See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/330798636

A Process Perspective on Organizational Routines

Chapter · August 2017

CITATIONS READS
43 2,000

2 authors:

Jennifer Howard-Grenville Claus Rerup

University of Cambridge Frankfurt School of Finance & Management
57 PUBLICATIONS   4,333 CITATIONS    48 PUBLICATIONS   2,592 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Routine Regulation: Balancing Contrasting Goals in Organizational Routines View project

Navigating stigma after stigma transfer View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Claus Rerup on 01 February 2019.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 1

A Process Perspective on Organizational Routines

Jennifer Howard-Grenville
University of Oregon
Lundquist College of Business
Department of Management
Eugene, OR 97403-1208, USA
jhg@uoregon.edu

Claus Rerup
Western University
Ivey Business School
Department of Organizational Behavior
Office 2308, 1255 Western Road, London,
ON, Canada, N6G 0N1
crerup@ivey.uwo.ca

PUBLISHED:

Howard-Grenville, J., & Rerup, C. 2017.

“A process perspective on organizational routines.”
In A. Langley., & H. Tsoukas (eds.),
Sage Handbook of Process Organizational Studies,
chapter 20: 323-339. Sage Publications, London, UK.

Acknowledgements. We thank Mohamed Hassan Awad for valuable assistance with our review
of the literature, and Martha Feldman, Brian Pentland, and Hari Tsoukas for valuable feedback
on an earlier version of the manuscript.
 2

Organizations use routines to accomplish work (Nelson and Winter, 1982). Routines are the

storehouses of organizational memory, often representing specialized or tacit knowledge, and are

valuable building blocks of organizational capabilities (Dosi, Faillo, and Marengo, 2008; Winter

and Szulanski, 2001). To adapt, organizations must learn new routines or reconfigure old ones

(Christianson, Farkas, Sutcliffe, and Weick, 2009; Edmondson, Bohmer, and Pisano, 2001).

Further, endogenous change in routines can lead to adaptations that influence how organizations

function (Feldman, 2000). In other words, scholarship from a broad swath of theoretical

traditions affirms a central connection between organizational routines, organizing, and change.

We explore how organizational routines have been studied from a process perspective, and how

this work helps our understanding of this construct.

Nelson and Winter characterized routines as “regular and predictable behavior patterns of firms”

(1982: 14). Building on this definition, Feldman and Pentland (2003) focused on how actions

uphold or alter these patterns. They defined routines as “repetitive, recognizable patterns of

interdependent organizational actions carried out by multiple actors” (Feldman and Pentland,

2003: 95). This definition is consistent with a process perspective because it sees routines not as

entities that encapsulate organizational knowledge, but as emergent (i.e., coming into being only

through specific performances), and generative (i.e., capable of producing continuity or change

in the actions they spawn) (Feldman, 2000; Feldman and Pentland, 2003; Rerup and Feldman,

2011). This perspective emphasizes how organizational routines unfold and how people and

artifacts enable routines to emerge, persist, or change.

 3

In this chapter, we review how early work on organizational routines captured process. We then

introduce Feldman and Pentland’s main arguments and illustrate how they are consistent with

and generative of a process perspective. Next, we describe the methods and findings of our

literature review. We conclude with directions for future work.

Early Work on Organizational Routines

The economic and early management literature conceptualized organizational routines as

relatively stable and paid limited attention to process. It saw organizational routines as

storehouses of reliable solutions to recurrent problems, learned by actors performing a task

(Levitt and March, 1988) that provided semi-automatic responses to environmental cues - “a

fixed response to defined stimuli” (March and Simon 1958: 142). Routines inhered in behavioral

(Becker and Zirpoli, 2008) or cognitive regularities (Cyert and March, 1963). Behavioral

regularities are recurrent activities performed by individual or collective actors (Winter, 1964).

Because routines involve repetition, they can be seen as patterns of highly automatic or mindless

behaviors (Cohen and Bacdayan, 1994; Gersick and Hackman, 1990; Levinthal and Rerup,

2006). Cognitive regularities are “understandings that organizational agents adopt to guide and

refer to specific performances of a routine” (Salvato and Rerup, 2011: 472). Seen cognitively

(Cohen, 1991; Cyert and March, 1963), routines entail decision rules and standard operating

procedures that influence organizational behavior by conserving cognitive effort.

This work usually regarded routines as whole “entities” as opposed to being comprised of parts

(Parmigiani and Howard-Grenville, 2011; Pentland and Feldman, 2008). This focus reflected the

effort to identify routines as stable units of selection in order to explain organizational evolution
 4

by natural selection (Nelson and Winter, 1982). By conceptualizing routines as stable, selectable

units – “factors that tend to limit the individual firm to the exercise of a distinctive package of

economic capabilities that is of a relatively narrow scope” (Nelson and Winter, 1982: 134) –

evolutionary scholars diverted attention from questions of how individuals perform routines and

“black boxed” much of what might explain their internal dynamics.

As a result, issues of interest to process scholars showed up infrequently, such as when authors

paid attention to how organizations used routines to learn or change. Routine change in this

perspective is explained through replacement or learning of whole routines, not endogenously.

Managers select specific routines (Knott, 2001), or routines themselves might be valuable tools

for learning (Mitchell and Shaver, 2003; Peng, Schroeder, and Shah, 2008). For example, Aime

and colleagues found that the movement of players between NFL teams facilitated the diffusion

of a routine represented by a type of play (Aime, Johnson, Ridge, and Hill, 2010).

The routines as entities perspective also hints at process via its emphasis on routines as

“organizational truces” (Nelson and Winter, 1982: 107-112). It assumes that the objectives of

participants in a routine overlap only partially, so coordination is possible only when objectives

are agreed upon (Simon, 1947: 15). Routines freeze conflict and represent tacit agreements about

how to subsume conflicting goals and interests in the routine’s tasks. Truces break and evolve

(Zbaracki and Bergen, 2010), however, and may be renegotiated through new routines that

restabilize underlying conflicts and help a new truce emerge. Therefore, routines as truces imply

political processes that suppress conflict. Until recently, however, this work has not probed the

processes underlying truces.

 5

In sum, past work has viewed routines as behavioral or cognitive regularities that produce

stability and reduce the cognitive strain on boundedly rational decision makers. This focus led

scholars to neglect internal complexity and dynamics by conceptualizing routines as entities and

black boxing how they were performed by distinct people at distinct times. However, while not

working from a process perspective, scholars are urging greater attention to microfoundations of

entities – including routines – “to understand how individual-level factors impact organizations,

how the interaction of individuals leads to emergent, collective and organization-level outcomes

and performance, and how relations between macro variables are mediated by micro actions and

interactions” (Felin, Foss, and Ployhart, 2015: 4).

