutional and organizational change. We find that idea-driven change (Reay et al. 2013 ) and practice-driven change (Jarzabkowski et al. 2009; Smets et al. 2012) are not mutually exclusive but that both are needed to understand how organizations change. We show that although major changes to digital work practices were implemented in response to the COVID-19 crisis, this change was enabled by previous ideas being communicated and encouraged by the court management and their preparatory work. The mere presence of digital opportunities was not enough for the professionals to change their work practices, neither were the management efforts to ignite change. It was not until the judges reassessed the meaning and value of digitalized work that their actual practices led to changes on a larger scale. Before the pandemic, one interviewee told us that for a transformation of work practices to take place, someone (or something) needs to 'push us into the deep end of the swimming pool and tell us to swim'. This is indeed what COVID-19 did. It pushed the professionals into deep water and forced them to act. In this situation, and despite previous concerns about the quality of technology and inconsistency in the level of digitization among the users of court services, the court swiftly adjusted to new ways of working and the new legal practice rapidly gained acceptance among the professionals-including those who had been the most vocal in their resistance. While this was the result of the re-assessment triggered by COVID-19, it is evident that the efforts and value-based work that the management team had performed in their previous attempts to change work practices had now begun to pay off. Returning to the imagery of 'the deep end of the swimming pool', the previous efforts by the management team meant that they had already taught the professionals how 'to swim'. This shows that institutional change can have an idea-driven and a practice-driven foundation (Smets et al. 2012; Reay et al. 2013 ). Therefore, our study opens the way for a more nuanced take on the origin of, and process for, institutional and organizational change.

We acknowledge that our study comes with limitations. First, our research draws on a single case study, which might limit the generalizability of our findings. Second, our case is based on an administrative court, a highly institutionalized and professionalized setting. More research is therefore needed to find out whether our findings apply to settings beyond courts. In particular, we see great value in using process studies to capture important events and activities over time to understand the dynamics of changing working practices in professional settings. Moreover, we cannot assume that the transformation of the work practices will be sustainable post-COVID-19. A promising route for future research is to examine to what extent the transformation of work practices during COVID-19 is sustainable and the effects of COVID-19 on other institutionalized settings more generally.

The purpose of this article has been to examine how digital ways of working have been implemented into the highly institutional and professional setting of an administrative court and to what extent COVID-19 has played a part in the transformation process regarding perceived barriers. Before the pandemic, the court management expressed a desire to move from working with paper documents and a manual handover of working activities to becoming completely digital by working on a digital platform with digital signaling systems. However, institutional and professional barriers hampered the digital transformation of work practices, which prohibited organizational change. When digitalization was empowered by COVID-19, the purpose of digitalization was reassessed among the professionals, which allowed for rapid implementation of digital work. Once new practices were in place, the value of these digital work practices was also reassessed. In these separate re-assessment processes, previous barriers to change were broken down. The judges came to not only implement but also accept the new way of working. This was key to achieving organizational change.

Besides contributing to the understanding of digital transformation in institutional and professional settings, our study comes with several implications for practice. For a successful digital transformation, court management must understand that judges see their professional purpose in light of delivering qualitative verdicts, and ultimately justice to the people they serve. Thus, they are not primarily motivated by efficiency, and this study shows that this professional pride and autonomy still stand firm in the digitalized context. Hence, judges are neither answering to the management of the court nor the taxpayers, but rather, they answer to individuals and organizations calling for their services. We, therefore, hold that court management must communicate other values from the use of digital technologies than efficiency gains when aiming to transform work practices. This has to be combined with clear goals for organizational members to understand where the organization is heading. Only then will the professionals be motivated to take part in the transformation. We also believe that court management must put efforts into designing the operating model used to transform work practices. Too many experiments and ad-hoc initiatives without providing feedback to the organization will only create frustration among organizational members. Instead, management must be heavily involved in the transformation, provide examples of successful and unsuccessful investments, and create a culture for organizational change. Although our study is limited to an administrative court, we believe that the same would hold for other professional settings.

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