Prelims

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ROUTINE DYNAMICS

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RESEARCH IN THE SOCIOLOGY OF ORGANIZATIONS

Series Editor: Michael Lounsbury

Recent Volumes:

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RESEARCH IN THE SOCIOLOGY OF ORGANIZATIONS ADVISORY BOARD

Series Editor

• Michael Lounsbury

• Professor of Strategic Management & Organization

• University of Alberta School of Business, Canada

RSO Advisory Board

• Howard E. Aldrich, University of North Carolina, USA

• Shaz Ansari, Cambridge University, UK

• Silvia Dorado Banacloche, University of Massachusetts Boston, USA

• Christine Beckman, University of Southern California, USA

• Marya Besharov, Oxford University, UK

• Eva Boxenbaum, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

• Ed Carberry, University of Massachusetts Boston, USA

• Lisa Cohen, McGill University, Canada

• Jeannette Colyvas, Northwestern University, USA

• Erica Coslor, University of Melbourne, Australia

• Gerald F. Davis, University of Michigan, USA

• Rich Dejordy, California State University, USA

• Rodolphe Durand, HEC Paris, France

• Fabrizio Ferraro, IESE Business School, Spain

• Peer Fiss, University of Southern California, USA

• Mary Ann Glynn, Boston College, USA

• Nina Granqvist, Aalto University School of Business, Finland

• Royston Greenwood, University of Alberta, Canada

• Stine Grodal, Northeastern University, USA

• Markus A. Hoellerer, University of New South Wales, Australia

• Ruthanne Huising, emlyon business school, France

• Candace Jones, University of Edinburgh, UK

• Sarah Kaplan, University of Toronto, Canada

• Brayden G. King, Northwestern University, USA

• Matthew S. Kraatz, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

• Tom Lawrence, Oxford University, UK

• Xiaowei Rose Luo, Insead, France

• Johanna Mair, Hertie School, Germany

• Christopher Marquis, Cambridge University, UK

• Renate Meyer, Vienna University, Austria

• William Ocasio, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

• Nelson Phillips, University of California at Santa Barbara, USA

• Prateek Raj, Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, India

• Marc Schneiberg, Reed College, USA

• Marc-David Seidel, University of British Columbia, Canada

• Paul Spee, University of Queensland, Australia

• Paul Tracey, Cambridge University, UK

• Kerstin Sahlin, Uppsala University, Sweden

• Sarah Soule, Stanford University, USA

• Eero Vaara, University of Oxford, UK

• Marc Ventresca, University of Oxford, UK

• Maxim Voronov, York University, Canada

• Filippo Carlo Wezel USI Lugano, Switzerland

• Melissa Wooten, Rutgers University, USA

• April Wright, University of Queensland, Australia

• Meng Zhao, Nanyang Business School & Renmin University, China

• Enying Zheng, Peking University, China

• Tammar B. Zilber, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

Title Page

RESEARCH IN THE SOCIOLOGY OF ORGANIZATIONS, VOLUME 88

ROUTINE DYNAMICS: ORGANIZING IN A WORLD IN FLUX

EDITED BY

CHRISTIAN A. MAHRINGER

University of Stuttgart, Germany

BRIAN T. PENTLAND

Michigan State University, USA

BIRGIT RENZL

University of Stuttgart, Germany

KATHRIN SELE

Aalto University, Finland

and

PAUL SPEE

The University of Queensland, Australia

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Copyright Page

Emerald Publishing Limited

Emerald Publishing, Floor 5, Northspring, 21-23 Wellington Street, Leeds LS1 4DL.

First edition 2024

Editorial matter and selection © 2024 Christian A. Mahringer, Brian T. Pentland, Birgit Renzl, Kathrin Sele, and Paul Spee.

Individual chapters © 2024 The authors.

Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited.

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Contact: www.copyright.com

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters’ suitability and application and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-83549-553-7 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-83549-552-0 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-83549-554-4 (Epub)

ISSN: 0733-558X (Series)

Contents

About the Editors

Christian A. Mahringer is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Stuttgart School of Management and a Project Leader at the WIN-Kolleg of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. In 2019, he earned his doctoral degree with the highest distinction, for his dissertation on organizational routines. His research focuses on several themes: (a) managing organizational change and cultivating agility, (b) organizing with digital technologies, (c) organizing for grand challenges, and (d) methodological opportunities of digital trace data. In exploring all these themes, he employs a practice-based approach that focuses on the contextualized, situated actions of individuals in organizations. His work has been published in academic journals such as Organization Theory, Strategic Organization, and the Scandinavian Journal of Management.

