Routine Dynamics: Organizing in a World in Flux: Volume 88

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 paper investigates the intricate process of integrating historically excluded social groups into long-established routines. Drawing on a dialectical perspective, the research explores how persistence and change emerge through the interplay of opposing forces, shedding light on the dynamics of integrating new participants while ensuring stability in established routines. The empirical focus is on an Armed Forces’ ground combat training (GCT) course, examining the integration of the first female officers after the formal ban on their participation in close-combat roles was lifted. The findings reveal a nuanced evolution of routine adaptation and truce reformation, characterized by three dialectical cycles: tentative truces, experimental truces, and enactment truces. These cycles involve negotiations between continuity and reformation, accommodation and resistance, and modification and preservation, uncovering a dialectical dance where organizational actors invest intense effort in maintaining the status quo while accommodating ambiguity and settling tensions. The findings extend our understanding of routine dynamics by illuminating the performative aspect of truce-making, highlighting the effortful processes involved in accommodating new participants. This paper establishes a connection between routines and dialectics, providing novel avenues for exploring complex organizational challenges and emphasizing micro-strategies employed by routine participants to address differences in practice. It also contributes to the field of organizational inclusion by offering a dialectical understanding of integration, showcasing the intricate dynamics involved in integrating historically excluded groups into established routines.

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.

A central tension in routine dynamics is the paradox of the [n]ever-changing world: how can we consider each routine performance as unique, when it is simultaneously a recognizable variant of the behavior from the past? Emergent from this paradox is the question of how we can consider routines to be the “same” over time, even as they change. Organizational traditions, which often persist over decades, present a potentially informative case of this paradox as their core rituals are simultaneously recognizable and recognizably in significant flux over the long-term. In this paper, the author draws on a case history of “the Unicorn,” a tradition at a US summer camp that began as a quiet activity for a few children in 1985 and by 2017 had become a weekly spectacle witnessed by hundreds of campers. By drawing on routine dynamics and tradition literatures, the author shows how action visibility and influence by different organizational constituencies over time slowly enabled these changes. This longer-term lens helps illuminate the under-researched, mutually constitutive relationship between routines and traditions, and their long-term dynamics.

Previous research on routine dynamics has most commonly incorporated consideration of power, politics, and conflict by using the notion of “truce.” In this paper, the authors propose a novel approach to integrating theories of power and politics with those of routine dynamics, and illustrate it by drawing on an in-depth study of operating room routines in a general hospital. The authors show how the dynamic interaction among groups’ sources of power, interests, and strategies is linked to the performance and patterning of routines. The approach opens up the originally rather static notion of “truce” to an inherently more dynamic and processual view of the micropolitics underpinning routines. The authors contribute to the routine dynamics literature by showing how and why the micropolitical context may influence, undermine, or reproduce the patterning and performing of organizational routines following a change initiative, and more broadly by illustrating an approach to integrating political considerations into the theory of routine dynamics.

Our understanding of what we call “normal” in organizations has been shaken multiple times in recent years. As change is perceived as an inherent feature of routine dynamics, it is relevant to understand how change becomes established as a new normal. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore how change in routines takes hold as normality forms. To answer this question, the author studies the change in routines in an in-depth process case study of a higher education organization during the COVID-19 pandemic transforming its teaching model. The author’s findings show that normality formation is a dynamic process. While normality can be described as a snapshot of the current state of what is considered normal at one point in time, normality transforms in sequential waves making the overall process of normality formation pulsate. In drawing out six patterning mechanisms, the author introduces a pulsating normality as the transformative evolution of what is considered normal. This study speaks to routine dynamics literature, contributing to a better understanding of how a variation in performance becomes patterned as a sustained part of a routine.

