CHAPTER
Process Theorizing and
3
Routine Dynamics
The Case for Performative Phenomenology
H A R I D I M O S TS O U K A S
3.1 Introduction
Organizations are filled with routines. Insofar as
organizations are set up to handle recurring issues
(from collecting garbage and hiring people to
dispatching products and treating patients, etc.),
they enact systematic ways of addressing them.
Routines are repetitive patterns of interdependent
action that are carried out to accomplish a recur-
ring task (Feldman et al., 2016, 2019; Feldman
and Pentland, 2003; Howard-Grenville et al.,
2016; Howard-Grenville and Rerup, 2017;
Parmigiani and Howard-Grenville, 2011). Given
their centrality to organizational behaviour, con-
ceptualizing routines has been a critical task in
organization studies.
In contrast to the entitative view of routines –
that is, the view that routines are stable entities,
whose distinctive feature is ‘uneventful’ repetitive-
ness (Nelson and Winter, 1982: 97) – that had long
been the staple approach in the field, the Routine
Dynamics (hereafter: RD) perspective, increasingly
influential since the early 2000s, takes a performa-
tive view of routines (D’Adderio, 2008; Dionysiou
and Tsoukas, 2013; Feldman, 2016; Feldman et al.,
2016). The performative approach has challenged
what the entitative approach took for granted: the
key question is not what routines do, as it was for
Nelson and Winter (1982), but ‘how routines are
done’ (Tsoukas, 2019: 4). Feldman et al.
(2016:505) have playfully noted the difference
between the two approaches as follows, ‘where
we used to say, “that work is routine”, we can
now say, “that routine is work”’. This pun aptly
makes the point that the performance of routines
requires effort by skilled agents. Routines do not
apply themselves; they are applied.
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The performative approach has furthered our
understanding of routines. As Feldman et al.
(2019: 1) have noted, by inserting agency to rou-
tines, RD researchers have methodologically high-
lighted the importance of focusing on actions and
offered theoretical tools (such as practice theory)
that have enabled researchers to overcome trad-
itional dualisms and obtain new insights into the
micro-foundations of routines (Dionysiou and
Tsoukas, 2013; Feldman and Pentland, 2003;
Felin et al., 2012). RD research has made visible
the effort (or work) required for a repetitive pattern
of action to come about: routinized action is not an
automatic, identical response to an identical stimu-
lus, as the entitative view would have it (Egidi,
2002: 109; March and Simon, 1953: 161), but an
effortful accomplishment that simultaneously
reproduces and modifies a pattern.
RD research has shown that routines have
internal dynamics that makes them both stable
and variable. Routines’ internal dynamics are made
visible by according agency a central place
(Feldman, 2000, 2016; Feldman et al., 2016).
Agency implies action-induced variability
(Giddens, 1993:81), since the experience of agency
changes the agent (Paul, 2014; Tsoukas and Chia,
2002) and the context in which agency is exercised
is inherently ‘fluctuating’ (Cohen, 2007: 782),
leading to variable performance. The very act of
repeated performance carries in it the seed for a
routine’s endogenous change. Reproduction entails
potential revision.
The emphasis on exploring the dynamics of
routines has made researchers particularly sensitive
to process (Feldman, 2016). Traditionally, practice
theory has been the main source of inspiration.
Practice theory does incorporate process thinking
37
 38 Haridimos Tsoukas
and has usefully brought the unfolding of agency
to the fore of our attention. In this chapter, I will
argue that it can go still further by consistently
adopting an even stronger conception of process.
I will seek to demonstrate that blending practice
theory with a ‘strong process’ view (Langley and
Tsoukas, 2017: 4) will provide further insights into
RD research.
