Routine Dynamics in Action

Replication and Transformation

Contains an Open Access chapter.

As organizations become increasingly distributed and diverse, and products, technologies and services more complex and dispersed, there is mounting pressure to understand how work can be coordinated across geographical, cultural and intellectual distance, both within and across organizations. As a result, questions arise about how work is accomplished through organizational practices and routines and in particular how patterns of actions are replicated and transformed across different contexts and over time. Routine dynamics has started to explore these dynamics by focusing attention on how routines (as practices) are enacted and, thus, created and re-created over time and across organizational locations through the actions of people and machines.

This book explores central themes in the enactment and coordination of organizational routines, drawing in particular on in-depth case studies and empirically-grounded theorizing. The chapters explore important organizational phenomena in the areas of strategy, entrepreneurship, human resources, health care, social policy, and the arts. Focusing in particular on four central themes in routine dynamics: replication and transfer; ecology and interdependence; action and the generation of novelty and technology and sociomateriality.