Jennifer Howard-Grenville

The Persistence of Flexible Organizational Routines: The Role of Agency and Organizational Context

Once regarded as stable and inflexible, organizational routines are increasingly seen as capable of being adapted to the situation at hand and a potentially important source of endogenous change in organizations. This paper considers why routines that are performed flexibly may nonetheless persist over time. Drawing on data from participant observation of a high-tech manufacturing company, I identify factors that contribute to both the flexibility and persistence of a routine. First, individuals and groups approach routines with different intentions and orientations, suggesting that agency shapes particular routine performances. Second, routine performances are embedded in an organizational context that, while it may not restrict the flexible use of a routine, may constrain its ongoing adaptation. Finally, accounting for the relative power of individuals sheds light on the interaction between agency and context in routine performance and explains why the actions of some individuals, but not others, can change routines. This paper draws on recent work that conceptualizes routines as ongoing accomplishments, and it extends it by identifying how actors and contexts shape both individual performances of routines and contribute to their persistence or change over time.

Routines Revisited: Exploring the Capabilities and Practice Perspectives

Organizational routines, repetitive patterns of interdependent organizational actions, have been investigated through the lens of capabilities, rooted in organizational economics, and the lens of practice, grounded in organization theory. The former approach emphasizes the “what” or “why,” while the latter emphasizes the “how.” In this review, we summarize both of these literatures and explore recent empirical studies in each stream, identifying common themes. In particular, we compare and contrast how each perspective incorporates the effects of individual actors, tacit knowledge, ambidexterity, and context specificity. We find that the two streams of work have distinct trajectories and strengths, but elements of each can be complementary to developing a more holistic understanding of organizational routines.

Inside the “Black Box”: How Organizational Culture and Subcultures Inform Interpretations and Actions on Environmental Issues

Companies do not respond identically when faced with similar environmental issues, confounding research that looks only at external influences on corporate environmental practice. In this article, the author explores the role of internal factors, specifically an organizations culture and subcultures, in shaping a companys interpretations and actions on environmental issues. Organizational culture influences how an organizations members define, or “set,” problems and the strategies they draw on to solve such problems. Drawing from a 9-month ethnographic study of a high-tech manufacturer, the author finds that the existence of multiple subcultures gives rise to divergent interpretations and strategies for action for environmental issues and that the relative power of the subcultures influences which interpretations and strategies for action are ultimately adopted. Differences between subcultures and the nature of the relationships between them can explain some of the variation in attention and action observed as organizations address issues of environmental protection.

The Evolution of Facilitated Industrial Symbiosis

While much work has been done on the conditions surrounding the emergence and establishment of industrial symbiosis (IS), new attention is being paid to understanding the evolution of IS over time. We demonstrate empirically how a new, facilitated IS initiative developed and evolved over an 8‐year period. We explore its network evolution by considering how the facilitators actions enabled and precluded two fundamental network processes - serendipitous and goal‐directed processes. We discuss implications for a more generalized theory of IS development by exploring why and how different evolutionary trajectories may unfold.

Liminality as Cultural Process for Cultural Change

This paper offers a revised understanding of intentional cultural change. In contrast to prevailing accounts, we suggest that such change can take place in the absence of initiating jolts, may be infused in everyday organizational life, and led by insiders who need not hold hierarchical power. Drawing on data from field studies and in-depth interviews, we develop a model of cultural change in which everyday occurrences such as meetings or workshops are constructed symbolically as “liminal” phenomena, bracketed from yet connected to everyday action in the organization. The construction of these occurrences as liminal illuminates the symbolic realm, creating possibilities for people to experiment with new cultural resources and invite different interpretations that hold potential for altering the cultural order. Our analyses contribute to the literature on culture by developing liminality, a process that brings forward the symbolic and invites recombination, as a cultural explanation of cultural change, to complement prevailing political or social structural explanations. We discuss implications and boundary conditions for this type of intentional cultural change.