Strong process theorizing underscores the
importance of experience, heterogeneity and tem-
porality (Langley and Tsoukas, 2017: 4; Tsoukas,
2019: 6). Specifically, the experience of action and
its consequences changes the agent. Agents’
experiences are singular (and, therefore, heteroge-
neous) each time they come about, since they are
tied to context and temporal flow. Integrating prac-
tice theory with a strong process ontology will
enable researchers to explore that ‘how the past is
drawn upon and made relevant to the present is not
an atomistic or random exercise but crucially
depends on the social practices in which actors
are embedded’ (Langley et al., 2013: 5). I call such
an integrated practice-cum-process approach ‘per-
formative phenomenology’ (Tsoukas, 2019: 10). In
this chapter, I will employ it to explore how RD
research may be further advanced. For this pur-
pose, I will first revisit key tenets of RD research
to take stock of its progress and note areas for
further development, and then show how per-
formative phenomenology may be drawn on to
advance RD research.
3.2 Refining Routine
Dynamics Theorizing
RD research has been prolific, impactful and
enlightening. As a result of conducting several
studies in diverse empirical contexts, we have
obtained a better view of how routines contribute
to stability and change; incorporate technology and
artifacts in processes of organizational adaptation
and innovation; transfer organizational knowledge
across context and time; contribute to organiza-
tional replication, innovation and problem solving;
intersect, interact and are integrated with other
routines, etc. (Feldman et al., 2016, 2019). As
Feldman et al. (2016: 506) have noted, three key
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conceptual principles have underlain RD research:
(a) action is situated, (b) actors are knowledgeable
and (c) stability is an accomplishment. In this
section, I will focus on two main issues that need
more refinement.
First, tacit knowledge and reflection-in-action
have not been given the central place they ought
to have in routine enactment. Actors are assumed
to be ‘knowledgeable and often reflective’
(Feldman et al., 2016: 506). With a few exceptions
(Blanche and Cohendet, 2019: 13; Danner-
Schroder and Geiger, 2016: 655), empirical studies
have taken knowledgeability to be mainly situated
knowledge (i.e., knowledge ‘about [actors’] local
context’, Feldman et al., 2016: 506) and/or
discursive-cognitive in character (i.e., actors articu-
late in ‘reflective talk’ (Dittrich et al., 2016) what
they know when enacting a routine). This, how-
ever, tends to underplay the tacit knowledge that is
typically embedded in the ‘body schemata’
(Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2020) and the ‘shared
understandings’ (Dionysiou and Tsoukas, 2013)
that form the background to the disposition to act,
which is at the core of human action involved in
routines (Cohen, 2007: 777; Cohen and Bacdayan,
1994; Dreyfus, 2014, 2017; Hadjimichael and
Tsoukas, 2019). Actors’ knowledgeability is prim-
ordially non-deliberate (Dreyfus, 2014): actors are
immersed in a background, which provides a tacit
frame or, in Polanyi’s (1962: 55) terms, the ‘sub-
sidiary particulars’ that enable actors to focus on
the tasks they engage in.
Moreover, in the formulation ‘knowledgeable
and often reflective’, it needs to be clarified how
reflectiveness is related to knowledgeability. It is
well established that reflecting on one’s action
differs from reflecting-in-action (Schön, 1983;
Yanow and Tsoukas, 2009), in terms of the type
of knowledge and language used. Reflecting-in-
action presupposes an actor absorbed in the task,
tacitly integrating subsidiary particulars, whose use
of language is primarily performative (Dreyfus,
2014, 2017). When absorbed in action, actors use
language like all other kinds of equipment: to get
things done (Cooren, 2007; Flores, 2012). When,
for example, a firefighter crew chief shouts, in the
middle of fighting a fire, ‘Drop your tools’ (Weick,
2001: 107), they are using language performatively

(Blattner, 2006: 103–108; Dreyfus, 2000: 317).
When, however, actors’ absorption in their tasks
is interrupted, actors become aware of their activity
and start thinking and talking about it deliberately:
mental content arises, consisting of beliefs and
propositional arguments. Language now points at
the properties of distinct objects and situations. For
example, when Susan, a pharmaceutical company
employee who is involved in enacting a shipping
routine, notices a problem with the lids to be
shipped (‘these are not the ones we usually ship’)
(Dittrich et al., 2016: 684), she points out a prop-
erty of certain objects. While she is still involved in
performing the routine, she makes statements
about the task (Schatzki, 2000). To account for
such subtle distinctions, we need an ontology that
focuses on actors’ modes of entwinement with the
world (Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2011, 2020).