Brian T. Pentland is the Main Street Capital Corporation Endowed Professor in the Broad College of Business at Michigan State University. His research is focused on the analysis of repetitive patterns of action, such as organizational routines. His creative work has appeared in the Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Accounting, Organizations and Society, Administrative Science Quarterly, JAIS, Journal of Management Studies, Management Science, MIS Quarterly, Organization Science, Organization Studies, YouTube, Soundcloud, and elsewhere. He received his PhD in Management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1991 and SB in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981.

Birgit Renzl is Full Professor and Chair of Management and Organization at the University of Stuttgart School of Management, Germany. Her research focuses on organizing and strategic change processes, with a particular focus on emerging technologies and routines. She is committed to the scientific community like the Strategizing Activities and Practices Interest Group at the Academy of Management, equally dedicated to fostering the dialogue between academia and practice, and contributes to various associations like Schmalenbach-Gesellschaft für Betriebswirtschaft e.V. Her work has been published in academic journals such as Management Learning, Omega The International Journal of Management Science, Journal of Economic Psychology, and Strategic Organization.

Kathrin Sele is an Academy of Finland Research Fellow and Lecturer at Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland. As an ethnographer of work, her research focuses on routines and their role in innovation and change processes as well as on how organizations embrace new technologies and how this changes work practices. In her work, she builds on ideas from actor–network and practice theory with a particular focus on socio-material and temporal aspects. Her work has been published among others in Organization Science, Organization Studies, Strategic Organization, and European Management Review.

Paul Spee is Associate Professor in Strategy at the University of Queensland Business School. His research is grounded in social practice theory, advocating for an alternative theorization of routines, strategy, and institutions among other phenomena. He also co-edited a volume On Practice and Institutions (Research in the Sociology of Organizations). Some of his work appeared in the Academy of Management Journal, Accounting, Organization & Society, Journal of Management Inquiry, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Science, and Organization Studies, and in influential handbooks. He has a book forthcoming on Introducing Social Practice Theory to Organization Theory (Edgar Elgar). He currently serves as Senior Editor for Organization Studies and served as Chair for the Strategizing, Activities & Practices Interest Group within the Academy of Management.

About the Contributors

Alessandro Alvarenga is a Visiting Scholar at Cranfield School of Management. With a PhD in Management from the University of Edinburgh, he has a decade of experience in project and operations management within the energy industry. His recent tenure in the Armed Forces saw him specializing in Force Protection. His research focuses on strategy and organization studies from a ”Routine Dynamics” perspective. As a Visiting Fellow at Cranfield University, he maintains a strong connection with academia and knowledge dissemination through research collaboration.

Lisa Balzarin holds a PhD in Management from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, where she worked for three years as a Postdoctoral Researcher. Her research focuses on coordination, studying organizational routines and their internal dynamics. She is also interested in organizational and technological change, and organizational and professional identity.

Jeremy Birnholtz is a Professor in the Communication Studies and (by courtesy) Computer Science departments at Northwestern University. His research interests include online self-presentation, attention management, and the dynamics of routines in seasonal organizations such as summer camps.

Gary T. Burke is an Associate Professor of Strategy and Organization at the University of Bristol Business School. His research utilizes qualitative and ethnographic methodologies and draws on practice and process philosophy perspectives to study how actors address complex (wicked) problems in practice. His work has appeared in the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Studies, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, British Journal of Management, and Long Range Planning.

Paul R. Carlile is a Professor of Management and Information Systems at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. He has published extensively on how knowledge is structured by the practices that individuals engage in and how this informs what can be done to address cross-domain knowledge boundaries to generate innovative outcomes. He has also explored the temporal relationality between structure and structuring to identify why, where, and when human agency and action can have the most productive effect. In all this work, he focuses on the consequences of materiality on actors to account for durability and not just dynamics, accumulations and not just activities, and outcomes and not just processes to create and establish more desirable forms of organizing.

Anja Danner-Schröder is a Junior Professor (Associate Professor) for Management Studies at the RPTU Kaiserslautern, Germany. She received her PhD from the University of Hamburg, Germany. Her current research focuses on organizational routines, agile management, and grand challenges. Her research has been published in journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Organization Studies, Journal of Management Inquiry, and Research in the Sociology of Organizations.

Geneviève Desbiens, MD, is a private Urologist at Rockland MD, Medical Director at Hôpital Marie-Clarac in Montréal, and Clinical Affiliate Professor at the University of Montreal. Her work focuses on strategic change in healthcare with an emphasis on clinical challenges. She received her PhD in Management from HEC Montréal.

Kim Louisa Dillenberger is Postdoctoral Researcher at Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, Germany. In her research, she explores transformation processes in an organizational context. She puts special focus on routine change, the impact of improvisation, and learning in dynamic environments. In her role as Head of Transformation, she operates at the intersection of academia and practice, fosters exchange on transformation challenges, and ensures the practical transfer of transformation knowledge.