A Process View of Routines

A number of scholars have begun to view routines as inherently dynamic rather than stable

(Feldman, 2000). This process orientation is grounded in the idea that routines are performative

accomplishments and expresses a wider desire to move towards dynamic ways of understanding

organizational phenomena (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002). Specifically, “[p]rocess studies focus

attention on how and why things emerge, develop, grow, or terminate over time. … Process

studies take time seriously, [and] illuminate the role of tensions and contradictions in driving

patterns of change” (Langley, Smallman, Tsoukas, and Van de Ven, 2013: 1).

A process perspective helps open the black box of routines by investigating how routines are

performed by specific people in specific settings. Work in this vein demonstrates how action,

surprise and creativity are all part of routine performances. Feldman (2000) demonstrated that

organizational routines can change continuously, and subsequent work has shown how the
 6

flexible use of routines enables organizational work (Canales 2011; Howard-Grenville, 2005;

Turner and Rindova, 2012). It also highlights how routines are “effortful accomplishments” that

reflect “complex patterns of social action” (Pentland and Reuter, 1994) implicating individual

agency and artifacts. Finally, it acknowledges the “paradox of the (n)ever-changing world”

(Birnholtz et al. 2007), capturing how routines are recognizable patterns, yet simultaneously

inhere in messy, unpredictable situated actions. Cohen (2007: 781–782) explained this paradox:

From one perspective … ‘one does not step into the same river twice.’ … From another

perspective … ‘there is no new thing under the sun.’ For an established routine, the

natural fluctuation of its surrounding environment guarantees that each performance is

different, and yet, … it is ‘the same.’

This paradox highlights the possibility that the same dynamics underlying a routine might

produce either stability or change (Feldman and Pentland, 2003).

A process perspective also facilitates a new language for integrating the behavioral and cognitive

aspects of routines. By conceptualizing routines as generative systems and distinguishing

between a routine’s performative and ostensive aspects, Feldman and Pentland (2003) suggest

that behavioral and cognitive regularities are entwined; the performative and ostensive are

created and re-created through action. Performative aspects constitute actual performances

carried out by specific participants, at specific times, in specific places, whereas the ostensive

aspects provide a “model of” and “model for” enacting the routine (see also Pentland and

Feldman, 2007: 789). The routine must comprise both aspects. A focus on only the ostensive or

the performative encourages the separation of mind and body. As such, the ostensive has
 7

meaning only when derived from performances. Representations of a routine, like a standard

operating procedure, or an espoused, envisioned routine (Feldman, 2014; Rerup and Feldman,

2011) cannot be regarded as a routine.

This understanding of routines raises several questions. These include: how do performative and

ostensive aspects vary over time? How do actors and artifacts shape the performative aspects, the

ostensive aspects, and their interactions? How does coordination occur across contrasting points

of view concerning how to perform a routine, or goals associated with routines, such that

patterns remain recognizable? How do contextual aspects condition the interplay of the

performative and ostensive? Where do organizational routines come from? And, how do multiple

routines that involve overlapping actors and/or artifacts interact?

Further, “[t]he understanding of the abstract [ostensive] pattern may not be the same from person

to person, from event to event or over time. Indeed, multiple and divergent understandings are

probably more the norm than the exception” (Pentland and Feldman, 2005: 797). Conflict and

heterogeneity can arise because i) an espoused ostensive does not accord with that which is

enacted (Rerup and Feldman, 2011), ii) there are divergent performances of routines (Feldman,

2004), iii) the participants in a routine hold different perspectives on it (Turner and Rindova,

2012; Zbaracki and Bergen, 2010), or iv) have goals and intentions for the routine (D’Adderio,

2014; Howard-Grenville, 2005). When a routine is performed, the participants will note if there

is a match between the ostensive “model” of the routine (Pentland and Feldman, 2007), and their

actions. If a mismatch persists, the actors may be unable to enact the routine as consistent with

the ostensive. At that point, they will face two options. First, they can change the ostensive.
 8

Second, they can change their actions. These changes might lead to different patterns over time,

or the same pattern persisting despite variability in its performance. The process scholar must

explore the mechanisms at play and how they drive these dynamics.

Studying routines from a process perspective is difficult because of reduced grain size (Cohen et

al., 1996) and more moving parts. It “requires engaging with the everyday realities of

organizational life that are rich with contingency, multiplicity, and emergence” (Feldman and

Orlikowski, 2011: 1249). Scholars have predominantly relied on qualitative data, including

observation and inductive analysis. Below, we review this literature.

Methodology of the Literature Review of Process Studies of Organizational Routines

Our literature review covered the period from 2003 to August 2014. We began by searching

ISI/Web of Science for articles and other works citing Feldman and Pentland (2003). This search

revealed over 500 items; 482 were available in ISI/Web of Science. We excluded proceedings,

focusing on scholarly published articles. We included review articles and editorial material

because several important statements have appeared in the introductory articles of special issues

or in essays. This yielded a final list of 445 published works for our analysis. Over 85% of the

works in this list were in Management and Business, in Information Science/Computer Science,

Public Administration, Psychology, Economics, and Educational and Health Science.

A research assistant working closely with one author coded the 445 published works as either

being centrally about organizational routines, or not centrally about organizational routines. We

assessed this by asking whether the article focused on explaining organizational routines or other
 9

phenomena. Similarly, we paid attention to the authors’ intended theoretical contribution. Was

the article seeking to advance routines theory, or seeking to advance another theory that referred

to routines? For example, some papers focused on related literatures, like organizational learning

or dynamic capabilities, but cited the routines literature to establish what a routine is and,

perhaps, how routines might change. We coded these articles as not centrally about

organizational routines. As well, because Feldman and Pentland (2003) is also a statement about

practice theory and structuration, it is cited when authors focus on these topics, and not on

organizational routines. Again, we coded these articles as not centrally about routines.

After several iterations, we arrived at a list of 97 articles that cited Feldman and Pentland (2003)

and were centrally concerned with routines. We coded these articles with: i) a “process” code to

indicate that they took a process perspective on routines, inquiring into their dynamics, as

opposed to an “entity” perspective on routines, in which the inner workings of routines are black-

boxed (Parmigiani and Howard-Grenville, 2011; Salvato and Rerup, 2011); and ii) an

“empirical” code to indicate that they employed data and empirical analysis. As Table 1 shows,

64 articles adopted a process perspective. 45 were empirical and 19 were conceptual. As Table 2

and Figure 1 show, the articles were published in a range of journals, with most appearing in

management journals.