Second, when enacting a routine, actors do not
merely do something: they act in the service of a
collective goal – a telos – that underlies their
practice. The modality of routine enactment does
not involve merely situational knowledge plus
occasional reflection, prompted by dialogue, but
is critically shaped by a particular ethos, namely a
morally oriented habit – a style of doing things that
is ‘drilled into habit’ (Salvato, 2009: 400; see
Cohen, 2007), driven by certain values. Thus,
when the employees in the pharmaceutical com-
pany CellCo, in the context of enacting the ship-
ping routine, reflect on how to solve a problem
(‘the fact that the plates are not yet packaged with
the lids, which they normally are’, Dittrich et al.,
2016: 683); when employees of BoutiqueCo, a
fast-growing retailer, act in the context of the mer-
chandising routine to place the merchandise on a
particular fixture (a table, a mannequin, etc.) and
integrate it with the merchandise that is already on
display, in order to ‘create a visually compelling
“look and feel” of the store’ (Sonenshein, 2016:
744); or when hospital staff try to effect change in
a surgical clinic’s patient process involving the
colon-resection routine (Bucher and Langley,
2016), what in all these cases occurs is not mere
activity, in the sense of people undertaking situ-
ational action as part of a recurring routine, but
praxis, that is, other-oriented and, therefore, mor-
ally laden action to normatively accomplish
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Process Theorizing and Routine Dynamics 39
collective goals (Sayer, 2011: Tsoukas, 2018:
2–3). Such goals are necessarily suffused with
values, that is, they articulate evaluative distinc-
tions concerning what is good or acceptable
(Sayer, 2011: 143; Tsoukas, 2018: 2).
Actors take part in a broader practice with its
own ‘internal goods’ and ‘standards of excel-
lence’ (MacIntyre, 1985; Moore, 2017; Tsoukas,
2018). The actions they undertake in pursuing a
practice’s goals disclose a ‘certain kind of life’
(MacIntyre, 1985: 190; see also Selznick, 2008:
89) that practitioners value and to the realization
of which they contribute (Sayer, 2011: 144;
Spinosa, et al., 1997: 20–26). In short, what par-
ticipants in a routine strive to do is to act well.
With few exceptions (see Eberhard et al., 2019),
the moral dimension of routines performance has
been understated in RD theorizing, although it has
been implied by Feldman (2000: 620 and 622)
with her concept of ‘striving’ (routine participants
modifying their routine when outcomes fall short
of ideals) and alluded to by Danner-Schroeder and
Geiger (2016).
3.3 Theorizing Routine Dynamics
Research through
Performative Phenomenology
To help further advance RD theorizing, I will offer,
in this section, a performative phenomenological
vocabulary that integrates practice theory with a
strong process ontology. I will illustrate my argu-
ment with several examples from RD research.
Practice worlds and tacit knowledge. Human
agency is inextricably embedded in practice
worlds. A practice world is a relational socio-
material whole that is teleologically organized, in
which embodied actors are immersed. A practice
world normatively specifies a particular way of
being, thinking and acting for its members
(Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2020: 5; Schatzki, 2002;
Spinosa, et al., 1997: 17–20). Actors do not
encounter objects, tools and other people as
stand-alone entities to which they, subsequently,
attach meaning. Rather, bundles of materials and
other humans become meaningful to actors only
within a practice world – ‘an intelligible ensemble
 40 Haridimos Tsoukas
of other meaningful things’ (Sheehan, 2015:
117–118). To be involved in a practice world is
to be immersed in a relational totality that is struc-
tured by tacit understandings, explicit rules and
teleo-affective structures (Schatzki, 2002: 87).
