It has long been proposed that inertia plays a crucial role for the success or failure of institu-tional change processes. The varying levels of digitalization progress in German public admin-istration, with an overall slow digitalization progress but notable exceptions such as the digital-ly transformed tax administration, raise questions about the role of inertia for digital govern-ment transformation. Data from a nationwide online survey with public employees and staff councils (n=1087) was analysed and integrated with the analysis of semi-structured expert interviews (n=44) to assess how inertia emerges in the digitalization process of public admin-istration.

The aim of the research is thus twofold: first, to add to the theoretical understanding of inertia in public sector organizations and thereby contribute to further conceptualizing the phenome-non of digital transformation in Public Administration. And second, to deepen our empirical knowledge on the manifestation of distinct inertial forces in digital government transformations conducted through different approaches and within varying institutional setups.

The study examines two advanced digital public services in Germany: internet-based vehicle registration (bottom-up digitalization, local self-government task) and digital income tax as-sessment (top-down digitalization, authorities act on federal commission).

Digital transformation in its various facets is a global topic and the subject of a rapidly increasing number of articles finding entrance into many sub-disciplines of public management (Gil-Garcia et al., 2018). Yet it remains a fuzzy term that is claimed to have ubiquitous implications for the way administrations deliver services and function internally (Mergel et al., 2019). A wide variety of technological trends and innovation buzzwords are subsumed under the digital terminology (such as machine learning, blockchain in infrastructure, robotic process automation) and thereby steadily increasing its complexity (Breaugh et al., 2023). "To become more digital" has become a recurring mantra. However, it remains open to how this mantra is perceived as by actors in local governments and how they make sense of it. We need to understand what the actors understand by digital transformation and - even more importantly - what they do not. In this sense, it is of central interest for digitization research to analyze these processes of sensemaking that materialize in the form of narratives for digital transformation and that prevail within organizations. Importantly, these processes of sensemaking do not occur in a vacuum, but are influenced by broader macro-societal templates, such as institutional logics. Consequently, this article first raises the question of what these narratives about digital transformation are and how their construction is influenced by actors' attachment to the institutional logics that shape them.