Martha Feldman was recognized at the Distinguished Scholar of 2015 by the OMT Division at the AOM in Vancouver, CA. This was her presentation.

1. Great honor.
Many people
to thank!

2. Looking into the Arrow: Learning
from Routines
Martha S. Feldman
University of California, Irvine

3. 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

4. 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

5. Routine as arrow between inputs
and outcomes
Routine
I
n
p
u
t
s
Outcomes

6. 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

7. Routines Dynamics: Focusing on the
Arrow
Performative
Aspects
Ostensive
Aspects

8. Performative
Aspects
Ostensive
Aspects
Material Artifacts
e.g., SOPs
Differentiating SOPs and written rules from routines:
Pentland and Feldman, 2005

9. Performative
Aspects
Ostensive
Aspects
Material
Artifacts
Integrating materiality in routine
dynamics depicted in D’Adderio 2011

10. 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

11. 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.

12. Material
Artifacts
Effortful Accomplishment

13. 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

14. Material
Artifacts
Emergent Accomplishment

15. 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.

16. 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.

17. 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

18. Multiplicity

19. 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.

20. 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.

21. 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

22. Relationality

23. 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.

24. 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).

25. 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.

26. 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

27. 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.

28. Thank You