Cognition is critical for finding different solutions to problems and providing new, robust patterns of action for the performance of routines. Routine Dynamics research provides significant empirical evidence about patterns and performance, and reveals how practices are permanently co-shaped using the notions of artefacts, reflection, replication of knowledge and intentionality. The notions of reflective action and reflective thinking have been identified as critical for current patterns of interdependent actions, thus offering an opportunity to reshape both cognition and the representation of routines that is far from the original conception of the Carnegie School.

In this chapter, we examine the contribution of routine dynamics studies toward the management of unexpected events. In particular, we explore how routine dynamics studies have extended our insights into flexible coordination in the face of the unexpected and how such a perspective generates novel insights into the way people make sense of unexpected events, how they mindfully operate during the occurrence of unexpected events, and how improvisation is enacted as routine performance. In this review, we connect routine dynamics studies with research on crisis management and discuss how a routine dynamics perspective expands the research agenda for the management of unexpected events and crises.

Experimental approaches are gaining in popularity across disciplines, ranging from behavioural sciences to economics. In this chapter, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of field experiments and review their use by scholars to study routine dynamics. Based on these, we suggest that field experiments hold further promise to study routines given their potential to develop and test theory, while achieving internal and external validity. To further the adoption of field experiments to study routines, we outline a five-step procedure, including research questions and hypotheses, context and research setting, treatment and design, measurement and statistical tests, and managing field experiments. We conclude by discussing potential research questions and contexts suitable for field experiments.

This chapter considers how the Routine Dynamics debate around technology, artifacts and materiality has evolved over the course of the past two decades. In reviewing the progress achieved so far, I show how the field is gearing up to address the important challenges posed, among other things, by new forms of artifacts and technology, and new ways of organizing. In so doing, I discuss how the latest advances in routines and materiality (artifacts at the centre, performativity and multiplicity/fluid ontology) can help us address the theoretical, methodological and empirical challenges raised by contemporary material phenomena. I conclude by laying out an agenda for future studies of routines, technology, artifacts and materiality.

Organizational ethnography has been crucial for the development of the field of Routine Dynamics since the beginning. It has altered the grain size of analysis and shifted the focus from the firm and its routines to the routine and the people, actions and artefacts that bring it to life. The discovery-oriented nature of ethnographic research has and continues to challenge the conceived wisdom of routines and their role in organizations. The majority of work in Routine Dynamics relies on ethnographic approaches and sensibilities. In this chapter, I review 43 studies and the various ways in which they draw on ethnography. Despite the wide variety of settings these studies have explored and the evidentiary approaches they draw on, I argue that Routine Dynamics research can draw on more novel and innovative forms of ethnographic research. This will allow scholars to address hitherto neglected aspects of routines, such as their emotional and aesthetic qualities, new contemporary phenomena that are of societal concern, such as inequality, climate change and epidemics, and make Routine Dynamics research more practically relevant.

This chapter deals with the role practice theory has played and can play in developing routine dynamics and the community of scholars associated with Routine Dynamics. It provides a short introduction to practice theory. It presents an analysis of how scholars in the field of Routine Dynamics relied on practice theory to build the foundation of the field and how scholars have continued to engage practice theory as the field has grown. The chapter ends with suggestions for how practice theory could help Routine Dynamics address questions of wide social relevance.

Routine dynamics and Business Process Management (BPM) are two academic disciplines that investigate sequences of action for carrying out work in organizations. Even though they share this phenomenon of interest, there are fundamental differences that separate both research areas. In this chapter, we take a first step to overcome this divide. To do this, we portray BPM by use of the business process lifecycle. The lifecycle well adopted instrument that allows us to describe how activities in BPM are interlinked and discuss the state of the art. Based on these insights, we develop multiple directions how routine dynamics and BPM can learn from and contribute to one another. We believe that a closer integration of both research areas can help to advance how we study and theorize about processes in organizations.

How to organize work is a topic at the core of routine dynamics, and studying novel forms of organizing constitutes a prime occasion for theory development. Though self-managed forms of organizing (SMOs) have held perennial interest by scholars and practitioners alike, contemporary SMOs are larger, and more rule driven than their earlier counterparts. Our chapter offers a primer on contemporary SMOs and identifies key issues that a routine dynamics perspective can lend towards seeing, tracing and understanding contemporary SMOs.

Implicitly or explicitly, sequence analysis is at the heart of research on routine dynamics. Sequence analysis takes many forms in many different disciplines, because sequence is central to temporality, process, language, and narrative. In this chapter, we focus on sequence analysis in routine dynamics research. The goal of this chapter is to help researchers use sequence analysis in their research on routine dynamics. Hence, the chapter reviews prior literature that has used sequence analysis, it shows how to carry out sequence analysis and it provides implications as well as an agenda for future research.

Organizational actors spend a tremendous amount of time and energy trying to intentionally change their routines. We conceptualize these intentional changes as routine design—intentional efforts to change one or more aspects of a routine to create a preferred situation. We review existing routines research on intentional change by showing how different perspectives on routines have generated different insights about the relationship between intentional change and design. We highlight a cognitive perspective, a practice perspective, and an ontological process perspective on routine design. We then draw on two perspectives inspired by design studies. Simon’s scientific perspective on design suggests that routines scholars study the effects and implications of designing artifacts. Schön’s reflective practice perspective on design suggests that routines scholars can examine how actors set the problem, engage in (re)framing, and in reflection-in-action. These design studies perspectives offer routines scholars a better understanding of efforts to intentionally change routines. Based on these insights from design studies, we develop a future research agenda for routine design.