------------------ Insert Tables 1 and 2, and Figure 1 about here ------------------

For the 97 articles, we noted the core themes of the article, and, if empirical, the data sources and

analytical methods used. We downloaded these articles in order to distill this information. We

applied thematic codes that were initially very close to the language used by the authors, and
 10

then grouped these themes into larger categories, including: Change in Routines, Artifacts,

Emergence of Routines, Learning, Nature of Routines, and Miscellaneous. We wanted to

understand what aspects of routines authors attended to using a process perspective and how they

advanced this perspective. We also examined what methods and data sources are used to advance

a process perspective of routines. Most of the empirical work used multiple sources of qualitative

data (e.g., interviews, observations, and archival material). However, some important work uses

modeling (Cohen, Levinthal, and Warglien, 2014) and quantitative data (e.g., Salvato, 2009;

Pentland, Hærem, and Hillison, 2011) to shed light on aspects of routines hard to observe “in the

wild” (Parmigiani and Howard-Grenville, 2011: 415).

Organizational Routines: What is Studied from a Process Perspective

Change in Routines

The most prevalent theme among the articles was change in routines. More than 40% of the 64

articles written from a process perspective were coded as primarily about change in routines.

This code captured articles that portrayed how routines admit variation across their specific

performances, often through individual agency. The connection between individual agency and

endogenous change in routines was made clear by Feldman and Pentland:

In contrast to the traditional view of routines, which emphasize structure, our framework

brings agency, and therefore subjectivity and power back into the picture. Agency

involves the ability to remember the past, imagine the future, and respond to present

circumstances …. While organizational routines are commonly perceived as reenacting

the past, the performance of routines can also involve adapting to contexts that require
 11

either idiosyncratic or ongoing changes and reflecting on the meaning of actions for

future realities. While organizational routines are commonly portrayed as promoting

cognitive efficiency, they also entail self-reflective and other-reflective behavior. We

argue that organizational routines consist of the resulting performances and the

understandings of these performances. As a result of the movement among these aspects,

organizational routines are inherently capable of endogenous change. (2003: 95).

This passage conveys important ideas that have been taken up in the subsequent literature. First,

the reviewed articles demonstrate that people do not perform routines identically (both across

people and across performances by the same person) because their dispositions, subjectivity, and

power relations shape how they perform routines. Second, such variation is sometimes

consequential for the ongoing performance of organizational routines. As Feldman and Pentland

argue, at times performance variation due to individual agency is idiosyncratic, whereas as other

times it might trigger ongoing changes to a routine.

Performance variability is common to many routines. For example, Pentland and colleagues used

invoice processing data from four organizations and modeled routine performances as networks

of action (Pentland, Haerem, and Hillison, 2010; 2011). They found hundreds of unique patterns

of action generated by the routines, and substantial change in how the routines were performed,

absent exogenous triggers, over a five-month period. Their results confirm that endogenous

factors, including experience of the routine’s participants, better explain performance variability,

compared to exogenous factors. Other studies echo these findings. People’s orientations (to the

past, present, or future) and intentions (Howard-Grenville, 2005), their role in a routine (Turner
 12

and Rindova, 2012), their discretionary use of rules (Canales, 2011), implicit valuation of certain

objectives (Bruns, 2009), and positions in systems of power relations (Brown and Lewis, 2011;

Lazaric and Denis, 2005; Raman and Bahardawaj, 2012) can influence how they perform

routines. For example, Bruns (2009) shows that the performance of new safety routines in a

university laboratory was shaped by molecular biologists’ prioritization of their scientific goals –

to protect their experiments from contamination – rather than the intended prioritization of

human health and safety. Other work explores the foundations that might lead to such variability,

whether through cognition, memory, or affect (Cohen, 2007; Miller et al., 2012).

While such variation might be regarded as problematic, work from a process perspective finds

that performance variability enables the accomplishment of work entrusted to routines. For

example, Turner and Rindova (2012) showed how garbage collectors sustained two patterns of

collection routines – one oriented towards consistency and one to flexibility – thereby enabling

the organization to adjust to contingencies. Canales (2011) found differences in how

microfinance loan officers apply written rules, with some enforcing them strictly and others

bending or ignoring them. He concludes that the rule bending is productive for the organization

as a whole, but only when at least some loan officers are strict enforcers.

Performance variation does not necessarily mean that routines change or evolve over time;

variation may be idiosyncratic (Feldman and Pentland, 2003). Or, variation may be necessary for

the routine, and its multiple ostensive aspects , to work in practice (Tuner and Rindova, 2012). In

some cases, best illustrated by Feldman’s study in a university housing organization (2000),

variation in performances led to significant change in the routine (both its performative and
 13

ostensive aspects). New patterns emerged such that the routine was not recognizable as the

“same.” Agency can explain these changes, as people performing the routine might have

aspirations for or act in a way that enables it to change (Feldman, 2000; Howard-Grenville,

2005). Recent work suggests how feedback on routines contributes to change in routines (Chen,

Ouyang, and Pan, 2013), and how conceptualizing routines as “trajectories” can uncover

mechanisms underpinning their reconfiguration (Chen, Pan, and Ouyang, 2014). Other work

explores learning in relation to change in routines; Rerup and Feldman (2011) demonstrated how

organizational routines and organizational schema coevolve, and Bresman (2012) explored

vicarious learning of routines between groups in a pharmaceutical company.

Finally, some work has examined the organizational or broader context in which routines are

performed, and explored how this shapes both individual agency and the tendency for routines to

change. Howard-Grenville (2005) argued that the embeddedness of routines in an organization’s

culture, hierarchy, or technologies might constrain evolution, despite permitting flexibility in

routines’ daily performance. Turner and Fern (2012) used a unique quantitative data set of GPS-

encoded garbage collection routes to demonstrate that drivers with more experience were better

able to adjust to environmental contingencies, showing how skillful actors read the context to

contribute to routine consistency. The use of routines can also reflect macro contextual factors as

channeled through individual participants; Essen (2008) found that macro cultural values,

adopted differently by different caregivers, led to variability in performance of elderly health

care routines.
 14

In sum, there is a considerable body of work exploring change in routines – both how routines

are performed flexibly in the day to day, and how they, at times, evolve over time to become

recognizable as a new routine. Individual agency, and its interaction with contextual conditions,

underpins explanations for these outcomes.

