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Industrial heritage is a collective term for the production relics, skills, and culture left over from past industrial production. These infrastructures, which have lost the production function, are not only a source of knowledge of past industrial production but also important evidence of the development of human technology (Buiok et al., 2014). It has always been an important topic for mankind to activate the value of industrial heritage. After entering the digital era, more and more enterprises in the industrial era have found the integration and utilization of digital technology can bring opportunities to them (Yoo et al., 2010). In particular, some enterprises with cultural genes generally believe that culture is a valuable strategic asset that can strongly support their digital transformation (Downes and Nunes 2013; Therefore, more and more enterprises engaged in industrial heritage have used ICT and other digital technologies frequently, trying to use digital technologies to reactivate the value of industrial heritage and realize their digital transformation (Magnusson et al., 2021; Morton et al., 2022). For instance, many organizations engaged in industrial heritage have set up publicity websites, developed WeChat mini programs, and opened We-media accounts to promote and expand the impact of industrial heritage. The application of these digital technologies is mostly the functional transformation of cultural heritage (Hawkins and Muecke, 2002), with the aim of employing ICT to support existing business models of enterprises (Berente et al., 2016; Gregory et al., 2015). However, the existing studies focus on the application of digital technologies, seldom paying attention to the organizational change (Hartl & Hess, 2017) required for the digital transformation of enterprises engaged in industrial heritage. In fact, the effective application of digital technology needs to be guaranteed by the corresponding organizational change. The lack of corresponding organizational change may lead to the successful short-term application of digital technologies, but enterprises engaged in industrial heritage cannot truly realize the digital transformation, thus failing to achieve sustainable development of industrial heritage.
We selected Taoxichuan Ceramic Art Avenue (the Company) that uses ICT to facilitate organizational change and activate its industrial heritage for the following reasons: 1) as an organization engaged in industrial heritage that lacks digital genes, the Company is unique and typical in terms of employing ICT to achieve organizational changes, especially the drastic changes in the core dimensions of the organizational system (Pan and Tan, 2011); 2) it lacks research on the application of ICT by enterprises engaged in industrial heritage to make organizational changes and achieve sustainable development; and 3) enterprises engaged in industrial heritage should consider the economic benefits of reusing, the protection and inheritance of heritage culture, and other practical issues. All of these are quite different from the digital transformation of ordinary enterprises. Moreover, few companies have achieved digital transformation in a real sense (Tilson et al., 2010). Therefore, this study not only has theoretical significance but also has strong practical significance.
This study adopts the affordance theory, as enterprises engaged in industrial heritage are typical bureaucratic organizations generated in the industrial manufacturing context. Existing research focuses on digital technologies and organizational capabilities, without fully considering the changes in the new digital context. The stimulation of industrial heritage values requires consideration of how organizations use digital technologies to change existing business models in new contexts (Tim et al., 2020). Therefore, this study requires a theoretical perspective that takes into account the interaction between technology, organizational ability, and context. The affordance theory is used to explain how the same technology induces different outcomes based on different contexts and organizational abilities (Gibson, 1986). This theory has been widely used in information management to interpret why people or organizations using the same technology may present different work practices (Treem and Leonardi, 2013, Strong et al., 2014; Du et al., 2019).