The ideas of classical pragmatists receive increasing attention by scholars working in diverse fields, who realize their fertility in addressing contemporary theoretical and practical challenges. Pragmatism, as a philosophical perspective, embraces a processual view of the world according to which what really exists is ‘in the making,’ in a process of becoming, and places great attention to action and its meaningful experience. In this chapter, I introduce the common themes in the work of the founding figures of classical pragmatism and examine their convergence with the theoretical assumptions underpinning routine dynamics theorizing. I trace the influence of pragmatism in routine dynamics research and suggest that pragmatist thinking has much to offer to the study of routines as dynamic, processual phenomena.

Ethnomethodology (EM) has been fundamental to Routine Dynamics theorizing since its inception. However, whereas EM is well known for its detailed studies of face-to-face interactions, its relevance to understanding phenomena such as routines that span multiple spaces and times is less widely recognized. EM studies of routine dynamics take a primary interest in the taken-for-granted yet systematic ways in which members produce actions that are accountably “the same” across sites and occasions. Through sequenced embodied displays of orientation to material elements of the setting and the unfolding interaction, members construct in situ an interaction that is meaningful to them. To the extent that some such elements are available and oriented-to by actors across multiple sites and occasions, a pattern of repetitive action becomes observable. EM thus provides the theoretical underpinning for an understanding of routines as situated actions, and paves the way for a program of routine dynamics research grounded in the empirically observable material and embodied processes of interaction that constitute repetitive action patterns.

In this chapter we set out to analyse the rich and diverse stream which makes up the topic of routines as truces. This involves addressing not only those contributions which directly deal with the construct of truces and their dynamics, but also those for which truces might not be the central focus but which have contributed to our understanding of truce dynamics through the lens of related concepts. These topics include the influence of conflicting interests, goals and motivations; the emergence and resolution of tensions and struggles between and across organizational communities and culture(s); and the role of artifacts and materiality in addressing organizational conflict.

Given the centrality of experiential learning in the Carnegie School, we focus on how this form of learning provides an opportunity for deepening the relationship between the Carnegie School and Routine Dynamics. Experiential learning is central to Routine Dynamics because the flow and progression of routines emerge from experiential learning like processes of taking action, evaluating the results of those actions, and, if necessary, making adjustments to future actions.

This chapter offers an introduction to Routine Dynamics as a particular approach to studying organizational phenomena. We provide a brief description of the genealogy of research on routines; starting with the work of the management scholar Fredrick Taylor (1911) and the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey (1922) at the beginning of the last century, to the works of the Carnegie School on standard operating procedures around the middle of the last century, to the economics-based Capabilities approach and finally the practice-based approach of Routine Dynamics around the turn of the century. We also discuss the advantages of conceptualizing patterns of action as “routines”, as compared to “practices”, “processes”, “activities” or “institutions”. In particular, we highlight that the concept of routines directs the researcher’s attention to certain specificities of particular action patterns, such as task orientation, sequentiality of actions, recurrence and familiarity as well as attempts at reflexive regulation. We also introduce and explain the key concepts of the Routine Dynamics perspective and how they have developed over time.

In this chapter, we shed light on bodies in the dynamics of routines. Though the body has just begun to be theorized in Routine Dynamics research, the body is, nonetheless, pervasive. We show how ubiquitous the bodies are in Routine Dynamics research by documenting the embodied orientation to and from performing, to and from patterns, and to and from situation or materiality in 13 reference articles. By exploring one of these articles in more depth, we show how theorizing the body more explicitly has potential for deepening our understanding of the processual mechanisms of routine dynamics.

In this chapter, we review routine dynamics research through a temporal lens. Providing an overview of this work, the chapter focuses on two aspects of routine temporality: the effects of time — subjective, intersubjective, and objective — on routine performance, and the development and evolution of routines over time. Based on the review, we discuss how a focus on temporality expands the research agenda for a number of core themes and questions in routine dynamics research.

In this chapter, we consider the embeddedness of organizational routines within their organizational contexts, drawing on the original work on this construct (Howard-Grenville, 2005), revisiting its core ideas, and reviewing subsequent work that has addressed routine embeddedness. We find that recent work has highlighted the importance of understanding routine dynamics as influenced by and potentially mutually constitutive with other generative aspects of organizational life. We end with calls for future research on this topic and encourage scholars to further explore how routines interact with other core aspects of organizing.

This Chapter discusses the potential and relevance of a practice perspective on management that sees routines and the dynamics of routines as an essential focus of managerial engagement. The Routine Dynamics research program has opened the door for this view on management, to understand how management shapes stability and change in organizations. The Chapter presents studies on the role of management in enacting routine performance, in reflecting routine dynamics, and in mobilizing specific settings to creating and changing routines. Furthermore, the study of management routines, essential for stability and change in managerial engagement itself, has recently gained attention, in the context of the Strategy-as-Practice research program. We explore the current state and identify promising opportunities for future research

In the strategic management tradition, dynamic capabilities are interpreted as grounded in high-level routines, while in the routine dynamics framework routines are seen as inherently dynamic. Despite the apparent convergence of constructs and interests, these two approaches to understanding routines and the dynamism that they embody and engender have not been building on each other. In this chapter I analyse commonalities and differences between the two views in relation to their ontologies, their focal interests, and their levels of theory, measurement and analysis. I also describe how the two views contribute—although from different angles—to answering the same questions on routines emergence and change, on their role in inhibiting and promoting creativity and novelty, and in maintaining pattern and variety. Finally, I provide directions for future research on routine participants, ecologies of routines, and routines performance, which build on both views, without necessarily integrating them.