Pace Layering as a Metaphor for Organizing in the Age of Intelligent Technologies: Considering the Future of Work by Theorizing the Future of Organizing

Journal of Management Studies · 2025 · Volume 62 · Issue 5

Abstract

Intelligent technologies are raising important questions about the future of work. In response, many scholars explore new forms of work related to these technologies. Researchers then often speculate about what the organization of the future might look like from these newer images of work. Here we take the opposite approach: we start by asking how intelligent technologies are reshaping howorganizinghappens, then theorize how such organizational transformations may shape work. To this end we reconceptualize organizations as a hierarchy of pace layers – interdependent organizational processes that evolve at different timescales. Doing so allows us to see the new forms of work that are becoming necessary to articulate these pace layers for intra-organizational coordination and allow for maximum organizational adaptability in an era where intelligent technologies engender rapid and discontinuous digital changes in the environments in which organizing occurs.

Keywords

future of organizing, future of work, intelligent technologies, pace layers

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