This paper addresses the issue of granularity. The authors argue that in routine dynamics research granularity can be usefully defined by the number of actors, the variety of places/contexts, and the amount of time it takes to successfully accomplish an action. This is an important but often overlooked aspect of studying routines. It is important because different granularities imply different challenges and opportunities for performing and patterning. The authors propose a framework to distinguish between fine-, medium-, and coarse-grained actions, illustrate how different granularities have been used in existing routine dynamics studies, and discuss the implications for understanding routine dynamics. The authors conclude that granularity is a key construct that needs to be taken seriously and suggest a four-step procedure to help researchers establish and report on the granularity of actions in their research process.

In this study, the authors applied a routine dynamics perspective to examine how agile routines enhance efficiency while allowing flexibility in a world of flux. Hence, the authors conducted an ethnographic case study in the IT sector, following a scrum team. The findings indicate that agile routines create affordances for addressing temporal orientations toward the past, present, and future. Within the scrum framework, each routine has a designed temporal orientation, such that the planning meeting is oriented toward the future. Actors enacted this single, temporal orientation through temporal demarcating patterns. However, in some instances, other temporal orientations conflicted with the dominant one. In those cases, actors enacted temporal integrating patterns that embraced multiple temporal orientations. The authors contribute to research on routine dynamics by demonstrating how (1) temporal demarcating enables organizational benefits, (2) temporal integrating enables learning from and anticipating problems, and (3) temporal spaces emerge within routine enactments to solve problems at hand.

In this paper, the authors study artistic improvising from a routine dynamics perspective, with a specific interest in how the performance of improvising is strategically enacted. While this dynamic is difficult to empirically study in the case of live improvisation on stage, as we know it from jazz, the specific situation of the recording studio allows the authors to investigate the research puzzle in great detail. First, the authors show how the performance of one specific routine, which the authors identify as the looping routine, makes systematic improvising possible. The authors describe how looping enables improvising through mobilizing the digital equipment in the recording studio. The authors further discuss how the performance of the looping routine allows for individual musical performances in improvising, as well as their emergence into and assembling of a coherent song and record. During the looping routine, the authors find not only artistic improvising but also strategic enactment. Therefore, the authors show how performing the looping routine in the studio enables the strategic enactment of the emerging musical patterns by the musicians and the producer. Thereby, the artistic ideas and performances of the musicians and producers involved are competitively valued and strategically positioned in view of industry-specific contexts.

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.

Taking a process perspective, the authors observed that some improvisations lead to altered patterns in organizational routines, while other improvisations fade. Key to this discovery is the concept of routine paths, which suggests that improvisation can play a significant role in routine dynamics over time, particularly in relation to organizational change. Examining improvisation before, during, and after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, our longitudinal study traces the uptake of the Chinese social media platform WeChat at an Australian university. Staff improvised discreetly with WeChat to enact their communication routines in the years leading up to 2020 and then improvised openly after the onset of the crisis. The study explains how improvisation drove some situated actions to expand paths and led to patterning, which gradually redefined and reorganized how the university communicated with its students from China.

This paper revisits the foundational concepts of agency and action in routine dynamics to provide guidance for intentional and directional change in a world in flux from a routine dynamics perspective. First, the authors put forward a relational-temporal triad of agency as a ratio of the past, present, and future to outline what gives shape to individual action. Second, the authors combine with this a relational-temporal triad of routine as a ratio of patterning, performing, and projecting to outline what gives shape to social action. Based on this, the authors reconceptualize the dynamic of routines as an enfolding inside-out and outside-in process that expresses the relational constraints between the intentionality of individual action and the directionality of social action. In managing a world in flux toward desirable futures, routines – as temporal structures for carrying out organizational work – need to be able to carry some degree of continuity to bring about change in fulfilling a desired and identified direction. The authors identify in-tension-less, in-tension-al, and in-tension-ful as three different degrees of intentionality in individual action and continuing, renewing, and transforming as the spectrum of a continuum of directionality in social action for routine change. Using time to bring in a fully relational understanding of agency and action in routine dynamics, the authors render the complexities of structure-agency and continuity-change dualities clearer and reveal their otherwise latent properties. This more complete picture of routine dynamics would allow for more intentional organizational routine change forward when facing significant environmental and social challenges in a world of flux.