Martha S. Feldman

University of California, Irvine | UCI · Department of Urban Planning and Public Policy

Over the last two decades, Routine Dynamics has emerged as an international research community that shares a particular approach to organizational phenomena. At the heart of this approach is an interest in examining the emergence, reproduction, replication and change of routines as recognizable patterns of actions. In contrast to other research com...

Over the last two decades, Routine Dynamics has emerged as an international research community that shares a particular approach to organizational phenomena. At the heart of this approach is an interest in examining the emergence, reproduction, replication and change of routines as recognizable patterns of actions. In contrast to other research com...

In this chapter, we shed light on bodies in the dynamics of routines. Though the body has just begun to be theorized in Routine Dynamics research, the body is, nonetheless, pervasive. We show how ubiquitous the bodies are in Routine Dynamics research by documenting the embodied orientation to and from performing, to and from patterns, and to and fr...

Over the last two decades, Routine Dynamics has emerged as an international research community that shares a particular approach to organizational phenomena. At the heart of this approach is an interest in examining the emergence, reproduction, replication and change of routines as recognizable patterns of actions. In contrast to other research com...

This chapter offers an introduction to Routine Dynamics as a particular approach to studying organizational phenomena. We provide a brief description of the genealogy of research on routines; starting with the work of the management scholar Fredrick Taylor (1911) and the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey (1922) at the beginning of the last century,...

Over the last two decades, Routine Dynamics has emerged as an international research community that shares a particular approach to organizational phenomena. At the heart of this approach is an interest in examining the emergence, reproduction, replication and change of routines as recognizable patterns of actions. In contrast to other research com...

This chapter deals with the role practice theory has played and can play in developing routine dynamics and the community of scholars associated with Routine Dynamics. It provides a short introduction to practice theory. It presents an analysis of how scholars in the field of Routine Dynamics relied on practice theory to build the foundation of the...

This chapter offers an introduction to Routine Dynamics as a particular approach to studying organizational phenomena. We provide a brief description of the genealogy of research on routines; starting with the work of the management scholar Fredrick Taylor (1911) and the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey (1922) at the beginning of the last century,...

In this chapter, we shed light on bodies in the dynamics of routines. Though the body has just begun to be theorized in Routine Dynamics research, the body is, nonetheless, pervasive. We show how ubiquitous the bodies are in Routine Dynamics research by documenting the embodied orientation "to" and "from" performing, "to" and "from" patterns, and "...

In research on process organization studies, the concept of multiplicity is widely used, but a fundamental confusion about what process multiplicity means persists. As a result, we miss some of the potential of this concept for understanding process dynamics and process change. In this paper, we define process multiplicity as a duality of ‘one’ and...

Researchers can expect to perform analytic actions repeatedly; that this iteration is required is a common observation. Yet, how researchers engage in iteration to progress their theorizing is not articulated. Our analysis provides new insight into what it means to iterate in the service of driving analysis. We examine iteration through the lens of...

Routine Dynamics, Defintion, Themes in the Special issue

This teaching case presents recurrent points of tension around resident representation in a community planning process: the Santa Centro Community Change Initiative. The case is relevant to current public policy, as outside funders ranging from private foundations to the national government increasingly focus their funding on community-based projec...

Nursing has a rich knowledge base with which to develop care models that can transform the ways health is promoted and valued. However, theory linking the environment domain of the nursing metaparadigm with the real-world environments where nurses practice and patients experience their health care is tenuous. Practice theory is used to foreground t...

This article is a theoretical contribution to reconsidering the boundaries that are central features of collaborative public management. We identify two contrasting ways of doing boundary work: one oriented to treating them as barriers that promote separation and the other to treating them as junctures that enable connecting. We describe three gene...

Objective: Our research explored how mental health care providers continued to work during and after Hurricane Katrina. Methods: We interviewed 32 practitioners working in the New Orleans mental health care community during and after Hurricane Katrina. Through qualitative data analysis, we developed three temporal periods of disruption: the evacuat...

This paper introduces a generative model of organizational routines and their change over time. The model demonstrates that variation and selective retention of patterns of action are necessary and sufficient to explain the features of organizational routines that are most relevant in relation to dynamic capabilities, such as formation, inertia, en...

Introduction The increasingly uncertain and fast-changing environments in which today's organizations operate call for a shift of attention from organizations—and organizational practices or routines—as fixed entities to the study of the distributed ( Hutchins 1995 ) and situated ( Suchman 1987 , Lave 1988 ) dynamics by which they emerge and are co...

This paper uses a practice perspective to study coordinating as dynamic activities that are continuously created and modified in order to enact organizational relationships and activities. It is based on the case of Servico, an organization undergoing a major restructuring of its value chain in response to a change in government regulation. In our...

CALL FOR PAPERS The increasingly uncertain and fast-changing environments in which today's organizations operate call for a shift of attention from organizations-and organizational practices or routines-as fixed entities to the study of the distributed (Hutchins 1995) and situated (Suchman 1987, Lave 1988) dynamics by which they emerge and are cons...