Artifacts

Artifacts’ influence on the performance of routines has been central to scholarship on routines

from a process perspective. Ten articles were coded as being primarily about artifacts; three of

these are conceptual and seven are empirical. Other articles allude to the role of artifacts in

explaining, for example, routine change. Feldman and Pentland (2003) referred to artifacts as

“artifacts of” the ostensive aspects of routines. In other words, a standard operating procedure or

other documentation, like a past employment ad in a hiring routine, are artifacts of the ostensive.

The ostensive aspect of a routine is, however, different from its artifacts. It comprises subjective

understandings of multiple actors, and is significantly tacit. Some routines are not associated

with artifacts, as their ostensive aspects are understood through norms or abstract rules.

Alternatively, an artifact might outlast its use in a routine if the routine is no longer performed

(Feldman and Pentland, 2003: 108).

Early process work echoed these claims and emphasized the importance of not confusing routine

artifacts with the routine itself. In a conceptual paper, Pentland and Feldman (2008) asserted that

designing a routine by creating a set of artifacts (checklists, written procedures, or software

encoded versions of these) reinforces the misunderstanding that routines are things, and divulges

the “folly” of believing that artifacts can actually generate desired patterns of action. Supporting
 15

this, Hales and Tidd (2009) found that formal representations of routines are less consequential

to how routines are actually performed than are non-formal representations.

Scholars now recognize that material artifacts both constrain and enable agency (Leonardi,

2011). For example, D’Adderio asserts “artifacts have been treated as either too solid to be

avoided, or too flexible to have an effect” on routine performance (2011: 1), and argues for

reconceptualizing the role of artifacts in routines by recognizing that artifacts can “influence

[routine’s] emergence and persistence, both in destabilizing existing action patterns, or providing

the glue that can hold patterns together” (2011: 1). D’Adderio uses performativity theory to

explore how artifacts and human agency adapt to each other, especially when “an artifact is

entangled in a thick web of organizational relationships” (2011: 23).

This move invites scholars to consider how artifacts shape routine dynamics. Several papers

capture how artifacts shape routine performances, enabling or altering connections between

different actors involved in routines (Bapuji, Hora, and Saeed, 2012; D’Adderio, 2008; Turner

and Rindova, 2012). Recent work also articulates how systems of artifacts are used in routine

performances (Cacciatore, 2012; Volkoff et al., 2007), and how artifacts used across multiple

routines can have unintended consequences for specific routines (Novak, Brooks, Gadd, Anders,

and Lorenzi, 2012). This research suggests the need to understand how artifacts and routines

influence and are constitutive of human agency. Accordingly, empirical work is exploring how

the design and use of artifacts influence the truces that get resolved through routine performances

(Cacciatore, 2012). Other studies examine technological change, including the contextual

settings into which technologies get introduced, as a basis for understanding routine adoption and

performance. For example, Labatut, Aggeri, and Girard (2011) trace the co-emergence of a new
 16

technology (animal breeding) and routines for its use in two distinct regional settings, finding

different trajectories in each region.

Learning and Routines

When viewed as entities, routines encode knowledge and are hence regarded as a product of

learning (Levitt and March, 1988; Argote, 1999). Organizational learning might also occur

through routine renewal or replacement. From a process perspective, learning is viewed as more

nuanced as the focus shifts to how people use and adjust routines.

Several papers explore learning and routines from a process perspective. Some consider

connections between routines and organizational learning. For example, Levinthal and Rerup

(2006) theorize how routines can enable mindfulness, and how mindfulness can lead to

organizational learning. Looking at learning in international new ventures, Prashantham and

Floyd (2012) theorize that variability in performances of routines will result in improvisational

learning and new capability development, while variability in ostensive aspects of routines will

lead to trial and error learning and improvement of existing capabilities. Christianson and

colleagues (2009) explored how the collapse of a railway museum’s roof triggered learning

through the strengthening and broadening of three organizing routines. Other work focuses on

learning through routines within a group or team. For example, teachers’ conversational routines

shaped how they learned from problems, thus linking the performance of routines with work

group learning (Horn and Little, 2010). In examining change implementation, management

scholars found that team mental models were shaped by coherence between ostensive and

performative aspects of routines (Guiette and Vandenbempt, 2013).

 17

Emergence of routines

An important question for the process perspective is “where do routines come from?” If routines

are not simply relatively stable products of organizational learning, or the performance of

scripted standard operating procedures, then it is important to consider how they emerge.

Routines might represent political truces that result from managerial conflict (Nelson and

Winter, 1982), but they might arise as a “product of action that occurs in the context of the

enabling and constraining structure that are typical of modern organizations (Feldman and

Pentland, 2003: 98).” Beyond this, and recognizing that power is exercised in different forms in

the interplay of the performative and ostensive, Feldman and Pentland did not theorize explicitly

about the emergence of routines. Recent emphasis on the “microfoundations” of organizational

routines calls for more work to consider how routines emerge (Felin, Foss, Heimeriks, and

Madsen, 2012).

Work from a process perspective has theorized how role taking enables the combining of

individual lines of action into recognizable, interdependent patterns (Dionysiou and Tsoukas,

2013). Other work uses agent-based simulation modeling to explore how individual skills are

combined as a routine forms (Miller, Choi, & Pentland, 2014). This work demonstrates that

development of a routine relies on people during initial performances searching for and

remembering what other actors do; in this way, transactive memory connects individual skills

with the collective capability of repeated routine performance. Others have studied how routines

emerge as new rules are imposed (Reynaud, 2005), communities attempt to share knowledge

(Ribes and Bowker, 2009) and organizations seek to improve collaboration (Swinglehurst,
 18

Greenhalgh, Myall, and Russell, 2009). Related to the work on artifacts, several papers consider

how artifacts can act as “intermediaries” between various actors in the development of new

routines (Bapuji, Hora, and Saeed, 2012), or how novel technologies more generally influence

the emergence of routines (Labatut, Aggeri, and Girard, 2011).

Nature of routines

Some research using simulation modeling (e.g., Lazaric & Raybaut, 2005; Pentland, Feldman,

Becker and Lui, 2012) develops Feldman and Pentland’s (2003) arguments about the nature and

generative properties of organizational routines. Pentland and Feldman (2005) elaborate how

understanding routines as comprising “parts” advances our conceptualization of them as

generative systems. Other work (Pentland and Feldman, 2007; Pentland et al., 2012), introduces

new ways of conceptualizing the dynamics underpinning routines. Others consider the

relationship between routines from a performative perspective and organizational capabilities

(Salvato and Rerup, 2011) or use simulations to investigate how different capabilities within

organizations lead to the selection of routines (Lazaric and Raybaut, 2005; see also Cohen et al.

2014). Finally, Parmigiani and Howard-Grenville (2011) review empirical work on routines from

both a practice and a capabilities perspective, and find common themes and opportunities for

future research.