For example, a BoutiqueCo employee, studied
by Sonenshein (2016), is entwined with others and
things in a meaningful socio-material practice
world. The store she works for and, in particular,
the merchandising routine she engages in, is not
merely a collection of externally related objects
available for contemplation, as it would perhaps
be for a visitor, but a meaningful unified whole that
is available for action (Merleau-Ponty, 1962/1945:
137). What the employee, others and objects (jew-
elry, mannequins, etc.) are depends on how they
show up in the relational totality they are part of.
The merchandising routine employee is driven by a
certain telos, to ‘create a visually compelling “look
and feel” of the store’ (Sonenshein, 2016: 744), the
accomplishment of which matters to her (Dreyfus
and Dreyfus, 2005). While she follows a visual
merchandising manual (Sonenshein, 2016: 744),
carrying out her tasks would be impossible without
the tacit knowledge about how to creatively imple-
ment the manual, typically in coordination with
her colleagues.
To enter a practice world – to become, say, a
pharmaceutical company or retail employee – is to
experience one’s situation in terms of already con-
stituted ends, meanings and acceptable emotions,
articulated through the discourse that defines the
practice world (Taylor, 1985a: 54–55). Members
of a practice world engage in activities through
which ‘internal goods’ (MacIntyre, 1985: 187) are
realized, while aiming to achieve certain ‘standards
of excellence’ (op. cit.). The already constituted
evaluative distinctions of a practice world make up
the ‘inherited background’ (Wittgenstein, 1979:
§94), against which practitioners make focal sense
of their particular tasks (Tsoukas, 2009: 943).
Through their participation in a practice world,
actors learn to relate to their tasks non-deliberately
(i.e., spontaneously) (Dreyfus, 2014): to merchan-
dise a store (Sonenshein, 2016), to pack and dis-
patch packages (Dittrich et al., 2016), to collect
waste (Turner and Rindova, 2012), to treat or oper-
ate on patients (Buchner and Langley, 2016; Kiwan
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and Lazaric, 2019; LeBaron et al., 2016), etc. Thus,
the world appears to actors as ‘ready-to-hand’
(Heidegger, 1962/1927), in which the most funda-
mental way of engaging with it is ‘absorbed coping’
(Dreyfus, 1991: 69; Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2011:
344). In absorbed coping, actors spontaneously
respond to an evolving situation they are facing
through using artifacts, tools and language. When,
for example, a BoutiqueCo employee merchandises
a store, she does not ordinarily stop to reflect on
what is a mannequin or a jewelry table. Having
grown familiar with them, she just does her job
(see Cohen, 2007: 777).
Through their immersion in a practice world,
actors acquire familiarity with it. Increased famil-
iarity provides actors with a host of ‘subsidiary
particulars’ (Polanyi, 1962: 55) that are necessary
for skilled action to be accomplished. Once the use
of tools (including language) and the roles of
others have become familiar, the subsidiary par-
ticulars have been assimilated (or interiorized) by
the actor, namely they have become tacit know-
ledge in which the actor dwells in order to focus on
the task at hand. For example, a merchandising
routine employee does not ordinarily need to think
about what subsidiary particulars, such as an acces-
sory table or a mannequin, are, namely what they
are for. Unless she has interiorized what an artefact
is for and how it should be used in the context of
her practice world, she will not be able to create a
proper display at a store (the focal task), just like a
car driver cannot competently drive unless she has
interiorized how to use the car instruments.
When absorbed in the execution of a task, actors
may be interrupted by a disturbance, anomaly or
breakdown (Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2011; see also
Rerup and Feldman, 2011; Salvato and Rerup,
2018). Then, they seek to reflect on their tacit
knowledge – the interiorized pattern of subsidiary
particulars – in order to resume smooth action. If
this happens while actors are still involved in a
practical activity, the world becomes ‘unready-to-
hand’ (Heidegger, 1962/1927), whereby actors
shift from absorbed coping to ‘involved thematic
deliberation’ (Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2011: 344).