Objective: Our research explored how mental health care providers continued to work during and after Hurricane Katrina. Methods: We interviewed 32 practitioners working in the New Orleans mental health care community during and after Hurricane Katrina. Through qualitative data analysis, we developed three temporal periods of disruption: the evac...

H1) This chapter presents an overview of resourcing theory, comparing it with other perspectives such as resource dependence and the resource based view of the firm. After developing an understanding of the basic tenets of resourcing theory, the chapter goes on to explicate three mechanisms of resourcing in context that arise from recent empirical...

Preparedness and planning for disasters within communities is difficult to achieve in part because plans for organized responses do not fully provide for uncertainty and changing conditions over time. Research suggests that people draw on and adapt everyday practices to negotiate changing disruptions of the immediate and extended effects of disaste...

This paper describes the emerging field of practice theory as it is practiced in relation to organizational phenomena. We identify three approaches— empirical, theoretical, and philosophical— that relate to the what, the how, and the why of using a practice lens. We discuss three principles of the theoretical approach to practice and offer examples...

This article argues that participation and inclusion are independent dimensions of public engagement and elaborates the relationships of inclusion with deliberation and diversity. Inclusion continuously creates a community involved in defining and addressing public issues; participation emphasizes public input on the content of programs and policie...

This paper presents a framework for expanding opportunities to enhance connections across boundaries that are commonly experienced in public management: inside/outside organizational, expert/lay knowledge, temporal, and issue boundaries. In an analysis of vignettes from several public engagement efforts in Grand Rapids, Michigan, we find a range of...

Organizational routines are ubiquitous, yet their contribution to organizing has been underappreciated. Our longitudinal, inductive study traces the relationship between organizational routines and organizational schemata in a new research institution, Learning Lab Denmark. We show how trial-and-error learning can connect routines and schemata thro...

In retrospect, one of the most extraordinary features of the support from faculty was that they encouraged me to follow my interests rather than being concerned about making sure that I would contribute to enlarging their research agenda. I say, in retrospect, because it has only been in seeing how often graduate students are given limited options...

Performed throughout Europe during the 1700s, Italian heroic opera, or opera seria, was the century’s most significant musical art form, profoundly engaging such figures as Handel, Haydn, and Mozart. Opera and Sovereignty is the first book to address this genre as cultural history, arguing that eighteenth-century opera seria must be understood in...

Resources are generally considered important for the practice of management. Potential resources, however, have to be put into use in order to fulfill their potential. In this paper, we use ethnographic research on the city budgeting cycle in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to explore the process of putting potential resources into use to energize desired...

There is increasing interest among public managers and scholars of public management in the practice and theory of collaborative and inclusive policymaking and implementation (Healey 1997; Reich 1998; Denhardt and Denhardt 2000; Hajer and Wagenaar 2003; Innes and Booher 2003; Delli Carpini, Cook, and Jacobs 2004; Roberts 2004; O'Leary and Bingham 2...

T his paper uses a practice perspective to study coordinating as dynamic activities that are continuously created and modified in order to enact organizational relationships and activities. It is based on the case of Servico, an organization undergoing a major restructuring of its value chain in response to a change in government regulation. In our...

In this paper, we want to shift the attention of our scholarly community to the living condition of doubt and its underappreciated significance for the theorizing process. Drawing on Peirce's notion of abduction, we articulate the relationship between doubt and belief in the everyday imaginative work central to theorizing, and establish the role pl...

Using the example of a failed software implementation, we discuss the role of artifacts in shaping organizational routines. We argue that artifact-centered assumptions about design are not well suited to designing organizational routines, which are generative systems that produce recognizable, repetitive patterns of interdependent actions, carried...

This paper introduces the narrative network as a device for representing patterns of technology-in-use. The narrative network offers a novel conceptual vocabulary for the description of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and their relationship to organizational forms. The narrative network is a constructive synthesis of concepts from...

In this article, we focus on the role of the public manager in bringing about inclusion. While inclusion often implies public participation, we have observed that one of the challenges for public managers practicing inclusive management is the necessity of combining information and perspectives of three domains: the political, the technical, and th...

The authors engage structural and agentic perspectives to examine opportunities for deliberation and the purposeful role of managers in creating those opportunities. Drawing on actor-network theory as a way of understanding the process of structuring knowledge, this essay focuses on the continuous enactment and reenactment of networks of human and...

Organizational routines can be conceptualized as generative systems with internal structures and dynamics. In this paper, we propose three different ways that organizational routines can be approached as a unit of analysis. One option is to treat the entire routine as an undifferentiated 'black box'. A second option is to study particular parts of...