Daniel Geiger is Professor of Organization Studies at the University of Hamburg, Germany. He holds a PhD from Freie Universität Berlin and has been Research Fellow of the Advanced Institute of Management Research, UK. His research focuses on the dynamics of organizational routines, particularly in situations of crisis and emergencies. Most recently, he explores the temporal and spatial dimensions of coordinating routines in dealing with tensions. His research has been published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Organization Studies, Organization, and Journal of Management Studies, among others.

Simon Grand studies the strategic management of creative enterprises, with a particular focus on creation routines, strategic engagement, and management practice, from the perspective of the Routine Dynamics and the Strategy-as-Process & -as-Practice research programs. He is an Associate Professor of Strategic Management and Management Innovation at the Swiss Institute of Small Business and Entrepreneurship, University of St. Gallen HSG, as well as Permanent Senior Research Fellow at the Zurich Center for Creative Economies, Zurich University of the Arts.

Paula Jarzabkowski is Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Queensland and City, University of London. Her research focuses on the practice of strategy and markets in complex, pluralistic, and paradoxical contexts. She publishes this research in leading journals, including the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Science, Organization Studies, and Strategic Management Journal. She is the author and editor of several books including, Strategy as Practice: An Activity-based Approach (Sage), Making a Market for Acts of God (Oxford University Press), Disaster Insurance Reimagined, and the Oxford Handbook of Organizational Paradox.

Anna Jenkins is a Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Queensland, Australia. Her research focuses on how entrepreneurs navigate the process of starting, managing, and exiting their firms. She researches the impact and implications of firm failure for owner-managers and her recent work takes a process and practice perspective to understand new venture emergence, co-editing the first handbook of Entrepreneurship-as-Practice. She currently holds two prestigious Australian Research Council Grants having brought in over 7.5 million in research funding during her career. She has published in the Journal of Business Venturing and International Small Business Journal, among others, and sits on the editorial review boards of the Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice.

Joanna Kho held two Postdoctoral Research Fellow positions at the University of Queensland Business School. Her research interests include routine dynamics and telemedicine with a particular interest in how change unfolds over time when new technologies and systems are implemented in health service contexts.

Waldemar Kremser is a Professor of Strategic Management at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria. In his research, he is combining a practice perspective on organizations with insights from complexity theory and other fields like design and strategy. He is most interested in routine dynamics, open strategy processes, self-managing forms of organizing, self-reinforcing dynamics, and radical innovations. His research has been published in Administrative Science Quarterly, MIS Quarterly, Organization Science, and Organization Theory, among others.

Ann Langley is an Emerita Professor of Management at HEC Montréal and a Distinguished Research Environment Professor at the University of Warwick. Her research deals with strategic management processes and practices in complex organizations with an emphasis on qualitative research methods. She is Deputy Editor of the Academy of Management Journal and Coeditor with Haridimos Tsoukas of a book series Perspectives on Process Organization Studies published by Oxford University Press.

Stefan Meisiek is Deputy Head of Discipline and Associate Professor in the Strategy, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship discipline at the University of Sydney Business School. He researches innovation, change, and learning in organizations and has a particular interest in how managerial choices enable or constrain learning and innovation efforts. This includes motivating organizational members to inquiry into pernicious problems, challenging assumptions, and giving license for dreaming, imagining, and creating. He has taught leadership and innovation in Graduate, MBA, EMBA, and Executive Education programs and worked with several companies, government organizations, and NGOs on developing innovation capabilities. He recently founded the Sydney Innovation Capabilities Lab to help companies develop innovation approaches, structures, and cultures. He received his PhD in Management from the Stockholm School of Economics, and his MA from the Free University, Berlin.

Gordon Müller-Seitz is Chair of Strategy, Innovation, and Cooperation at the RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau, Department of Business Studies & Economics. His research focuses on digitalization, technology and innovation management, interorganizational networks as well as dealing with risks and uncertainties. His insights have been applied to international corporations, small and medium-sized enterprises, public organizations, and consulting firms. His work has appeared in Research Policy, Organization Studies, Organization, Industry & Innovation, R&D Management, and the International Journal of Technology Management.

Florian Ritter is the Project Lead for Future Tech Trends and GenAI at Mercedes-Benz Group AG. Formerly, he obtained his doctoral degree as Researcher at the Chair of Strategy, Innovation, and Cooperation at TU Kaiserslautern, Germany. His research focuses on agility, organizational routines, and digitization and guides his recent work in the automotive sector.

Mehdi Safavi is a Senior Lecturer in Strategy and Organization at Cranfield School of Management. His research focus is on analyzing organizational change and inertia qualitatively through the lens of organizational routines (routine dynamics) during various internal and external change initiatives. His work has been featured in the Journal of Management Studies, British Journal of Management, Long Range Planning, Studies in Higher Education, and MIT Sloan Management Review.