Organizational Routines: How They are Studied from a Process Perspective

We also investigated the data sources and methods used in the 45 empirical papers that explore

routines from a process perspective. Of those that clearly specified the methods used, more than

90% relied on qualitative data, with the remaining used at least some quantitative data.
 19

The predominant use of qualitative data is not surprising, given that the process perspective

emphasizes looking inside the “black box” of routines. Most of this work included direct

observation (ranging from ethnographic studies to short stints of observation). Qualitative papers

that did not use observation relied on interviews and/or archival data. In fact, these two sources

were nearly ubiquitous, as most studies using observation also included interview and archival

data. The message is that studying routines from a process perspective demands a close-in view

of actions and interactions, or the capacity to capture routines “in the wild” (Parmigiani and

Howard-Grenville, 2011: 415). In line with the qualitative data collected, virtually all of these

studies used inductive analysis. Much of this theorizing took Feldman and Pentland (2003) as

foundational, and elaborated on when, how, and why performative and ostensive aspects of

routines interact, change, and implicate actors and artifacts.

The empirical papers that used non-qualitative data and/or didn’t rely on inductive analytic

methods offer some promising insights. First, some studies (Bapuji et al., 2012; Turner and Fern,

2012) use quantitative data. Turner and Fern (2012) used GPS-encoded garbage route data and

information on who drove which routes to discover the relationship between level of experience

and capacity to adjust the routine to context. Bapuji and coauthors (2011) ran an experiment in

which they changed a sign associated with a hotel towel-changing routine and collected data on

the towel-changing behavior of participants in experimental and control conditions. These papers

also used qualitative (interview) data to develop explanations. A second novel method for

studying routines from a process perspective is modeling, using either quantitative or qualitative

data as inputs. Several papers portrayed routines as “narrative networks” (Hayes, Lee, and

Dourish, 2011; Mein Goh, Gao, & Agarwal, 2011; Pentland & Feldman, 2007), which represent
 20

the narrative fragment (as nodes) that involve “two or more actants and the actions that go on

between them” (Hayes et al, 2011: 165.) Narrative networks then graphically represent the

relationships between narrative fragments and their sequencing. Narrative coherence results from

a routine’s performance rather than from its espousal. Simulation modeling is also used to

explore how individual actions accrue to patterns of action, (Lazaric & Raybaut, 2005; Miller,

Pentland, and Choi, 2014; Pentland, Feldman, Becker and Lui, 2012.)

Discussion: Ways Forward

Our review identified several topics that merit more research. Specifically, future research should

more deeply explore routines’ processual aspects, the embeddedness of routines within other

organizing processes, and address under-researched topics including the nature of truces,

temporality and spatiality, and creativity in routines. Finally, we suggest some additional

methods to broaden the reach of process perspectives on routines.

Routine Dynamics

One challenge in using the process perspective has been the difficulty of conceptualizing,

capturing, and describing processes when we so readily conceive of entities. Ostensive aspects of

routines are sometimes regarded as existing independently – through being thought, espoused, or

encapsulated in an artifact like a written procedure. Yet, this understanding is inconsistent with

the idea that the ostensive and performative exist only in relation to the other.

To further illuminate routines as processual, scholars should describe not only the dynamics of

the performative aspect, but also probe how the ostensive is itself dynamic. Feldman (2014) has
 21

begun to speak of ostensives as patterns, and direct attention to the process of patterning

(Feldman, 2014). Exploring patterning will limit the conflation of an espoused, written, or

imagined pattern with an actual aspect of a routine. Thinking about patterning also redirects

attention to the processual character of routines – patterns appear as experienced regularities, not

as entities. Routine participants recognize routines when their prior performances appear

patterned, yet performances can depart and new patterns emerge as a result. Paying attention to

patterns and patterning (as opposed to ostensives), might also trigger scholars to be alert to the

consequences of breakdowns that prevent people from enacting patterns; for example, the

absence of expected cues can lead to new patterns emerging (Jarzabkowksi, Le, and Feldman,

2012). This suggests that gaps in action, or omissions that constitute a departure from previously

performed patterns, might help scholars more deeply theorize the interplay of actions and

patterns in organizational routines. Future work should therefore attend to situated actions and

pauses or disruptions, as ways of furthering understanding of how patterns evolve from and

shape actions.

Routine Embeddedness

While the process perspective on routines has peered deep into the black box to address an

earlier tendency to regard routines as black-boxed entities, scholars should pull their heads far

enough out of the box to be able to situate the inner workings of routines within other processes

of organizing. As Parmigiani and Howard-Grenville (2011) noted:

Perhaps somewhat ironically, studies from a practice [process] perspective are so

concerned with situated action – the specific actions of specific people in specific
 22

organizations – that they sometimes ignore fundamental organizational attributes

that exist above the level of the routine but nonetheless affect its performance (443).

Howard-Grenville (2005: 619) introduced the concept of a routine’s embeddedness “to capture

the degree to which the use of a routine overlaps with the enactment of other organizational

structures,” such as cultures, hierarchies, and technologies. While this might suggest a dynamic

routine lodged within stable surrounding structures, Howard-Grenville regarded these structures

as also enacted, observing that “the simultaneous enactment of multiple structures can contribute

to the persistence of routines, by generating multiple, often overlapping artifacts and

expectations” (2005: 631). For example, expectations generated through employee’s

understandings of how their organization works can prevent top-down routine change efforts

from taking hold (Feldman, 2003). More recent work begins to offer a more processual account

of embeddedness by arguing that “routines are not simply embedded in context, they are also

enacted through context” (D’Adderio, 2014: 23). Process scholars are well positioned to explore

how the performance of organizational goals (D’Adderio, 2014), organizational schema (Rerup

& Feldman, 2011), coordinating (Jarzabkowski, Le and Feldman, 2012), or other aspects of

organizing, like culture, identity, or sensemaking are intertwined with the performing of routines.

As well, they can address how multiple routines are performed together, within and between

organizations. In this way, attention to routines’ inner workings will be matched with attention to

how these are situated within processes of interest to a broader community of organizational

scholars.