1 This has been a thoroughly collaborative process with all authors contributing substantially to the project.

In this paper I argue that understanding resources through a social practice perspective enables us to understand more about the role of resources in change. In particular, social practice theory enables us to view resources in context as mutable sources of energy rather than as stable things that are independent of context, and to analyze the reci...

In this article we show how an interpretative methodology of narrative analysis is beneficial for the study of public administration. We demonstrate the use and usefulness of a method for analyzing narratives that is based in concepts from classical rhetoric and semiotics. The method allows researchers to make more available the unstated, implicit...

In this paper, we challenge the traditional understanding of organizational routines as creating inertia in organizations. We adapt Latour's distinction between ostensive and performative to build a theory that explains why routines are a source of change as well as stability. The ostensive aspect of a routine embodies what we typically think of as...

This paper is about stability in organizational routines. It proposes a new explanation of stability, based on mindfulness rather than mindlessness. Traditional explanations of stability (or lack of change) in organizational routines suggest that organizational participants are not thinking about what they are doing, but repeating actions that they...

In 2001, the city of Grand Rapids, MI began a process to develop the first master plan for the city in nearly four decades. Rather than delegate the responsibility to a handful of city planners, the structure and growth of the new planning process and the content of the plan was determined through broad inclusion of individuals, neighborhood organi...

In this essay we explore the relationship between management practices and a basic governance dilemma: how to manage flexibly and accountably. The challenge is both practical and theoretical. Managers must respond flexibly to the changing demands and expectations of the public and the ever-changing nature of public problems, yet they must do so in...

No Abstract. Peer Reviewed http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/34845/1/1050_ftp.pdf

Governance structures constrain and enable the actions of public managers. Principal-agent theory has played a dominant role in our understanding of governance structures. This theory suggests that politicians create relatively static governance structures in a top-down fashion and hold man- agers accountable for mandated results. In other words, p...

Organizational routines are increasingly identified as an aspect of organizations that allows them to achieve the balance between adaptability and stability. We contribute to this discussion by showing that the connections that organizational routines make between people contribute to both stability and the ability to adapt. We argue that the conne...

Stories are an important part of organizational life that scholars have studied from many different perspectives. In this paper, we contribute a new way of exploring the meaning of stories. We use a concept from classical rhetoric, the enthymeme, to help reveal the particular underlying "logic" contained in the story form, and we show that the cons...

Participation and control are both necessary in a democracy. In the two main models of public management, control trumps participation. The traditional model, Managing for Process, relies on centralized authority over process and emphasizes rules and regulations. The newer model, Managing for Results, permits decentralized control over process but...

In this paper I claim that organizational routines have a great potential for change even though they are often perceived, even defined, as unchanging. I present descriptions of routines that change as participants respond to outcomes of previous iterations of a routine. Based on the changes in these routines I propose a performative model of organ...

New approaches to public management provide principles by which to organize the classroom as a case. In teaching public management one can enhance learning for practice by modeling, experimenting with, and reflecting upon the principles that one is teaching the students. The principles from the new ideas about public management that can be used to...

When people use electronic mail, they can communicate even when they are not physically or temporally proximate. Thus, it is not surprising that most studies report that the use of electronic mail increases organizational communication. In the study presented here, overall organizational communication declined as use of electronic mail increased. A...

Electronic communication can either facilitate or sabotage decision-making contexts. This article formulates recommendations about when and how to use electronic communication to enhance decision making and describes various decision contexts. Solutions to communication problems such as groupthink, social deadlock, bureaucratic isolation from subor...

How information flows through an organization is important to many organizational processes. The information people receive influences the perceptions they have of the organization they work for and the tasks they are assigned. Electronic mail constitutes a new medium in organizational communication. It may alter some of the information flow in the...

How information flows through an organization is important to many organizational processes. The information people receive influences the perceptions they have of the organization they work for and the tasks they are assigned. Electronic mail constitutes a new medium in organizational communication. It may alter some of the information flow in the...

Organizational cultures, and in particular stories, carry a claim to uniqueness - that an institution is unlike any other. This paper argues that a culture's claim to uniqueness is, paradoxically, expressed through cultural manifestations, such as stories, that are not in fact unique. We present seven types of stories that make a tacit claim to uni...

Formal theories of rational choice suggest that information about the possible consequences of alternative actions will be sought and used only if the precision, relevance, and reliability of the information are compatible with its cost. Empirical studies of information in organizations portray a pattern that is hard to rationalize in such terms. I...

This is an early version of this paper: Rerup, C., & Feldman, M. 2011. “Routines as a source of change in organizational schemata: The role of trial-and-error learning.” Academy of Management Journal, 54 (3): 577-610. Web of Science Highly Cited Paper. As of November / December 2016, this paper received enough citations to place it in the top 1%...

Con base en los datos recopilados para una investigación muy grande sobre la vivienda estudiantil en una universidad, la autora de este libro explica diversas maneras de interpretar la información a través de diversos métodos de acercamiento: etnometodología, análisis semiótico y teatral, deconstrucción.