Reconceptualizing organizational routines as a source of flexibility and change.

In this paper, we challenge the traditional understanding of organizational routines as creating inertia in organizations. We adapt Latour's distinction between ostensive and performative to build a theory that explains why routines are a source of change as well as stability. The ostensive aspect of a routine embodies what we typically think of as the structure. The performative aspect embodies the specific actions, by specific people, at specific times and places, that bring the routine to life. We argue that the ostensive aspect enables people to guide, account for, and refer to specific performances of a routine, and the performative aspect creates, maintains, and modifies the ostensive aspect of the routine. We argue that the relationship between ostensive and performative aspects of routines creates an on-going opportunity for variation, selection, and retention of new practices and patterns of action within routines and allows routines to generate a wide range of outcomes, from apparent stability to considerable change. This revised ontology of organizational routines provides a better explanation of empirical findings than existing theories of routines and has implications for a wide range of organizational theories.

Organizational routines are a central feature of human organizations and an explanatory mechanism in many of our most widely accepted theories. Since the concept was introduced by Stene (1940), organizational routines have been regarded as the primary means by which organizations accomplish much of what they do (March and Simon, 1958; Cyert and March, 1963; Thompson, 1967; Nelson and Winter, 1982). While recognized as an essential aspect of organized work, organizational routines are also a well-known source of inertia (Hannan and Freeman, 1983), inflexibility (Weiss and Ilgen, 1985; Gersick and Hackman, 1990), and even mindlessness (Ashforth and Fried, 1988). This understanding of organizational routines has deep roots in social theory, as reflected in writings on bureaucracy (Merton, 1940; Weber, 1947; Selznick, 1949; Gouldner, 1954; Blau, 1955). Stability, or "regularity and continuity," is a defining feature of bureaucracies (Stinchcombe, 1959: 184). Organizational rules and routines have been seen as an important source of accountability and political protection as well as a source of stagnation (Weber, 1947; Crozier, 1964; Kaufman, 1977; Hummel, 1987). For better or worse, routines enable bureaucracies to organize expertise and exercise power efficiently.

While routines can be a source of inertia and inflexibility, they can also be an important source of flexibility and change. We are not simply referring to meta-routines, routines for changing routines (Adler, Goldoftas, and Levine, 1999). Many organizations employ meta-routines, such as continuous improvement and total quality management (Hackman and Wageman, 1995), as a means to generate change. Metaroutines have been theorized as a mechanism for generating "dynamic capabilities" (Teece and Pisano, 1994; Tranfield and Smith, 1998). We refer here to something more basic: the inherent capability of every organizational routine to generate change, merely by its ongoing performance.

The idea that routines can change is not entirely new. Cyert and March (1963) referred to this as adaptation; Nelson and Winter (1982) called it mutation. Change in organizational routines is especially evident when there is a crisis (Gersick and Hackman, 1990), in the early stages of establishing an organization (Naduzzo, Rocco, and Warglien, 2000), or in areas of ambiguity (Miner, 1990). But routines also change in old, established organizations in stable environments (Feldman, 2000). This has led some authors to suggest that, contrary to the received wisdom, routines can be sources of both organizational flexibility (Pentland and Rueter, 1994) and organizational change (Miner, 1990; Feldman, 2000). To explain these observations, a new understanding of organizational routines is needed. The problem is not that existing definitions are erroneous or inadequate. There is considerable agreement in the literature that organizational routines can be defined as repetitive, recognizable patterns of interdependent actions, carried out by multiple actors. We accept this definition, but if we analyze it seriously, in light of recent empirical studies and current social theory, it leads us to a new ontology of the underlying phenomenon.

This ontology builds on the idea that routines, like other social phenomena, embody a duality of structure and agency (Giddens, 1984; Bourdieu, 1977, 1990). An organizational routine consists of two related parts. One part embodies the abstract idea of the routine (structure), while the other part consists of the actual performances of the routine by specific people, at specific times, in specific places (agency). Each part is necessary, but neither part alone is sufficient to explain (or even describe) the properties of the phenomenon we refer to as "organizational routines." Understanding the interactions between these two aspects is necessary for us to appreciate the potential of organizational routines as a source of change.

In contrast to traditional views of routines, which emphasize structure, our framework brings agency, and therefore, subjectivity and power back into the picture. Agency involves the ability to remember the past, imagine the future, and respond to present circumstances (Emirbayers and Mische, 1998). While organizational routines are commonly perceived as reenacting the past, the performance of routines can also involve adapting to contexts that require either idiosyncratic or ongoing changes and reflecting on the meaning of actions for future realities. While organizational routines are commonly portrayed as promoting cognitive efficiency, they also entail self-reflective and other-reflective behavior. We argue that organizational routines consist of the resulting performances and the understandings of these performances. As a result of the movement among these aspects, organizational routines are inherently capable of endogenous change. They can still be defined as repetitive, recognizable patterns of interdependent actions, but they cannot be understood as static, unchanging objects. To clarify our discussion of the complex phenomenon represented by organizational routines, we refer throughout to one example of such a routine that is familiar to most of us, the academic "hiring" routine.

ORGANIZATIONAL ROUTINES: A COMPLEX PHENOMENON