But when the breakdown is severe so that actors
become detached from the practical situation at
hand, viewing it from the ‘outside’, namely as an

array of discrete objects with causally related prop-
erties, actors have then entered a situation of
‘abstract detachment’ (Tsoukas, 2015: 65). When
in it, actors move from practical to quasi-
theoretical understanding. In both cases, following
a breakdown, actors engage in deliberative think-
ing – reflecting on action.
For example, when actors, in performing the
shipping routine at CellCo, as studied by Dittrich
et al. (2016: 683), find that the plates are not yet
packaged with the lids, as would have normally
been the case, routine participants face a mild
breakdown: they shift from absorbed coping to
involved thematic deliberation – they engage in
‘reflective talk’ (2016: 683) (e.g., ‘we need to
discuss how we do this’, 2016: 684). On this
occasion, reflective talk does not involve abstract
reflection but is conducted in the context of prac-
tically addressing the problem: it ‘takes place on
the background of absorption in the world’
(Dreyfus, 1991: 74). However, reflective talk
marks the beginning of a potentially detached
intentionality, through which actors may begin to
form abstract representations of the task at hand
(not in evidence in Dittrich et al., 2016). Whereas,
in absorbed coping, the materials were immedi-
ately available to routine participants (the world
was ready-to-hand), in involved thematic deliber-
ation, the same materials become unavailable (the
world is unready-to-hand).
Radial structure and reweaving. Through
repeated performance, subsidiary particulars are
not merely accumulated but form a pattern
(Klein, 1998: 31–33; 2003: 21). This is important
since patterns enable actors to recognize situations
as typical and, thus, adopt relevant courses of
action. This is particularly relevant for routines,
since they derive from situated repetitiveness and,
when performed, constitute patterns of actions.
The knowledge of patterns is tacitly held: actors
are subsidiarily aware of patterned experiences
when carrying out particular tasks, just like a car-
penter is subsidiarily aware of holding a hammer
while driving a nail into a plank.
Patterns of subsidiary particulars stemming
from past routine performances are radially struc-
tured: their structure is formed around a relatively
stable core made up of prototypical (central)
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Process Theorizing and Routine Dynamics 41
members that have been typically encountered in
practice and an unstable part made up of non-
prototypical (peripheral) members, radiating at
various conceptual distances from the core
(Johnson, 1993; Lakoff, 1987). The radial struc-
ture of practical experience is important since it
enables actors to judge prototypicality. Insofar as
the case at hand is close to the prototypical core,
actors spontaneously undertake appropriate action
(Klein, 1998: 149): focal awareness of a particular
issue subsidiarily draws on familiar patterns in the
spontaneous undertaking of action (Dreyfus,
2014, 2017).
When, however, absorbed coping is interrupted,
either because participants have different under-
standings of the routine or the situation they face
deviates from what is typically the case, or both,
deliberate reflection in various degrees takes place.
What was previously subsidiary now becomes
focal. Through deliberating how to respond to a
breakdown in the midst of action or reflecting on a
pattern of actions ex post facto, actors reweave
their beliefs to preserve a coherent sense of agency
(Rorty, 1991). Such reweaving is a matter of
degree (Rorty, 1991: 94).
For example, shipping routine participants
tacitly know how to handle a prototypical case of
plate shipment – they have done it countless times.
When, however, the plates are not packaged with
the lids, participants encounter non-prototypicality,
calling for deliberation and, thus, the reweaving of
beliefs – ‘reflective talk’ ensues (Dittrich et al.,
2016). Similarly, a study of handoffs between
intensive care unit physicians when they change
shifts shows a pattern (LeBaron et al., 2016: 520).
Its core (prototypical) component consists of five
moves physicians have been trained, as well as
experientially used, to expect in a handoff: patient
identification, past events, current issues, future
plans and family matters. Such a prototypical pat-
tern furnishes physicians with shared understand-
ings and body schemata (i.e., action dispositions),
which they tacitly draw on (i.e., activate) when
handling particular patients.
However, situational variability, namely
patients’ different circumstances, needs and under-
standings, creates various non-prototypical cases,
which physicians flexibly handle by, for example,
 42 Haridimos Tsoukas
skipping, elaborating or modifying particular
moves (LeBaron et al., 2016). As LeBaron et al.
