Search results

Volumes 70 and 71 of Research in the Sociology of Organizations combine to comprise cutting edge theory and empirical scholarship at the interface of practice and institution in organization studies. As we highlight, this interface has spurred particularly generative conversations with many open questions, and much to explore. We provide a review of scholarly developments in practice theory and organizational institutionalism that have given rise to this interest in building a bridge between scholarly communities. As signaled by recent efforts to construct a practice-driven institutionalism, we highlight how connecting practice theory with the institutional logics perspective provides a particularly attractive focal point for scholarship at this interface due to a variety of shared ontological and epistemological commitments, including the constitution of actors and their behavior. Collectively, the papers assembled unlock exciting opportunities to connect distinct, but related scholarly communities on practice and institution, seeding scholarship that can advance our understanding of organizational and societal dynamics.

Volumes 70 and 71 of Research in the Sociology of Organizations combine to comprise cutting edge theory and empirical scholarship at the interface of practice and institution in organization studies. As we highlight, this interface has spurred particularly generative conversations with many open questions, and much to explore. We provide a review of scholarly developments in practice theory and organizational institutionalism that have given rise to this interest in building a bridge between scholarly communities. As signaled by recent efforts to construct a practice-driven institutionalism, we highlight how connecting practice theory with the institutional logics perspective provides a particularly attractive focal point for scholarship at this interface due to a variety of shared ontological and epistemological commitments, including the constitution of actors and their behavior. Collectively, the papers assembled unlock exciting opportunities to connect distinct, but related scholarly communities on practice and institution, seeding scholarship that can advance our understanding of organizational and societal dynamics.

In this editorial, the authors present an overview of the papers featured in this volume, all centered around the theme of “Routine Dynamics: Organizing in a World in Flux.” Recognizing the omnipresence of flux in organizational life, the authors identify key themes that emerged across the papers. These encompass temporality, improvisation, process and multiplicity, power and political dynamics, and scale. The authors elucidate the significance of each theme in the context of routine dynamics, highlight the advancements made by the respective papers in this volume, and underscore questions that warrant further exploration.

This essay extends a Bourdieusian perspective on the microfoundations of institutions. Drawing on this perspective, the authors argue that the recursive dynamics of institutions and action orient actors toward the maintenance of distinct and contradictory practices within, rather than bridging across, different fields. The authors corroborate our argument with an illustration of how corporate executives strategize within the tax field compared to the philanthropy field. Specifically, the authors show how actors are simultaneously oriented by different capitals toward apparently contradictory strategies. This chapter provides promising avenues for future research on the microfoundations of institutions, inter-field dynamics, and critical accounting and business ethics studies.

This chapter advances understanding of how professional expertise is enacted and created to accomplish routines in the context of technology-mediated work. Information and communication technologies broaden the participation of professionals with various specialist skills and expertise to accomplish work together, which is particularly salient in health care. Broadening participation, however, creates jurisdictional conflict among professionals. Thus, a key challenge of interprofessional work is the need to mutually adapt established professional routines and overcome jurisdictional conflict to perform interdependent routine tasks. The authors examine how professionals adapt established routines by analyzing the new interactions and interdependent actions required to accomplish technology-mediated geriatric consultation routines. The findings of this study show that professionals create new patterns of actions that are shaped by relational forms of professional expertise, namely selective and blending expertise. The findings and theoretical insights contribute to the literature on routine dynamics by highlighting the importance of relational expertise, and showing how it can transform and destabilize otherwise established professional routines.

This study addresses an important yet underdeveloped topic in routine dynamics research: how do routines form? Given the salience of routine formation in new ventures, this study is based on a single, longitudinal case study, following MatchMe, a technology-enabled startup. Building on findings from MatchMe, this study posits routine formation as a layered process. Rather than replacing established routines, routine formation was sequential. New routines were formed in addition to routines that continued to run in parallel. Routine formation was guided by organizational goals and monitoring their attainment. Multiple routines are formed to explore and create possibilities by shifting espoused ideals to attain organizational goals. This study advances routine dynamics in three distinct ways. First, it elaborates on a predominantly binary view of routine formation. Second, it extends work focused on the active creation of patterns. Third, it extends the response and outcomes of routine change, providing avenues for future research to explore strategic consequences of routines for outcomes typically associated with firm performance.

In this paper, I compare Theodore Schatzki’s practice theory, the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger upon whom Schatzki drew in its formation, and my own theory of institutional logics which I have sought to develop as a religious sociology of institution. I examine how Schatzki and I both differently locate our thinking at the level of practice. In this essay I also explore the possibility of appropriating Heidegger’s religious ontology of worldhood, which Schatzki rejects, in that project. My institutional logical position is an atheological religious one, poly-onto-teleological. Institutional logics are grounded in ultimate goods which are praiseworthy “objects” of striving and practice, signifieds to which elements of an institutional logic have a non-arbitrary relation, sources of and references for practical norms about how one should have, make, do or be that good, and a basis of knowing the world of practice as ordered around such goods. Institutional logics are constellations co-constituted by substances, not fields animated by values, interests or powers.

Because we are speaking against “values,” people are horrified at a philosophy that ostensibly dares to despise humanity’s best qualities. For what is more “logical” than that a thinking that denies values must necessarily pronounce everything valueless? Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism” (2008a, p. 249).