The Corporate Governance of Religious Organizations in a Digital Society

With Tobias Brügger and Jan Danko

The URPP subproject P4 focuses on the question of how digitization is changing governance structures in religious and non-religious organizations. Governance structures include orientation, selection, motivation and control instruments in organizations, such as the type and number of formal and informal meetings, the professional training background of management, the use of algorithms for employee selection and monitoring, or the flexibility granted in terms of working hours and location. The project suspects strong differences in how organizations with a religious imprint (for example, monasteries or companies led by Christian managers) and those with a non-religious character (typically most modern organizations) deal with digitization. First, history shows that functioning governance structures have emerged in religious organizations. Accordingly, these have a centuries-old wealth of experience from successes and failures for overcoming governance problems, especially in the case of radical change as is the case with digitization. Second, this wealth of experience is reflected in religious values, norms, rules, and thus management practices that come into play in organizations. We therefore assume that religious organizations adapt their control structures to digitization more hesitantly and incrementally, but all the more sustainably than non-religious organizations. Non-religious organizations lack experience in dealing with radical change. Accordingly, they experiment more with the challenges of digitization and have to accept costly structural adjustments within the organization. Thus, the subproject aims to contribute to theory building in organizational research.