(2016) make clear, physicians’ coordination of the
joint task is actively sustained during handoffs by
physicians rearranging their moves through verbal
and bodily gestures, namely reweaving their pat-
terns of understandings and actions during routine
performance. Reweaving becomes more deliberate
and radical, the more actors explicitly represent (as
opposed to merely adapting to) the routine, namely
the more they reflect on the patterns enacted.
Dittrich et al. (2016: 685–686) provide an example
of this when shipping routine participants at
CellCo used particular breakdowns related to
delays in delivering orders to both dispatch a par-
ticular order and reflect, more generally, on the
desirability of hitherto dependence on a single
shipping provider. In the latter case, reweaving of
beliefs is more radical and the language used is
representational (Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2020).
Performance, teleo-affectivity and virtuality.
As argued earlier, routines are enacted in the ser-
vice of a collective purpose – they are teleologic-
ally driven. Practice theory usefully underscores,
among other things, the purposiveness of agency –
its teleo-affective structure (Schatzki, 2002: 87).
As Feldman (2000:614) perceptively noted, ‘rou-
tines are performed by people who think and feel
and care. [. . .] Their actions are motivated by will
and intention’. Although, when absorbed in action,
individual intentionality is subdued, the practice
world is purposively organized (Chia and Holt,
2009; Dreyfus, 2014) – agents engage in action
for the sake of accomplishing a collective goal,
which drives the performance of related tasks
(nursing, waste collection, hiring, etc.).
Underlying the performance of a routine is the
fulfilment of a ‘justification’ (Schauer, 1991: 53;
Tsoukas, 2019: 415) that reflects the ‘intrinsic
goods’ that a practice world is set to realize.
A justification provides the raison d’etre of a rou-
tine (Rerup and Feldman, 2011: 581).
Even when explicitly formulated, a justification
cannot be conveyed to actors in a propositional
form (Tsoukas, 2019: 416). Justifications are part
of subsidiary awareness: an actor subsidiarily relies
on them for focally attending to something else
(Tsoukas, 2011). If a justification were to be
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propositionally articulated, it would inevitably be
based on a further justification, and so on ad infi-
nitum. Why actors should enact a routine in a
particular manner cannot be propositionally
conveyed. As Wittgenstein (1958: §217) famously
noted, ‘if I have exhausted the justifications I have
reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then
I am inclined to say: “This is simply what I do”’.
The justification is virtual, namely it constitutes a
creative potential, which may be performed differ-
ently over time.
Specifically, a performance is a particular actu-
alization of virtuality; what is is a manifestation of
what can potentially be (Colebrook, 2005: 10). It is
thanks to the virtual that repetition does not pro-
duce the same effects. An actual performance of a
routine is governed by the contingencies, needs
and interests of the present (Bertel et al., 2016:
587). However, the virtual is also part of reality –
the power of reality to express itself in different
actualities. Thus, any time a routine is performed,
the justification that articulates its underlying telos
is re-enacted; the actual performance contingently
actualizes the potential – the virtual – that is cap-
tured by the justification. To re-enact a routine is to
repeat the creative potential from which actual
performances emerge (Colebrook, 2006: 82).
This is well illustrated by Feldman (2000) in her
influential study of, among other things, the
damage-assessment routine in student halls at a
US university (i.e., building directors assessing
any damage done in student halls of residence at
the end of each academic year). Revisiting this
study generates fresh insights. Specifically, routine
participants are members of a practice world that
has a teleo-affective structure – they are driven by
a collective purpose about things that matter to
them. The purpose of the building directors’ prac-
tice world (what Feldman calls ‘ideals’) provides
the justification of the routine, which, in this case,
was holding room residents accountable for any
damage caused in their rooms (Feldman, 2000:
616). This justification was tacitly upheld by build-
ing directors while focusing on their routine tasks –
room inspection and assessment of fines.
