Great honor. Many people

to thank!

Looking into the Arrow: Learning from Routines

Martha S. FeldmanUniversity of California, Irvine

Organizational Routines?

• Organizational routines are “repetitive, recognizable patterns of interdependent actions, carried out by multiple actors” (Feldman and Pentland, 2003: 95)

• Routines accomplish organizational work– Administrative routines – e.g., hiring, budgeting– Operational routines – e.g., producing goods and

services

Routines as Processes

• Routines have been recognized as critical processes that connect organizational inputs with organizational outcomes– Behavioral Theory of the Firm (Cyert and March,

1963): routines as programs– Evolutionary Economics (Nelson and Winter,

1982): routines as organizational genes– Routine Dynamics (Feldman and Pentland, 2003)

routines as generative systems

Routine as arrow between inputs and outcomes

Routine

Inputs

Outcomes

Routine Dynamics - Going inside the Arrow

• Feldman and Pentland – 2003 • Routines are practices that have performative

aspects and ostensive aspects– Performative = specific actions taken at specific

times and places– Ostensive = enacted patterns– These aspects are mutually constitituted

Routines Dynamics: Focusing on the Arrow

Performative Aspects

Ostensive Aspects

Performative Aspects

Ostensive Aspects

Material Artifactse.g., SOPs

Differentiating SOPs and written rules from routines: Pentland and Feldman, 2005

Performative Aspects

Ostensive Aspects

Material Artifacts

Integrating materiality in routine dynamics depicted in D’Adderio 2011

Stability and Change in Routines

• Routine dynamics is about the internal dynamics of routines that produce both stability and change. – Effortful accomplishments – doing different things

to produce the same pattern– Emergent accomplishments – doing the same

thing produces change

Routines are effortful accomplishments

• Focus is on the work done to recreate and conform to “the same” pattern– E.g., performances of hiring routines are adapted

to the circumstances of the hire– Performances of talks are adapted to the

circumstances of the talk• The routine remains recognizably “the same”

even though it may have to be performed differently.

Material Artifacts

Effortful Accomplishment

Routines are emergent accomplishments

• Focus is on how flexibility in performance has the potential to change enacted patterns. – As we perform a routine differently, we discover

possibilities that that we may incorporate into the pattern.• The telephone/skype interview• Gender-neutral interviewing• Talks with powerpoint slides• New opportunities to cooperate

Material Artifacts

Emergent Accomplishment

Sources of Pattern Change

• Exogenous: Some changes in routines are caused by external/exogenous forces – e.g., technology or laws– Exogenous changes tend to be wide-spread and are

visible through statistical studies.• Endogenous: Some changes are caused by internal/

endogenous forces – e.g., just by doing the routine – Endogenous changes tend to be local and situated and

are more likely to be visible through ethnographic or other qualitative studies.

Endogeneity – internal forces of stability and change

• Routine dynamics focuses primarily on endogenous relationship between performance and pattern and how that relationship produces stability and change.

• Endogeneity is important to managing a specific organization at a specific time.– Even exogenously mandated change has to be enacted and

the relationship between performance and pattern affects how external forces (e.g., technology changes, legal mandates, etc.) are enacted in an organization.

– Edogeneity affects how organizations take advantage of internally generated possibilities.

Seeing into the arrow

• Introducing two (of many) concepts that underlie the particular process theorizing represented in routine dynamics.–Multiplicity – enables movement–Relationality – enables creating order

through movement

Multiplicity

Multiplicity• Simply: The world is made

of lots of different stuff.• Less colloquially: The social

world is enacted through many different actions.

• Multiplicity allows for movement.– Multiple identities, for

instance, allow us to move actions from one domain to another.

Multiplicity in Routines: Performances

• Routines entail multiple performances – a sequence of actions performed multiple times.

• Performances are made of multiple actions and constellations of actions involving multiple people.

Multiplicity in Routines: Patterns

• Routines entail multiple patterns.

• Patterns (what is connected to what) vary by point of view:– Different participants in a

routine – Participant and non-

participant (emic and etic)– Different points in time

Relationality

Relationality• The nature of the phenomenon

– object, idea, event, action – depends on the connections it is embedded in.

• Constrasts to substantialism in which the phenomenon has an intrinsic nature that is affected by context, which is separable.

• Enacting is the relationality of action and the pattern being enacted.

We say `The wind is blowing’, as if the wind were separate from its blowing, as if a wind could exist which did not blow (Elias, What is Sociology? 1978: 112).

Relationality of mutual constitution

• The wind is not separate from the wind blowing.

• Power is not something we have – it has to be enacted usually through other people.

• Organization requires acts of organizing.

• Identity must be enacted and re-enacted.

Relationality in Routines• Relationality of routines: There

is no routine separate from the multiple enactings of it.– Descriptions, traces and espoused

routines must be enacted to become routines.

• Relationality within routines: Performances and patterns are mutually constituted– Performative and ostensive are

aspects of routine - separable only analytically

– There are no performative routines or ostensive routines

Implications for Studying Social/Organizational Processes

• Taking multiplicity and relationality seriously:– Entails methods of study that do not favor

singularity or finality including ethnography, grounded theorizing, formal modeling, simulation.

– Implies a focus on opening conversations rather than on finding foundational answers.

• Routine dynamics provides an example of both how this work can be done and why it is worth it.

Thank You