Applying organizational routines in analyzing the behavior of organizations

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2007.04.002Get rights and content

Abstract

The concept of organizational routine can foster our understanding of the behavior of organizations and of organizational change [Nelson, R.R., Winter, S.G., 1982. An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, Cambridge; March, J.G., Simon, H.A., 1958. Organizations. Blackwell, Oxford (1993); Cyert, R.M., March, J.G., 1963. A Behavioral Theory of the Firm. Blackwell, Oxford (1992)], but since empirical studies employing organizational routines as analytical perspective are still relatively rare, how to conduct such an analysis and what are its benefits is not yet fully evident. We wish to shed light on how employing routines contributes to understanding the behavior of organizations and to demonstrate the potential of such analysis. The empirical analysis of the product development process at an engineering centre shows that using organizational routines presents advantages over alternative analytical approaches. The paper also contributes to shed light on how to fruitfully employ an organizational routines perspective in analyzing the behavior of organizations, providing the foundation for further empirical work.

Introduction

Understanding the behavior and change of organizations was one of the key motivations in introducing the concept of organizational routines (Simon, 1947, March and Simon, 1958, Cyert and March, 1963, Nelson and Winter, 1982). More recently, organizational routines have also been posited as a useful focus in analyzing how work is carried out in organizations (Hutchins, 1991, Pentland, 1995, Orlikowski, 2000, Barley and Kunda, 2001, Pentland, 2003a, Pentland, 2003b) and in showing how organizations change their operations (Feldman, 2000, Winter and Szulanski, 2001, Zollo and Winter, 2002, Feldman and Pentland, 2003). Other theoretical frameworks and approaches to empirical analysis of organizational behavior and change do, of course, exist, so why choose organizational routines as analytical perspective?

To start with, routines are ubiquitous in organizations (see the empirical literature reviewed in Becker, 2004), as well as an integral part of their daily operation. A large part of the work carried out in organizations is accomplished in routinized ways. In order to understand an organization and its behavior, analyzing its routines thus seems an appropriate starting point since they capture systematic and endogenous (rather than exogenous or one-off) performance drivers, and what can be considered typical for an organization. Moreover, routines play an important role in organizational learning and memory, and contribute to efficiency induced by such learning (Argote and Epple, 1990). Accordingly, using organizational routines means to be able to capture knowledge- and learning-related aspects and their effects.

The potential of organizational routines as analytical perspective has not yet been fully unlocked. Empirical studies of organizations focused on routines are still relatively rare (for some examples, see Cohen and Bacdayan, 1994, Pentland and Rueter, 1994, Knott and McKelvey, 1999, Feldman, 2000, Feldman, 2003, Narduzzo et al., 2000, Edmondson et al., 2001, Winter and Szulanski, 2001, Szulanski and Winter, 2002). Furthermore, the question of how to operationalize organizational routines has turned out to be more than trivial, making the task more difficult (recently, a number of papers on the topic have been published; see Pentland, 2003a, Pentland, 2003b, Becker et al., 2005 and the articles in the special section of Industrial and Corporate Change 2005, vol. 14 n̊ 5). Finally, precisely what the benefits are from such an analysis is yet not fully evident, mainly due to a lack of empirical studies.

While previous empirical studies employing an organizational routines approach have tackled specific research questions about organizations, we explore how using the analytical perspective of organizational routines contributes to understanding the behavior of organizations and show how to carry out such an analysis, thus closing a gap in the literature. The paper is structured as follows. It first briefly introduces the notion of organizational routines. The case study is presented in Section 3. Sections 4 Analysis, 5 Discussion: the advantages of the organizational routines concept in analyzing the behavior of organizations explore the contribution of organizational routines in explaining the behavior of organizations, thus answering the research question. Section 6 presents conclusions.

Section snippets

Organizational routines

Three definitions of organizational routines can be found in the literature: (i) behavior patterns (recurrent interaction patterns), (ii) rules (standard operating procedures, heuristics, etc.) and (iii) dispositions.

  • (i)

    Currently, most scholars think of organizational routines as repeated behavior patterns for accomplishing tasks. For example, consider the task of taking an order by phone, which is often accomplished by using a particular sequence of phrases in a phone conversation between a call

Method

Current literature shows that existing research does not fully address how organizational routines can be operationalized so that they can contribute to the understanding of organizational behavior through empirical studies. In this respect, we intend to offer both an empirical and an analytical contribution. These goals, the nature of the research question and of the gaps we found in the literature led us to choose the case study methodology (Eisenhardt, 1989, Pettigrew, 1990, Yin, 1994,

Analysis

The research question tackled in this paper is ‘What does employing routines as analytical perspective contribute to understanding the behavior of organizations?’ In the analysis presented in the previous section, employing organizational routines as an analytical perspective has allowed us to do a number of things.

Discussion: the advantages of the organizational routines concept in analyzing the behavior of organizations

Our analysis thus far has documented what we can understand when using the concept of organizational routines to analyze how organizations accomplish tasks. We have seen that such an analysis goes a long way in understanding the performance generated in accomplishing tasks. In the remainder of this section, we argue that this analytical perspective can make even more contributions. We further argue those contributions are unique to the concept of organizational routines and go beyond the

Conclusion

Using organizational routines as analytical perspective to examine how the virtual packaging task is carried out at an engineering centre has been helpful in uncovering important details that would otherwise have remained largely hidden to the firm's management, particularly in contrasting how tasks are carried out in practice with how they should be carried out. On the basis of the ‘governance gap’ analysis, we were able to identify the causes of certain performance effects. The examples are

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Thorbjørn Knudsen, two anonymous referees, and participants of the 2005 Academy of Management Meetings and the 2nd International Routines Conference, Nice 2005, for helpful comments and discussion of preceding versions of this paper, and to Pasquale Salvatore for research assistance. All remaining errors and omissions are our own responsibility.