Justification constitutes a creative potential (i.e., it
is virtual), which may be actualized differently
over time. The contingent performance of the

routine at the time – i.e., its situational enactment
involving room assessment of fines after students
had gone – showed that building directors had
been turned into quasi-business managers rather
than quasi-educators, which is how they saw them-
selves as a result of performing and, therefore,
experiencing their jobs. Re-enacting the routine
provided participants with the possibility of actual-
izing the routine’s virtual aspect differently, thus
leading to the modification of the routine. As Parr
(2005: 223) notes, ‘to repeat is to begin again’.
3.4 Discussion
Performative phenomenology enables RD research
to move forward in interesting ways. The following
new directions for future research are suggested.
First, studying tacit knowledge, which is at the
core of routine performance, ought to receive
greater attention in RD research, since tacit know-
ledge will provide a deeper understanding of what
is entailed in patterning (i.e., interrelating stability
and change in RD); add nuances to our understand-
ing of endogenous change; and help account for
the difficulties in changing routines exogenously.
I briefly expand on them next.
Stability in routine performance stems, in part,
from the embodied nature of human action and, in
part, from the perceived prototypicality of prac-
tical experience. Insofar as human action depends
on the development of body schemas, the latter
take time to develop and change – they are a
source of inertia (Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2020).
Body schemas are a prime example of tacit know-
ledge that is developed through the habitual
engagement of the body in action. One of the
main effects of actors’ immersion in a practice
world is the training of the body, as well as
equipping actors with relevant perceptual abilities
and the use of language (Cohen, 2012: 1384).
Future research can focus on how body schemas
are developed through routine performance, and
with what consequences.
Moreover, although RD research has done a lot to
show that routine performance is an effortful
accomplishment, what needs to be explored in more
depth is the effortlessness of prototypical routine
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Process Theorizing and Routine Dynamics 43
performance. Insofar as, during routine perform-
ance, participants handle cases that are close to the
prototypical core, their action tends to be relatively
stable and effortless in the sense that they spontan-
eously draw on subsidiary particulars (including
body schemata) to engage in action. Endogenously
induced change and novelty need not necessarily
involve explicit ‘agentic choice’ (Sonenshein,
2016: 752), but may well be the outcome of spon-
taneous responsiveness to situational and agent-
specific experiential variability. An overemphasis
on ‘interpretation’ (Sonenshein, 2016: 752) and
‘reflective talk’ (Dittrich et al., 2016) risks missing
the more subtle way (i.e., non-deliberate, non-dis-
cursive, non-cognitive) through which endogenous
change emerges (Chia and Holt, 2009; Tsoukas and
Chia, 2002; Yanow and Tsoukas, 2009).
Second, for all its emphasis on accounting for
the internal dynamic of routines and the accom-
panying emphasis on non-deliberate change, RD
research needs to explore in more depth how senior
managers bring about deliberate change in rou-
tines. Research on organizational change has
focused on language and cognition as both instru-
ments and outcomes of change (Balogun et al.,
2015). While this is important, further research
can shed light on how language can bring about
deliberate change in routines (Flores, 2012; Ford
and Ford, 2009) by focusing on participants’ mode
of engagement with their practice world.
When, for example, deliberate change in a hos-
pital’s colon-resection routine involves the setting
up of ‘reflective spaces’, in which participants
‘intentionally develop new conceptions of rou-
tines’ (Bucher and Langley, 2016: 608) through
dialogue, participants can rethink the routine inso-
far as they step back from it to reflect explicitly on
it. Thus, participants relate to the old routine
through abstract detachment, whereby they point
at properties of the routine from the ‘outside’
(Tsoukas, 2019). This representational use of lan-
guage (i.e., pointing at abstract properties) con-
trasts with the moderately performative use of
language, as shown by Dittrich et al. (2016), when
actors enter involved thematic deliberation (‘these
lids are not the ones we usually ship’), which, in
turn, is different from the strongly performative
language actors use when engaged in routine
 44 Haridimos Tsoukas
through absorbed coping (e.g., ‘Drop your tools’,
Weick, 2001: 107). Such distinctions need to be
developed further through empirical research,
focusing in particular on the different speech acts
used in performative language (Flores, 2012; Ford
and Ford, 2009; Searle, 1969).
