Research in the Sociology of Organizations · Volume 88 · 2024
How do organizations remain stable enough to coordinate while continuously adapting in a world of ongoing change?
Mahringer, C. A., Pentland, B. T., Renzl, B., Sele, K., & Spee, P. (2024). Routine dynamics: Organizing in a world in flux. In C. A. Mahringer, B. T. Pentland, B. Renzl, K. Sele, & P. Spee (Eds.), Routine Dynamics: Organizing in a World in Flux (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 88, pp. 1–15). Emerald Publishing. 10.1108/S0733-558X20240000088001
Organizations depend on recurring ways of working, yet the conditions surrounding those activities never remain completely stable. Technologies change, crises disrupt established practices, new actors enter organizations, priorities shift, and people continually adapt what they do. This creates a fundamental organizational problem: how can recognizable patterns of action persist while the organization itself remains in motion?
The editorial approaches this problem through organizational routines. Rather than treating routines as fixed rules or mindless repetition, it conceptualizes them as ongoing, effortful accomplishments that can produce both stability and change. This process perspective makes organizational routines relevant to broader questions of adaptation, resilience, innovation, strategy, organizational learning, and continuous change.
The editorial asks: What does a process view of organizational routines reveal about organizing in a world in flux, and which research questions become visible when we focus on temporality, improvisation, process multiplicity, power and political dynamics, and scale?
As the introduction to Volume 88 of Research in the Sociology of Organizations, the editorial synthesizes the contributions of the volume and develops a forward-looking research agenda. It organizes the papers around five themes: temporality, improvisation, process and multiplicity, power and political dynamics, and scale. Across these themes, the editorial connects close analysis of everyday organizational action with broader questions about change, innovation, agility, grand challenges, technology, and organizational transformation.
In this editorial, we present an overview of the papers featured in this volume, all centered around the theme of ‘Routine Dynamics: organizing in a world in flux’. Recognizing the omnipresence of flux in organizational life, we identify key themes that emerged across the papers. These encompass temporality, improvisation, process and multiplicity, power and political dynamics, and scale. We elucidate the significance of each theme in the context of Routine Dynamics, highlight the advancements made by the respective papers in this volume, and underscore questions that warrant further exploration.
The editorial shows why recurring organizational practices should not be understood as the opposite of change, but as one of the places where stability, adaptation, and transformation are continuously produced.
Organizational routines are repetitive and recognizable, but they are also emergent accomplishments that require continuous effort. A process perspective therefore replaces the simple opposition between routine and change with a more dynamic question: how do recurring patterns remain recognizable while their performances continually adapt?
The volume highlights five lenses for understanding change in recurring work: temporality, improvisation, process multiplicity, power and political dynamics, and scale. Together they show that adaptation depends not only on formal redesign but also on timing, local improvisation, evolving possible paths, competing interests, and the level at which organizational action is examined.
Routine Dynamics starts from concrete actions but raises questions that reach far beyond individual routines. The editorial shows how recurring patterns of work can connect to organizational capabilities, innovation, agility, strategy, technology, power relations, and grand challenges. Understanding these connections requires attention to both fine-grained situated action and broader temporal and spatial scales.
The editorial positions organizational routines as a useful bridge across process theory, practice theory, organizational change, improvisation, temporality, power, innovation, agility, and resilience. Its five-part research agenda encourages scholars to examine not only whether routines change, but how time, possible action paths, political dynamics, and analytical scale shape that change.
It also opens connections to emerging research questions. The discussion of technology asks how increasingly technology-populated routines, including routines involving artificial intelligence, may alter improvisation. The discussion of scale asks how situated actions become connected to larger phenomena such as capabilities, innovation, agility, and grand challenges.
Managers should not assume that routines merely resist change. Recurring ways of working can be important resources for adaptation because people continuously adjust their performances to changing circumstances. The practical challenge is therefore not simply to eliminate routines, but to understand which patterns should remain recognizable and where room for variation and improvisation is valuable.
The framework also suggests several questions for organizational change: Are teams working with incompatible temporal rhythms? Which improvisations become durable changes? Which possible ways of working are expanding or disappearing? Whose interests shape the resulting patterns? And do local changes remain isolated, or do they connect to broader organizational capabilities and strategic concerns?
