Rethinking the rationality models of the digital organization: Toward reflexive ordinary rationality

In the current context of digital transformation of the way organizations operate and are designed, the purpose of this paper is to rethink the concept of rationality in order to provide new insights on how the choices made individually by social actors could help to shape sociotechnical change at the organizational and societal levels. We propose a theoretical synthesis of the principal conceptions of rationality in the social sciences: that is, the dominant theory of rational choice and other critical approaches developed, among others, by Foucault, Habermas, Boudon, and Archer. The paper revisits and reconciles the views developed by the latter two authors in particular. Boudon favors an enlarged conception of rationality (called ordinary rationality), as developed by Weber (1922), which includes the instrumentalist, normative, and representational dimensions. We propose to associate this model with the reflexivity model developed by Archer (2003) in order to define a new approach: reflexive ordinary rationality, which is based upon three underlying ideas: (1) The unit of analysis of social action is the individual; (2) Social structures affect and are affected by individual actions; (3) Behind each individual action there is a system of reasons related to certain modes of reflexivity that we can define. Hence, this paper proposes a new analytical framework for studying current and future sociotechnical changes related to the interactions between individuals and digital technologies.