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How ESL Devices Transform into Connected Label Solutions: A Perspective of Actor Interaction and
Information Rebundling

2011; Cennamo, Dagnino, Di Minin, and Lanzolla, 2020; Dąbrowska et al., 2022; Ekbia,
Mattioli, Kouper, Arave, Ghazinejad, Bowman, Suri, Tsou, Weingart, and Sugimoto,
2015).
These insights lead us to conclude that the information’s liquification will impact

ecosystems and organizations of all scales, not only at the level of a single client.
Nonetheless, past studies have significantly neglected the dematerialization and
liquification of the information at the various levels. As a result, we extend our research,

aiming to answer our second research question: how does digital transformation facilitate
the dematerialization of information, leading to a business model shift in operations?
ESL is a critical object in the dematerialization process of product information, which
separates the information from the physical environment to the virtual environment. To
answer aforementioned two research questions, the current study employs actor-network

theory (ANT) (Callon, 1999, 2007). Here, an actor denotes an individual or organization
carrying out and acting with certain tools or technological devices. Social actors in the
digital transformation are distributed at different levels, following the ecosystem hierarchy

at the micro, meso, and macro levels. At the micro level, actors can be identified as
individual customers or employees. A group of individual customers and employees
form an interaction network at the meso level and generate an organization, while at the
macro level, different industries connect to share resources. Using the ANT theoretical
perspective, the current study can clearly illustrate how social and technical systems

interact during digital transformation. Explaining the digital transformation process from
an ANT perspective is appropriate, since digital transformation is also a socio-technical
system for adopting technology (Nadkarni and Prügl, 2021), which creates an interaction

network between social actors and technological artifacts. Additionally, studying ESL as
a key artifact in a social context, we also need to clarify the definition of the technological
artifact. A technological artifact can be defined as a specific machine, technique, gadget,
appliance, or device that appears in our daily lives.
Finally, to understand this relationship and experience, ANT offers a rich set of

concepts to help researchers determine technology utilization in a social context with
network elements such as humans, technological artifacts, organizations, and institutions
(Callon, 1999, 2007). In understanding the mechanism of ESL evolution and its impact

on dematerialization, the current study focuses on ESL as a focal point to explain the

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