Blind Dates and Arranged Marriages: Longitudinal Processes of Network Orchestration

Using longitudinal qualitative and network data capturing five years of evolution of an interorganizational network, this paper explores network orchestration – the process of assembling and developing an interorganizational network. In particular, we analyze shifts in the network orchestrator’s actions and the network’s structure and composition. We find that an orchestrator builds the capacity to assemble a network over time through the accumulation of resources and specialized expertise. However, as the network develops, an orchestrator faces an evolving set of dilemmas arising from the need to demonstrate value for various members and audiences. To resolve these dilemmas, orchestrators may shift their actions, moving from initially encouraging serendipitous encounters between network members (“blind dates”) to increasingly selecting members and more closely influencing their interactions (“arranging marriages”). We discuss implications of our findings for a processual understanding of orchestrated network assembly and growth.

Facilitating regional industrial symbiosis: Network growth in the UK’s National Industrial Symbiosis Programme

In the years since the discovery of Kalundborg’s long-lived network of resource exchanges, industrial symbiosis, and its potential for reducing the environmental impact of industrial activity on a local or regional scale, has been the subject of intense interest. Industrial symbiosis is defined as the enlistment of geographically proximate facilities in the “physical exchange of materials, energy, water, and by-products” (Chertow, 2000: 314). While some industrial symbiosis occurs between firms that are closely co-located, such as those in the same industrial park (see Chapters 4 and 6), other efforts to develop industrial symbiosis are undertaken on regional geographic scales. This chapter considers regional-scale industrial symbiosis, and, in particular, the development of a network of industrial symbiosis facilitated by a single brokering organization.

The incompatibility of knowledge regimes: consequences of the material world for cross-domain work

In this paper, we argue that successful integration of knowledge across work domains in the short-term can mask the generation of long-term consequences. We explore a setting, the introduction of environmental considerations into semiconductor manufacturing, where the eventual adoption of common measurement artifacts and associated practices enabled knowledge integration, but failed to address significant underlying consequences. Drawing from observational, interview, and archival data we develop an understanding of the work practices of the Tech and EnviroTech groups as structured by the material world and broader collective conventions. We introduce the concept of knowledge regime to outline the differences in knowledge across these work domains. More specifically, we find that differences in the causal specificity and developmental time horizon of knowledge and the measurement artifacts that result contribute to the relative power of one knowledge regime over another. Understanding these sources of incompatibility provides insight into the design requirements of information systems as boundary objects for knowledge integration, but also specifies the potential limits to any design effort.

Encouraging Trade at the Boundary of Organizational Culture and Institutional Theory

In this essay, we reflect on the contributions to this dialogue. We focus on highlighting opportunities for deepening our understanding of cultural phenomena and institutions through work on the border between the two theories. Two avenues are promising: deepening our understandings of process in order to better explain cultural and institutional dynamics and attending to (surprising) levels of analysis such as local institutions and global cultures. The contributors to this dialogue have provided examples of the potential benefits gained through work at the borders of organizational culture and institutional theory, and in so doing have begun to answer some of the questions that instigated this exchange, suggesting paths forward, and we hope, instigating exchange.

Cultural Molding, Shielding, and Shoring at Oilco: The Role of Culture in the Integration of Routines

We explore how organizational culture shapes an organization’s integration and enactment of an external routine that is not a cultural fit. Attending to employees’ use of culture as a repertoire of strategies of action, we found that the use of familiar cultural strategies of action shaped the routine’s artifacts and expectations even before it was performed, a process we call cultural molding. Subsequently, employees drew differently on cultural strategies of action as they performed the routine, generating patterns of workarounds or hindered performances. In response to these patterns, they undertook additional cultural work to either shield their workarounds and protect them from scrutiny or shore up hindered performances. We contribute to the routine dynamics literature by highlighting the effortful cultural work involved in integrating coveted routines, furthering our understanding of routines as truces and the embeddedness of routines.