Applying organizational routines in analyzing the behavior of organizations☆
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.
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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.