Multiplicity in Routines and the Nature of Truces

 23

Process scholars conceptualize routines as performed by an ensemble of actors, which ensures

multiple ostensive aspects of the same routine (Pentland and Feldman, 2005). Thus, the

“ostensive” is never singular (For a different view see Dionysiou and Tsoukas (2013)). If there

are conflicting ostensive aspects associated with a routine, how is a recognizable routine

accomplished? The concept of routines as truces (Nelson and Winter, 1982) suggests that

multiple points of view are managed through a truce, but says little about how truces emerge,

change, and reform because it “misses the conflict behind the truce; it reveals only the stable

truce” (Zbaracki and Bergen, 2010: 956). In existing work, conflict and contradiction between

different perspectives are balanced through experimentation (Rerup and Feldman, 2011) or are

aligned through the creative use of authority (Rerup and Feldman, 2011; Zbaracki and Bergen,

2010), improved connections between routine participants (Cacciatori, 2012; Turner and

Rindova, 2012), or by sequentially performing different ostensive patterns of the same routine

(D’Adderio, 2014). The study of truce dynamics over an extended period remains an open topic.

Future work could trace how the routine as truce might sustain generative tension between

participants with contradictory ostensive orientations over extended periods, and explore the

implications for the routine’s performance, stability and change.

Temporality and Spatiality of Routines

An area ripe for further development is accounting for how temporality and spatiality contribute

to understanding routines from a process perspective. Some routines play out in fairly short

bursts, in confined spaces through co-located actions and actors. Other routines occur across long

periods, are spatially dispersed, and may involve actors unknown to one another. Some routines

involve only face-to-face interactions; others may involve no such interactions. In distributed
 24

organizations, routines may be performed exclusively in “virtual” space, by people and artifacts

connected only through electronic means. The times and spaces within and across which a single

routine is performed are as varied as routines themselves. This variation does not pose a problem

for thinking about routines as inhering in action and patterns, but the nature and interplay of

these actions and patterns differs and should be understood. As Turner writes:

[T]he temporal dimension has received only limited attention in existing reviews

of routines scholarship. … [T]his is a function of the limited body of empirical work

that has explored the temporal aspects of routines … and [the fact that] we are only

beginning to develop the common understandings and frameworks about time [in

organizational routines]. (2014: 2)

Such research should examine both how clock time influences the performance of routines and

how people’s experiences of time shape routine performances. An individual’s history with a

routine, the pacing of actions central to a routine, or time pressure, all influence the actions and

patterns that arise from routine performances. Similarly, scholars could examine how actions are

experienced as interdependent when actors (humans and/or artifacts) are widely dispersed in time

or space. Through what mechanisms are actions coupled in routine performances, and how do

these actions then shape the patterns that arise? How does spatial colocation versus dispersion

influence the multiplicity of ostensive patterns that arise and underpin routine performances?

How does the performance of routines in virtual space shape the evolution and interaction of

artifacts and actions both online and offline?

Creativity and Routines

 25

Process-oriented conceptualizations of routines highlight the centrality of action, agency, and

performativity in organizational routines. Because open-ended actions and performativity help

constitute the routine, creativity is an important but overlooked aspect of routines (Joas, 1996).

A body of work is starting to show how novelty, interruption, and adaptation are common

features of routine performances (Dionysiou and Tsoukas, 2013; Jarzabkowski et al., 2011;

Rerup and Feldman, 2011). Just as mindless routines can help organizations become more

mindful (Levinthal and Rerup, 2006), creative routines might help organizations be more

innovative. Future work should examine how creative actions taken within a routine contribute

both to the accomplishment of the routine (Obstfeld, 2012) and to creative organizational

outcomes. More fundamentally, what is the relationship between routines as recognizable

patterns of interdependent actions, and the drivers, experiences, and outcomes of creativity?

Method for Studying Routines

We have already mentioned the merit in extending process research on routines by using

simulations (Cohen et al., 2014) and conducting more quantitative research. As well, additional

work using qualitative data is needed to continue to develop the processual perspective along the

lines indicated above. Novel methods might also be suitable to further develop this stream of

literature. For instance, historical methods (Rowlinson, Hassard, and Decker, 2014) may help

scholars trace routine patterns across long time spans (e.g., decades) and dispersed locations.

Historical analysis and archival data make detailed longitudinal analysis possible. “[I]t allows us

to look at … dynamics … in ways that more accurate but shorter-term ethnographic studies

would not allow” (Cohen et al. 1996: 682). At the other end of the spectrum, methods that seek

to capture distributed, individual, and real-time data, including diary methods might considerably
 26

enrich our understanding of how individuals experience routines. Sensor technologies might also

be used, with care, to measure interactions between individuals in certain settings, enabling

insight into actual, real-time action patterns. In each of these cases, data could be augmented

with those from additional sources to make sense of routine dynamics.

Conclusion

A process perspective is alive and well in the study of organizational routines. The foundational

work by Feldman and Pentland (2003) opened up a new way of thinking about routines as

possessing both performative and ostensive aspects and helps scholars theorize how routines

change or are recreated, how artifacts and agency shape these dynamics, and how routines

emerge and evolve over time. Future research should build on these findings and further our

thinking about routines as processes, exploring their multiplicity, how time and space shape

them, and how they are connected to seemingly disparate processes like creativity.
 27

Figure 1: Count of Routines Papers from a Process Perspective Published by Journal

 28

Table 1: Summary of Review of Papers Citing Feldman and Pentland (2003)

Total articles citing Feldman & Pentland 2003 445

Articles coded as centrally about routines 97
Articles coded as centrally about routines and adopting a process 64
perspective
- of these, empirical 45
- of these, non-empirical 19
Primary themes in articles coded as centrally about routines and
adopting process perspective (empirical/non-empirical)
- Change in routines 27 (25/2)
- Artifacts in routine performance 10 (7/3)
- Emergence of routines 10 (7/3)
- Learning and routines 5 (3/2)
- Nature of routines 7 (0/7)
- Miscellaneous
5 (3/2)
 29

Table 2: Top Five Journals Publishing Routines Papers from a Process Perspective

Journal Frequency Percent

Organization Science 12 18.8
Journal of Management Studies 5 7.8
Industrial and Corporate Change 5 7.8
Organization Studies 4 6.3
Journal of Institutional Economics 2 3.1
Total 28 43.8
 30

References

Aime, F., Johnson, S., Ridge, J. W., & Hill, A. D. (2010). The routine may be stable but the
advantage is not: Competitive implications of key employee mobility. Strategic
Management Journal, 31(1), 75-87.

Argote, L. (2012). Organizational learning: Creating, retaining and transferring

knowledge. Springer Science & Business Media.

Bapuji, H. & Saeed, A. M. (2012). Intentions, Intermediaries, and Interaction: Examining

the Emergence of Routines. Journal of Management Studies, 49(8), 1586–1607.

Becker, M. C., & Zirpoli, F. (2008). Applying organizational routines in analyzing the
behavior of organizations. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 66(1),
128–148.