However, there is more to deliberate routine
change than the use of language. As mentioned,
new body schemata are developed when actors strive
to learn to perform a new routine. For example,
Bucher and Langley (2016) have noted the import-
ance of language and symbolic and temporal bound-
aries through the creation of ‘experimental spaces’ in
intentional routine change. They allude to the import-
ance of experimental spaces by noting how they
enable ‘new interactions’ (2016: 609). Further
research can unpack this by focusing on what it is
that new interactions accomplish. Bucher and
Langley rightly emphasize that what is distinctive
in experimental spaces is the enabling of new per-
formances. Further research may shed light on this
by showing how new performances enable the devel-
opment of new body schemata and fresh understand-
ings without necessarily involving the full use of
language (Dreyfus, 2014, 2017). In other words, an
‘experimental space’ carves out a new way of doing
things, which enables participants to learn new skills.
Third, RD research needs to grapple with an
under-researched topic, namely the moral dimen-
sion of routine enactment. Approaching this topic
with the lens of performative phenomenology
enables an understanding of routines as norma-
tively bounded practices: not merely as what rou-
tine participants do but the ethos they are driven by
to accomplish what they do (Selznick, 1992;
Tsoukas, 2018). Such a perspective underscores
the teleo-affective structures of even the most mun-
dane or technical routines, along with the intrinsic
goods that characterize and the standards of excel-
lence that permeate their enactment.
For example, it is the telos of the colon-resection
routine studied by Bucher and Langley (2016) – i.e.,
the improvement of patients’ conditions – that pro-
pelled the nurses involved to want to ‘re-initialize’
(i.e., re-energize) (2016: 604) the reflective space
created for the enactment of the envisioned routine
after experiencing ‘blockages’ in the ‘experimental
space’ (2016: 603). Similarly, in their study of the
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108993340.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
the network maintenance and trouble-fixing routines
of an Italian cellular phone company, Narduzzo et al.
(2000) noted the particular ethos of ‘spontaneous re-
engineering’ (2000: 41) that underlay the perform-
ance of routines. The authors note that the particular
mode of routine enactment manifests the distinctive
normative way routine technicians work.
‘Spontaneous re-engineering’ does not merely arise
from the technicians’ need to adapt to situational
uniqueness but, also, from the need to enact their
routine in the service of their collective goal – the
justification – of doing their job as responsibly and
effectively as possible (Bertels et al., 2016). The
collective goal reflects the intrinsic goods that are
embedded in technicians’ practice (Tsoukas, 2018).
Further research can explore how the intrinsic
goods inform the enactment of routines as well as
how the intrinsic goods change over time with
experience, with what effects (Bertels, et al.,
2016; Cohendet and Simon, 2016; LeBaron et al.,
2016; Turner and Rindova, 2012). Focusing more
explicitly on the moral dimension of routines
(Eberhard et al., 2019), researchers may explore
moral routines per se, namely routines that are
explicitly set up to deal with ethical concerns,
involving, for example, the allocation of scarce
resources (Gkeredakis et al., 2014). Currently,
whatever we know about this comes, mainly, from
ethical decision-making (Trevino et al., 2014). RD
could contribute further to the study of the latter by
viewing it though the lens of Routine Dynamics,
namely by focusing on moral routines’ recurring
enactment and how the intrinsic goods underlying
routines are situationally accomplished.
3.5 Conclusions
In this chapter, I have sought to extend the hitherto
valuable insights provided by RD research, by
urging the adoption of a strong process-cum-prac-
tice perspective, which I have called performative
phenomenology. I have argued that RD research
will need to explore how tacit knowledge impacts
on routine enactment; better understand exogen-
ously originated deliberate change in routines;
and take explicitly on board the moral dimension
of routine enactment.

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