References (46)

  • G.M. Hodgson

    Reclaiming habit for institutional economics

    Journal of Economic Psychology

    (2004)
  • G.M. Hodgson et al.

    The complex evolution of a simple traffic convention: the functions and implications of habit

    Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization

    (2004)
  • A.M. Knott et al.

    Nirvana efficiency: a comparative test of residual claims and routines

    Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization

    (1999)
  • P.S. Adler et al.

    Behind the learning curve: a sketch of the learning process

    Management Science

    (1991)
  • P.S. Adler et al.

    Flexibility versus efficiency? A case study of model changovers in the Toyota production system

    Organization Science

    (1999)
  • L. Argote et al.

    Learning curves in manufacturing

    Science

    (1990)
  • S.R. Barley et al.

    Bringing work back in

    Organization Science

    (2001)
  • M.C. Becker

    Organizational routines: a review of the literature

    Industrial and Corporate Change

    (2004)
  • M.C. Becker et al.

    Applying organizational routines in understanding organizational change

    Industrial and Corporate Change

    (2005)
  • M. Cohen et al.

    Organizational routines are stored as procedural memory: evidence from a laboratory study

    Organization Science

    (1994)
  • R.M. Cyert et al.

    A Behavioral Theory of the Firm

    (1963)
  • G. Dosi et al.

    Introduction: the nature and dynamics of organisational capabilities

  • A.C. Edmondson et al.

    Disrupted routines: team learning and new technology implementation in hospitals

    Administrative Science Quarterly

    (2001)
  • K.M. Eisenhardt

    Building theories from case study research

    Academy of Management Review

    (1989)
  • K.M. Eisenhardt et al.

    Theory building from cases: opportunities and challenges

    Academy of Management Journal

    (2007)
  • M.S. Feldman

    Organizational routines as a source of continuous change

    Organization Science

    (2000)
  • M.S. Feldman

    A performative perspective on stability and change in organizational routines

    Industrial and Corporate Change

    (2003)
  • M.S. Feldman et al.

    Reconceptualizing organizational routines as a source of flexibility and change

    Administrative Science Quarterly

    (2003)
  • J.R. Hackman

    Learning more by crossing levels: evidence from airplanes, hospitals, and orchestras

    Journal of Organizational Behavior

    (2003)
  • M. Hammer et al.

    Reengineering the Corporation—A Manifesto for Business Revolution

    (1993)
  • C. Heath et al.

    Big-B versus Big-O: what is organizational about organizational behavior?

    Journal of Organizational Behavior

    (2001)
  • G.M. Hodgson

    The concept of a routine

  • G.M. Hodgson et al.

    The firm as an interactor: firms as vehicles for habits and routines

    Journal of Evolutionary Economics

    (2004)
  • Cited by (46)

    • Writing plans instead of eliminating risks: How can written safety artefacts reduce safety?

      2022, Safety Science
      Citation Excerpt :

      Routines are reflected in a range of activities from hiring employees, procuring new inventory items and manufacturing products (Nelson and Winter, 1982, p. 14), through to safety routines like donning protective equipment (Bruns, 2009) or writing emergency plans. Routines are the “basic components” of behavioural patterns in organisations (Becker and Zirpoli, 2008, p. 775; Feldman and Pentland, 2003). Routines help organisations to control and coordinate performance (Becker, 2004), allowing them to draw on pre-existing solutions for recurring problems rather than developing novel solutions each time.

    • A level-of-analysis issue in resource consumption and environmental behavior research: A theoretical and empirical contradiction

      2020, Journal of Environmental Management
      Citation Excerpt :

      While routines could be studied as a whole (with a focus on their inputs and outputs), studying the internal dynamics of the routine, namely the relationship and interplay between the ostentative and performative aspects of the routine, becomes an opportunity to generate rich insights. Becker and Zirpoli (2008) use this approach to perform a multi-level analysis of tasks within an engineering firm to highlight important details of organisational behavior and governance that would have remained largely hidden. Important in their analysis is the recognition of the individual and group levels, and the necessity to develop concepts that describe behavioral processes at each level so that cross-level interdependencies can be appreciated.

    • Mind the gap: a qualitative approach to assessing why different sub-cultures within high-risk industries interpret safety rule gaps in different ways

      2017, Safety Science
      Citation Excerpt :

      However, much of the research, across many different industries, has found that rules as imagined and enacted often drift apart creating a gap (Reason, 1990, 1997; Dekker, 2005), or are never aligned in the first place. Examples include: higher education (Feldman, 2003; Feldman and Pentland, 2003), car production (Becker and Zirpoli, 2008), seafaring (Knudsen, 2009), railway (Grote et al., 2009; Weichbrodt, 2013), firefighting (Weick, 1993), nuclear power plants (Bourrier, 1998), petroleum industry (Antonsen et al., 2008), and hospitals (McDonald et al., 2005; Wilhelm, 2014). Enactment of rules, as prescribed through written routines, is crucial to organizations, failure to do so can lead to poorer coordination and performance, in some cases accidents, and in the worst-case, death (Wilhelm, 2014).

    View all citing articles on Scopus

    Authors’ names are in alphabetical order because they have contributed to the paper equally. For purposes of formal assignment, Markus Becker wrote Section 2. Francesco Zirpoli wrote Section 3. Sections 1, 4, 5 and 6 were written jointly.

    View full text