Birnholtz, J. P., Cohen, M. D., & Hoch, S. V. (2007). Organizational character: on the
regeneration of Camp Poplar Grove. Organization Science, 18(2), 315-332.

Bresman, H. (2012). Changing routines: A process model of vicarious group learning in

pharmaceutical R&D. Academy of Management Journal,

Brown, a. D., & Lewis, M. a. (2011). Identities, Discipline and Routines. Organization
Studies, 32(7), 871–895.

Bruns, H. C. (2009). Leveraging functionality in safety routines: Examining the divergence

of rules and performance. Human Relations, 62(9), 1399–1426.

Cacciatori, E. (2012). Resolving Conflict in Problem-Solving: Systems of Artefacts in the

Development of New Routines. Journal of Management Studies, 49(8), 1559–1585.

Canales, R. (2011). Rule bending, sociological citizenship, and organizational contestation

in microfinance. Regulation and Governance, 5(1), 90–117

Chen, J. E., Ouyang, T. H., & Pan, S. L. (2013). The role of feedback in changing
organizational routine: A case study of Haier, China. International Journal of
Information Management, 33(6), 971-974.

Chen, J. E., Pan, S. L., & Ouyang, T. H. (2014). Routine reconfiguration in traditional
companies’ e-commerce strategy implementation: A trajectory perspective.
Information and Management, 51(2), 270–282.
 31

Christianson, M. K., Farkas, M. T., Sutcliffe, K. M., & Weick, K. E. (2009). Learning
Through Rare Events: Significant Interruptions at the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad
Museum. Organization Science, 20(5),

Cohen, M. D. (1991). Individual learning and organizational routine: Emerging

connections. Organization Science, 2(1), 135-139.

Cohen, M. D., Burkhart, R., Dosi, G., Egidi, M., Marengo, L., Warglien, M., & Winter, S.
(1996). Routines and other recurring action patterns of organizations: contemporary
research issues. Industrial and Corporate Change, 5(3), 653-698.

Cohen, M. D., & Bacdayan, P. (1994). Organizational routines are stored as procedural
memory: Evidence from a laboratory study. Organization Science, 5(4), 554-568.

Cohen, M. D., Levinthal, D. A., and Warglien, M. 2014. Collective performance: Modeling
the interaction of habit-based actions. Industrial and Corporate Change, 23(2): 329-
360

Cohen, M. D. (2007). Reading Dewey: Reflections on the Study of Routine. Organization

Studies, 28(5), 773–786.

Cyert, R. M., & March, J. G. (1963). A behavioral theory of the firm. Englewood Cliffs, NJ,
2.

D’Adderio, L. (2011). Artifacts at the centre of routines: performing the material turn in
routines theory. Journal of Institutional Economics, 7(02), 197–230.

D’Adderio, L. 2014. The replication dilemma unravelled: How organizations enact multiple
goals in routine transfer. Organization Science. 25(5) 1325–1350.

Dionysiou, D. D., & Tsoukas, H. (2013). Understanding the (RE)creation of routines from
within: A symbolic interactionist perspective. Academy of Management Review, 38(2),
181–205.

Dosi, G., Faillo, M., & Marengo, L. (2008). Organizational capabilities, patterns of
knowledge accumulation and governance structures in business firms: an introduction.
Organization Studies, 29(8-9), 1165-1185.

Edmondson, A. C., Bohmer, R. M., & Pisano, G. P. (2001). Disrupted routines: Team
learning and new technology implementation in hospitals. Administrative Science
Quarterly, 46(4), 685-716.

Essen, A. (2008). Variability as a source of stability: Studying routines in the elderly home
care setting. Human Relations, 61(11), 1617–1644.
 32

Feldman, M. S. (2000). Organizational routines as a source of continuous change.

Organization Science, 11(6), 611-629.

Feldman, M. S. (2004). Resources in Emerging Structures and Processes of Change.

Organization Science, 15(3), 295–309.

Feldman, M. S. (2008). Information and Organization Designing routines : On the folly of

designing artifacts , while hoping for patterns of action. Information and Organization,
18(4), 235–250.

Feldman, M. 2014. Action in routines: A processual view of routines. Keynote talk at 6th
International Symposium on Process Organization Studies. Rhodes, Greece. June
2014.

Feldman, M. S., & Orlikowski, W. J. (2011). Theorizing practice and practicing theory.
Organization Science, 22(5), 1240-1253.

Feldman, M. S., & Pentland, B. T. (2003). Reconceptualizing organizational routines as a

source of flexibility and change. Administrative Science Quarterly, 48(1), 94-118.

Felin, T., Foss, N., Heimeriks, & Madsen, T. (2012). Microfoundations of routines and
capabilities: individuals, processes and structures. Journal of Management Studies.

Felin, T., Foss, N. J., & Ployhart, R. E. 2015. The microfoundations movement in strategy
and organization theory. Academy of Management Annals, Forthcoming.

Gersick, C. J., & Hackman, J. R. (1990). Habitual routines in task-performing groups.

Organizational behavior and human decision processes, 47(1), 65-97.

Goh, J. M., Gao, G., & Agarwal, R. (2011). Evolving work routines: adaptive routinization
of information technology in healthcare. Information Systems Research, 22(3), 565-
585.

Guiette, A., & Vandenbempt, K. (2013). Exploring team mental model dynamics during
strategic change implementation in professional service organizations. A sensemaking
perspective. European Management Journal, 31(6), 728-744.

Hales, M., & Tidd, J. (2009). The practice of routines and representations in design and
development. Industrial and Corporate Change, 18(4), 551–574.

Hayes, G. R., Lee, C. P., & Dourish, P. (2011). Organizational routines, innovation, and
flexibility: The application of narrative networks to dynamic workflow. International
Journal of Medical Informatics, 80(8), 161–77.
 33

Horn, I. S., & Little, J. W. (2010). Attending to Problems of Practice: Routines and
Resources for Professional Learning in Teachers’ Workplace Interactions. American
Educational Research Journal, 47(1), 181–217.

Howard-Grenville, J. a. (2005). The Persistence of Flexible Organizational Routines: The

Role of Agency and Organizational Context. Organization Science, 16(6), 618–636.

Jarzabkowski, P. A., Lê, J. K., & Feldman, M. S. (2012). Toward a theory of coordinating:
Creating coordinating mechanisms in practice. Organization Science, 23(4), 907-927.

Joas, H. (1996). The creativity of action. University of Chicago Press.

Knott, A. M. (2001). The dynamic value of hierarchy. Management Science, 47(3), 430-
448.

