Ganga singh Chouhan he future of commerce and management will be shaped by the convergence of digital transformation, institutional dynamics, and organizational adaptability. Research on digital transformation in municipalities and SMEs demonstrates that innovation is not merely a question of technological adoption but of navigating institutional pressures, organizational logics, and legitimacy concerns.
Commerce will increasingly evolve around business models that integrate technological advances such as artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, and additive manufacturing with their institutional embedding in regulatory frameworks, professional norms, and societal expectations regarding sustainability and transparency. Management, in turn, must focus on the interpretive processes through which organizations make sense of digitalization, balancing coercive, mimetic, and normative pressures with the need for regionally and sectorally adapted solutions.
For academia, this implies a dual future orientation. First, theory development will need to integrate perspectives from institutional theory, digital governance, and organizational change into coherent frameworks capable of capturing socio-technical complexity. Second, scholarship must continue to co-create actionable instruments with practitioners—such as modular focus group guides or adaptive frameworks for SMEs—that enable reflective, context-sensitive transformation. In this way, the future of commerce and management research lies in producing knowledge that is simultaneously rigorous and relevant, guiding organizations through cycles of technological disruption while safeguarding resilience, legitimacy, and societal responsibility.