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The literature on routine dynamics widely explores how organizational routines endogenously change over time, emphasizing the benefits of such property. Until now, there has been relatively little research attention devoted to the potential challenges associated with routine changes. This is a problem in a world in flux, where adaptation is more of a continuous rather than intermittent need. The authors suggest that when routines change, the links they create between agents that enable coordination are destabilized, ultimately hindering organizational change. This work draws on a case study in the automotive industry, a sector in which organizations are encountering significant changes in both their business environment and dominant technological design. The authors show that when new systems of organizational routines emerge to fill new spaces of action the established connections decay and generate relational and temporal voids, that is, missing connections among agents and across time. As these voids form, the change process of organizations is made more complex, no matter the emergence of new routines and agents’ willingness to change. The findings offer a fresh perspective on the impact of organizational routines in a “world in flux” by delving into the costly “side effect” of routine dynamics.

The nature of buyer‐supplier relationships has been closely linked to nation specific explanations and concern has been expressed in literature regarding the transferability of co‐design best practices to different firms and countries. On the other hand, many attempts to isolate best practices and to apply them on a global scale have been proposed in the literature. Contributes to the issue by analysing a controversial case study based on the Italian automotive industry. Results show that few aspects of the Japanese contextual features and American ones existed when the major Italian car maker decided to outsource component design and dramatically change its supply chain management approach. Moreover, despite the massive involvement of suppliers at a very early stage of the car maker new product development process, not all the best practices deemed to be necessary when implementing a co‐operative buyer‐supplier relationship have been applied. Argues that these results lead us to question the very nature of effective buyer‐supplier relationships as described by the dominant literature and suggests implications for practitioners and for future research.

The paper analyses the organization of the new product development process at FIAT from a resource‐based perspective. The focus is on organizational resources for integrating dispersed specialist knowledge required in the development of complex products. The analysis shows how the application of a resource‐based perspective is able to uncover negative long‐term effects of outsourcing on the knowledge base (hollowing out), despite beneficial short‐term effects on cost.