Andreas Schwendener embarks on his exploration of the concept of recurrent creation within the realm of Creative Economies during his doctoral studies in Organization Studies and Cultural Theory at the University of St. Gallen. In addition to his academic pursuits, he serves as a Research Fellow at the Zurich Centre for Creative Economies. Beyond his research, he actively participates in the Creative Economies as a Drummer and Founder of a synth-pop band. Furthermore, he channels his academic insights into practical application as founder of the For Planet Strategy Lab.

Bonnie Rose Stanway recently graduated with a PhD in Strategy, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship from the University of Sydney Business School in Australia. With a deep curiosity for process and practice studies, her research explores how organizations adapt, innovate, and collaborate in dynamic and diverse contexts. She has a particular interest in routine dynamics and organizing in crisis. Alongside this research, she has experience teaching at both undergraduate and masters level in management, as well as 13 years of experience in industry including working in finance, government, and SMEs.

Sunny Mosangzi Xu is a Postdoc at the Department of Organization and the Centre for Organization and Time at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. With a focus on time, space, and materiality, she often takes a process and practice approach to explore different social phenomena ethnographically. Her research interests revolve around dualities, such as stability and change, temporary and permanent, and nature and culture, which she has explored in the context of interorganizational collaboration, research and innovation, and green transitions in agri-food systems. Particularly, she is interested in understanding how actors manage such dualities in their everyday doings and interactions toward desired outcomes.

Francesco Zirpoli is Professor at the Department of Management, Coordinator of the PhD in Management, Scientific Director of CAMI – Center for Automotive and Mobility Innovation, Director of National Observatory on the Transformation of the Automotive Ecosystem (Italy), and Co-organizer of the summer program "Organizing for Sustainable Futures: Micro and Macro-institutional Conditions of Transformation" held at Venice International University. He received his PhD from the Judge Business School of the University of Cambridge and his doctorate from the University of Naples “Federico II.” He was a Visiting Scholar at the Centre on Organizational Innovation of Columbia University in NYC within the Fulbright Program in 2008. His research interests include organizational routines, network governance, organization boundary decisions, and the organization of innovation processes.

Foreword

Research in the Sociology of Organizations (RSO) publishes cutting-edge empirical research and theoretical papers that seek to enhance our understanding of organizations and organizing as pervasive and fundamental aspects of society and economy. We seek provocative papers that push the frontiers of current conversations, that help to revive old ones, or that incubate and develop new perspectives. Given its successes in this regard, RSO has become an impactful and indispensable fount of knowledge for scholars interested in organizational phenomena and theories. RSO is indexed and ranks highly in Scopus/SCImago as well as in the Academic Journal Guide published by the Chartered Association of Business Schools.

As one of the most vibrant areas in the social sciences, the sociology of organizations engages a plurality of empirical and theoretical approaches to enhance our understanding of the varied imperatives and challenges that these organizations and their organizers face. Of course, there is a diversity of formal and informal organizations—from for-profit entities to non-profits, state and public agencies, social enterprises, communal forms of organizing, non-governmental associations, trade associations, publicly traded, family owned and managed, private firms – the list goes on! Organizations, moreover, can vary dramatically in size from small entrepreneurial ventures to large multi-national conglomerates to international governing bodies such as the United Nations.

Empirical topics addressed by RSO include the formation, survival, and growth of organizations; collaboration and competition between organizations; the accumulation and management of resources and legitimacy; and how organizations or organizing efforts cope with a multitude of internal and external challenges and pressures. Particular interest is growing in the complexities of contemporary organizations as they cope with changing social expectations and as they seek to address societal problems related to corporate social responsibility, inequality, corruption, and wrongdoing, and the challenge of new technologies. As a result, levels of analysis reach from the individual, to the organization, industry, community and field, and even the nation-state or world society. Much research is multi-level and embraces both qualitative and quantitative forms of data.

Diverse theory is employed or constructed to enhance our understanding of these topics. While anchored in the discipline of sociology and the field of management, RSO also welcomes theoretical engagement that draws on other disciplinary conversations—such as those in political science or economics, as well as work from diverse philosophical traditions. RSO scholarship has helped push forward a plethora of theoretical conversations on institutions and institutional change, networks, practice, culture, power, inequality, social movements, categories, routines, organization design and change, configurational dynamics, and many other topics.

Each volume of RSO tends to be thematically focused on a particular empirical phenomenon (e.g., creative industries, multinational corporations, and entrepreneurship) or theoretical conversation (e.g., institutional logics, actors and agency, and microfoundations). The series publishes papers by junior as well as leading international scholars and embraces diversity on all dimensions. If you are a scholar interested in organizations or organizing, I hope you find RSO to be an invaluable resource as you develop your work.

Professor Michael Lounsbury

Series Editor, Research in the Sociology of Organizations

Canada Research Chair in Entrepreneurship & Innovation

University of Alberta