Organization and Management Theory OMT

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Call for Papers: Organization Science Special Issue

ROUTINE DYNAMICS: EXPLORING SOURCES OF STABILITY AND CHANGE IN ORGANIZATIONS

Editorial Team

Luciana D’Adderio, University of Edinburgh
Martha S. Feldman, University of California, Irvine
Nathalie Lazaric, University of Nice, Sophia Antipolis
Brian T. Pentland, Michigan State University

Submission deadline: September 1, 2013

Call for Papers

The increasingly uncertain and fast-changing environments in which today’s
organizations operate call for a shift of attention from organizations—and
organizational practices or routines—as fixed entities to the study of the
distributed (Hutchins 1995) and situated (Suchman 1987, Lave 1988) dynamics
by which they emerge and are constructed. Capturing how organizations learn
to strike a balance between stability and coherence, on one hand, and
flexibility and change, on the other, however, is non-trivial (Tsoukas and
Chia 2002, Farjoun 2010). It requires abandoning static views of
organization to reveal the microdynamics of organizing, including the
processes through which organizational routines and capabilities emerge and
evolve.

The first crucial step forward in this direction has been to relinquish a
fixed characterization of routines as monolithic objects to study the
internal mechanisms by which they emerge as practices (Feldman 2000, Feldman
and Pentland 2003). As a result, we have moved from conceptualizing routines
as automatic, as dead or as opaque black boxes, to seeing them as alive,
embodying agency and the potential for change (Cohen 2007, Pentland and
Feldman 2008). In particular, this reconceptualization has proposed that
routines themselves have dynamics. These routine dynamics have generally
been theorized around the interaction of performative and ostensive aspects
of routines. Empirical research and modeling of routine dynamics has
extended our understanding of the role of routines in producing stability
and change (Howard-Grenville 2005, Levinthal and Rerup 2006, D’Adderio 2008
and 2011, Salvato 2009, Zbaracki and Bergen 2010, Lazaric 2011, Rerup and
Feldman 2011, Pentland, Haerem and Hillison 2011, Salvato and Rerup 2011,
Turner and Rindova 2012; Pentland, Feldman, Becker and Liu 2012).

While some of the questions made possible by the practice turn in research
on organizational routines have been addressed, many questions remain. The
following is a thematic list of questions. We do not propose these themes as
mutually exclusive as we recognize the substantial interconnection among
them. Instead we suggest the themes as points of entry that provide
opportunities to explore the effects of routine dynamics in complex
empirical field settings.

• Coordination. Since Stene (1940), routines have been described as way
facilitate coordination. At the same time, we find many instances of
routinized action that seem to undermine effective coordination (e.g., when
two routines have different time scales). How does focusing on the actions
people take as they produce and reproduce routines enable us to understand
the role of routines in enabling and inhibiting coordination? What role do
the ostensive aspects of routines play in coordination?

• Interdependence. Routines have been defined as repetitive, recognizable
patterns of interdependent actions, carried out by multiple actors (Feldman
and Pentland 2003). Interdependence is an element of this definition that
has not received much attention. What is the role of interdependence in the
formation and dynamics of routines? Some attention has been paid to the
interaction between performative and ostensive aspects of routines. What can
we say about the interdependence of performative aspects within a routine,
the interdependence of ostensive aspects of the same and of different routines?

• Multiplicity and ecologies of routines. Existing research has generally
focused on one routine at a time. What happens when routines are
interconnected? What happens when single performances contribute to multiple
ostensive aspects? What happens when multiple patterns or ostensive aspects
impinge upon the same performance?

• Actants and artifacts. What is the role of artifacts (material and
immaterial), such as standard operating procedures, classifications,
computer systems, and so on in the production and reproduction of routines?
What is the role of artifacts as intermediaries and mediators (D’Adderio
2008, 2011) in the performance of routines? And how do they interact with
the ostensive and the performative aspects? More generally, how are networks
of action related to networks of actants (human and non-human, material and
non-material)? How do different configurations - or sociomaterial
entanglements - of actors and actants influence and shape routines?

• Routines and institutions. While research focusing on the dynamics of
routines has been fruitful, routines exist within institutional and
organizational contexts. What is the role of routines in (re)creating
institutional contexts (and vice versa)? How does the practice-based nature
of routines play a role in creating and recreating the contexts in which
they are practiced? How do the interactions of routines within a context
affect the nature of the context?

• Mechanisms for feedback and change.Under appropriate conditions,
individuals can learn and change their patterns of action through feedback.
Do these processes apply to organizational routines and if so, how? What is
the role of feedback in the stability or change of routines? How is mutual
constitution similar to or different from feedback? Why do some routines
stay the same when we want them to change, while other routines change when
we want them to stay the same?

• Recombinations and mashups. Some argue that routines evolve through
variation, selection and retention, but what is the role of recombination
(e.g., recombining chunks of routines to create a new routine) and mashups
(e.g., combining in ways not defined by predetermined chunks) in routine
dynamics? When are recombination and mashups possible? Is there any evidence
that they actually occur? What factors facilitate or limit recombination
and/or mashups?

• Granularity and levels of analysis. Organizational researchers often
rely on traditional levels of analysis (individual, group, sub-unit,
organization, field…). Can we construct a similar hierarchy for routines?
How would that relate to traditional levels in organizational research? How
does stability/change at one level influence (or fail to influence)
stability/change at the other levels (up or down) in the hierarchy? Would
this focus help us understand the relationship between organizational
capabilities and routines (Becker, Lazaric, Nelson and Winter 2005)?

• Time scales. Routines operate on very different time scales (seconds,
minutes, hours, weeks, months, years). The temporal dimension of routines
has received very little attention. Does this matter to issues such as
coordination, interdependence, institutions, stability, change, etc.? Do
time scales help us understand path dependence, path creation and drift in
routines?

• Performation. Routines are becoming increasingly distributed across
projects and organizations. How do routines spread over time and space? How
do the ostensive aspects and/or the formal or informal descriptions of a
practice become instantiated at different points in time and across
different locales? How are different spatial or temporal
instantiations/enactments of the routine coordinated? What is the role of
artifacts in this coordination?

• Cognition. Routines have traditionally been seen as reducing cognitive
load and operating through procedural memory. When agency is conceptualized
as a feature of routines, then otherwise settled questions of cognition
become open to scrutiny. For instance, how do routine dynamics influence
cognition, interpretation, and sense-making and how are routine dynamics
influenced by cognition, interpretation, and sense-making? To what extent
are these phenomena (traditionally conceived as individual level
psychological processes) shaped by the sociological processes of
organizational routines?

• Generativity and novelty. Some routinized processes (e.g., project
management routines) are capable of producing significantly different
substantive results each time they are performed. For example, an
architectural firm may use a recognizable, repetitive process for designing
buildings, yet each design is different. Other routines are focused on
producing exactly the same result every time. What governs this difference?
Are there limits to the generative power of routines? Can routines generate
other routines in this manner? What is the role of formal descriptions of
routines (such as standards or “best” practices) and templates (actual
examples) in guiding and shaping actions in routines? At what point, and in
which circumstances, does innovation/adaptation erase the value of the
template or model? And what implications should we expect for innovation and
adaptation when formal routines and models become embedded into artifacts?

Review Process

All authors will receive an initial screening, and only papers deemed to
have a reasonable chance of acceptance after the two or three rounds of
accelerated review will enter the process. Submissions are due September 1,
2013. Manuscript submission is handled electronically via ScholarOne
Manuscripts: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/orgsci.

Bibliography

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