Labatut, J., Aggeri, F., & Girard, N. (2011). Discipline and Change: How Technologies and
Organizational Routines Interact in New Practice Creation. Organization Studies (Vol.
33, pp. 39–69).

Langley, A., Smallman, C., Tsoukas, Haridimos and Van de Ven, A. H. Process studies of
change in organization and management : unveiling temporality, activity, and flow.
Academy of Management Journal 56 (2013): 1-13.

Lazaric, N., & Denis, B. (2005). Routinization and memorization of tasks in a workshop:
The case of the introduction of ISO norms. Industrial and Corporate Change, 14(5),
873–896.

Lazaric, N., & Raybaut, A. (2005). Knowledge, hierarchy and the selection of routines: An
interpretative model with group interactions. Journal of Evolutionary Economics,
15(4), 393–421.

Leonardi, P. M. (2011). When flexible routines meet flexible technologies: Affordance,

constraint, and the imbrication of human and material agencies. MIS quarterly, 35(1),
147-167.

Levinthal, D., & Rerup, C. (2006). Crossing an Apparent Chasm: Bridging Mindful and
Less-Mindful Perspectives on Organizational Learning. Organization Science, 17(4),
502–513.

Levitt, B., & March, J. G. (1988). Organizational learning. Annual Review of Sociology,
319-340.

March. J. G., & Simon, H. (1958) Organizations. New York: Wiley.

 34

Miller, K. D., Choi, S., & Pentland, B. T. (2014). The role of transactive memory in the
formation of organizational routines. Strategic Organization,12(2), 109-133.

Miller, K. D., Pentland, B. T., & Choi, S. (2012). Dynamics of performing and
remembering organizational routines. Journal of Management Studies, 49(8), 1536-
1558.

Mitchell, W., & Shaver, J. M. (2003). Who buys what? How integration capability affects
acquisition incidence and target choice. Strategic Organization, 1(2), 171-201.

Nelson, P.R., Winter S. (1982) An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change, Harvard

University Press.

Novak, L., Brooks, J., Gadd, C., Anders, S., & Lorenzi, N. (2012). Mediating the
intersections of organizational routines during the introduction of a health IT system.
European Journal of Information Systems, 21(5), 552-569.

Obstfeld, D. (2012). Creative projects: A less routine approach toward getting new things
done. Organization Science, 23(6), 1571-1592.

Parmigiani, A., & Howard-Grenville, J. (2011). Routines revisited: Exploring the

capabilities and practice perspectives. The Academy of Management Annals,5(1), 413-
453.

Peng, D. X., Schroeder, R. G., & Shah, R. (2008). Linking routines to operations
capabilities: A new perspective. Journal of Operations Management, 26(6), 730-748.

Pentland, B. T., & Feldman, M. S. (2005). Organizational routines as a unit of analysis.

Industrial and Corporate Change, 14(5), 793-815.

Pentland, B. T., & Feldman, M. S. (2007). Narrative networks: Patterns of technology and
organization. Organization Science, 18(5), 781-795

Pentland, B. T., & Feldman, M. S. (2008). Designing routines: On the folly of designing
artifacts, while hoping for patterns of action. Information and Organization, 18(4),
235-250.

Pentland, B. T., Feldman, M. S., Becker, M. C., & Liu, P. (2012). Dynamics of
organizational routines: a generative model. Journal of Management Studies,49(8),
1484-1508.

Pentland, B. T., Hærem, T., & Hillison, D. (2010). Comparing organizational routines as
recurrent patterns of action. Organization Studies, 31(7), 917-940.
 35

Pentland, B. T., Hærem, T., & Hillison, D. (2011). The (N) ever-changing world: stability
and change in organizational routines. Organization Science, 22(6), 1369-1383.

Pentland, B. T. and H. H. Reuter. 1994. Organizational routines as grammars of action.

Administrative Science Quarterly, 39:3:484-510.Prashantham, S., & Floyd, S. W.
(2012). Routine microprocesses and capability learning in international new ventures.
Journal of International Business Studies, 43(6), 544-562.

Raman, R., & Bharadwaj, A. (2012). Power differentials and performative deviation paths
in practice transfer: the case of evidence-based medicine. Organization Science, 23(6),
1593-1621.

Rerup, C., & Feldman, M. S. (2011). Routines as a source of change in organizational

schemata: The role of trial-and-error learning. Academy of Management Journal,
54(3), 577-610.

Reynaud, B. (2005). The void at the heart of rules: routines in the context of rule-following.
The case of the Paris Metro Workshop. Industrial and Corporate Change, 14(5), 847-
871.

Ribes, D., Bowker, G.C. (2009). Between meaning and machine: Learning to represent the
knowledge of communities. Information and Organization, 19(4), 199-217

Rowlinson, M., H. Hassard, and S. Decker (2014). Research strategies for organizational
history: A dialogue between historical theory and organization theory. Academy of
Management Review, 39: 250–274.

Salvato, C. (2009). Capabilities unveiled: The role of ordinary activities in the evolution of
product development processes. Organization Science, 20(2), 384-409.

Salvato, C., & Rerup, C. (2010). Beyond collective entities: Multilevel research on
organizational routines and capabilities. Journal of Management.

Simon, H. A. (1965). Administrative behavior (Vol. 4). New York: Free Press.

Swinglehurst, D., Greenhalgh, T., Myall, M., & Russell, J. (2010). Ethnographic study of
ICT-supported collaborative work routines in general practice. BMC Health Services
Research, 10(1), 348.

Tsoukas, H., & Chia, R. (2002). On organizational becoming: Rethinking organizational

change. Organization Science, 13(5), 567-582.
 36

Turner, S. F. (2014) Time and Work: How Time Impacts Groups, Organizations and
Methodological Choices. Edited by A. J. Shipp and Y. Fried. Volume 2. 115-145.
Psychology Press. East Sussex.

Turner, S. F., & Fern, M. J. (2012). Examining the stability and variability of routine
performances: the effects of experience and context change. Journal of Management
Studies, 49(8), 1407-1434.

Turner, S. F., & Rindova, V. (2012). A balancing act: How organizations pursue
consistency in routine functioning in the face of ongoing change. Organization
Science, 23(1), 24-46.

Volkoff, O., Strong, D. M., & Elmes, M. B. (2007). Technological embeddedness and
organizational change. Organization Science, 18(5), 832-848.

Winter, S.G. (1964) Economic ”Natural” Selection and the Theory of The Firm, Yale
Economic Essays, 225-272.

Zbaracki, M. J., & Bergen, M. (2010). When truces collapse: A longitudinal study of price-
adjustment routines. Organization Science, 21(5), 955-972.

View publication stats