This research investigates digital transformation (DT) in manufacturing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), highlighting their significant contributions to national GDP and job creation. Given their paradoxical situation (agile yet vulnerable) and idiosyncrasies, SMEs’ challenges are compounded by resource constraints and institutional inadequacies. However, the literature approaches DT in SMEs mainly through technology adoption and capability-building frameworks that treat the social and the technical as separate rather than constitutively entangled, and fail to capture its granular, relational process. Conceptualising DT as a journey, this research shifts the analytical focus to sociomaterial relations and challenges the linear or one-off portrayal of DT. Grounded in an actor-network perspective, it employs a multicase study design across five Indonesian manufacturing SMEs, involving four months of fieldwork, 35 semi-structured interviews, field observations, and document reviews. Data analysis followed an abductive strategy, moving recursively between empirical resources and theoretical leads to reveal surprising insights into how DT unfolds in practice.
This research identified three interwoven DT journeys: the leadership journey, in which shared leadership and power negotiation dynamically shape DT endeavours; the learning journey, where a self-learning mindset blends with community participation in knowledge sharing; and the innovation journey, highlighting value creation, circulation, and consolidation through intensive boundary work. These journeys reveal a workforce divide between emergent digital labour and indispensable manual production, reflecting a constitutive asymmetry in which freely circulating innovation credentials mask persistent material vulnerabilities on shop floors. This research further highlights DT heterogeneity, attending to its complexity and embeddedness within Indonesian sociopolitical and cultural contexts, where DT assumes distinct meanings and trajectories. It advances knowledge by conceptualising the three journeys as ongoing sociomaterial achievements; offering key methodological insights for network tracing of organisational change; and providing practical implications for broader DT policies and SME practitioners navigating the DT journey.
