Anja Danner-Schröder

Unravelling the Motor of Patterning Work: Toward an Understanding of the Microlevel Dynamics of Standardization and Flexibility

This paper examines how routine patterns are recognized as either stable or flexible and which mechanisms are enacted to maintain this patterning work. We address this question through an ethnographic case study analyzing how a catastrophe management organization enacts routines in a highly dynamic setting. Our findings first of all reveal that patterns described by the participants as either stable or flexible were nevertheless both performed differently in each iteration of the routine. Our microlevel analysis shows that to enact patterns that participants perceive as stable, participants had to carry out specific aligning and prioritizing activities that lock-stepped performances. In contrast, participants perceive patterns as flexible when they enact specific selecting and recombining activities. Building on these observations, we add to extant routine literature by (1) differentiating between stability, standardization, flexibility, and change of routines and by (2) providing new insights on mindfulness in accounting for the microlevel activities enacted to orient toward a pattern that enhances standardization or flexibility in dynamic contexts. Moreover, (3) our insights point to the centrality of knowing for the enactment and recognition of patterning work.

Managing the Digital Transformation: Preparing Cities for the Future

This chapter examines how organizations cope with and handle the temporal mode of the future in the light of digital transformation. Despite the importance of organizing for the future, we still lack an understanding of which processes and practices organizations use to manage the future. To this end, one of the most pervasive challenges in today’s organizational landscape is that of coping with the issues imposed by the ever-increasing need to face digitalization. Actors are able to reveal the practices and processes used to actually manage digital transformation, venturing beyond accounts that merely sketch the future as a digitalized, imagined state. We address this challenge through an explorative in-depth case study, observing how a set of innovation networks in Germany developed new city management concepts in a collaborative fashion to generate an intelligent and sustainable city of the future. Our analysis shows that innovation networks offer an at least partially generalizable account of how to engage different actors to collaborate on the challenges of the future. Building on these observations, we add to the extant literature on organizing for the future by (1) revealing practices and processes used to actually manage the digital transformation, and (2) providing a phase framework that offers an at least partially generalizable account of how to engage different actors to collaborate on the challenges of digitalization. Moreover, (3) our insights focus, at least indirectly, attention on cities as informative urban laboratories that engage with digitalization, offering an alternative setting to study when compared to the more usual settings of digitalization efforts, such as companies or crowds.

Focusing on and Backgrounding Events Simultaneously: The Past–Present–Future Relationship of the Great East Japan Earthquake

This article examines how events from the past, present, and future form into event structures over time. This question is addressed by investigating the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011 until the fifth anniversary in 2016. This allowed to analyze different events over time. The findings reveal that events can be used in two different ways. One process was meant to focus on events, whereas the other one backgrounded events. These different ways to use events revealed four different mechanisms of how event structures can be formed. Moreover, each mechanism has its own idiosyncratic temporal orientation toward either a nostalgic past, imagined future, “better” future or critical past. Second, the article contributes that the paradoxical ways of focusing on an event and backgrounding the very same event need to be embraced simultaneously to enable a greater sense of wholeness. Last, the article reveals multiple temporalities within and across temporal trajectories.

It’s All about Timing: Toward a Relational Understanding of Time in Routine Performance

The present paper examines the role of time in routine performance. We argue that time is a central actor shaping the dynamics of organizational routines, whilst at the same time, time only becomes constituted in relation to routines. Emerging research on temporal structuring has pointed to the active role of people in shaping time, whereas research on routine dynamics explores how routines unfold over time. Yet little is known how actors build on routines for shaping time and how time shapes the dynamics of routines on a micro-level. Drawing on an ethnographic study conducted at a firefighting unit operating in an urban environment, we elaborate on how routine participants actively make time by enacting specific routines and how time drives the pace and rhythm of routines. Building on an newly developed method that allows us to plot event time in relation to clock time, we find that actors enact specific routines for slowing down or speeding up the pace of routine performances whilst specific triggers me...