Much recent scholarly investigation has been focused on the promise of digitalization and the new ways of working and organizing it makes possible. In this paper, we analyze how the COVID-19 pandemic has acted as a natural breaching experiment that has challenged taken-for-granted expectations about digitalization and revealed four important issues: uneven access to digital infrastructures, the persistence of the analog in digitalization, the brittleness of unchecked digitalization, and panoptical surveillance. The sudden shift to digital work has exposed taken-for-granted assumptions about the universality of digital access. The crisis has also revealed that many highly digitalized processes still rely on analog elements. The pandemic has also exposed that many algorithms used in digitalized inter-organizational processes are brittle due to overreliance on historic patterns. Finally, the pandemic has breached fundamental expectations of privacy when organizational surveillance was extended into private and public spaces. Thus, the pandemic has laid bare fundamental challenges in digitalization and has exposed the limits of rose‑tinted thinking about the relation between technology and organizing.

最近的许多学术研究都集中在数字化的前景上，而新的工作方式和组织方式则使之成为可能。在本文中，我们分析了COVID-19大流行如何作为自然破坏实验，该实验挑战了人们对数字化的认可期望，并揭示了四个重要问题：数字基础设施的访问不畅，数字化中模拟物的持久性，未经检查的数字化和全光学监视的脆弱性。突然转向数字工作暴露了人们对数字访问普遍性的认可假设。危机还表明，许多高度数字化的流程仍然依赖于模拟元素。大流行还暴露出，由于过度依赖历史模式，用于数字化组织间过程的许多算法都很脆弱。最后，当组织监视扩展到私人和公共场所时，这种流行病已经超出了对隐私的基本期望。因此，这种流行病给数字化带来了根本性的挑战，并暴露了人们对技术与组织之间的关系持怀疑态度的局限性。