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Organizational Routines: Developing a Duality Model to Explain the Effects of Strategic Change Initiatives
Abstract
This chapter presents an integrated duality model to understand how changes in core processes caused by strategic interventions are related with views on human conduct, organizational routines and embedded organizations, particularly in today's society that is characterized by fluidity and continuous change. This model is developed from a Deweyian perspective on human conduct including the interplay between habits, cognition and emotion. Using this duality model, the current chapter discusses why top-down strategic plans and initiatives will result in resistance amongst organizational members. Finally, it discusses directions for further theoretical development and empirical research.
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An organization's identity, symbolized by its corporate name, is rooted in institutional fields. We advance the construct of symbolic isomorphism, or the resemblance of an organization's symbolic attributes to those of others within its institutional field, and examine its effects on the homogenization of names and legitimacy. We review historical naming patterns and present two studies that examine the antecedents and outcomes of name conformity: The first analyzes 1,600 name changes to demonstrate how institutional conformity shapes organizational identities, and the second surveys public audiences and delineates how symbolic isomorphism serves as a touchstone for legitimacy.
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 through a microfoundation of observable action. Our analysis (1) identifies two processes of trial-and-error learning and (2) strengthens theory about the coevolution of interpretive schemata and routines. By recognizing the complex relationship between routines and schemata and the role that trial-and-error learning processes play in this relationship, organizations can gain a previously overlooked tool for managing change.
This study investigates how top management teams in higher education institutions make sense of important issues that affect strategic change in modern academia. We used a two-phase research approach that progressed from a grounded model anchored in a case study to a quantitative, generalizable study of the issue interpretation process, using 611 executives from 372 colleges and universities in the United States. The findings suggest that under conditions of change, top management team members' perceptions of identity and image, especially desired future image, are key to the sensemaking process and serve as important links between the organization's internal context and the team members' issue interpretations. Rather than using the more common business issue categories of ''threats'' and ''opportunities,'' team members distinguished their interpretations mainly according to ''strategic'' or ''political'' categorizations.(.)
This paper examines the proposition that change is detrimental to organizational performance and survival chances. I propose that organizational change may benefit organizational performance and survival chances
if it occurs in response to dramatic restructuring of environmental conditions and if it builds on established routines and competences. These propositions are tested on the savings and loan industry in California, which has experienced technological, economic, and regulatory shifts that have forced savings and loan associations to change or die. Findings indicate that most changes enhance financial performance, one is harmful to performance, and three diminish failure rates. These results support the model developed here and suggest that the question of whether change is hazardous should be replaced by the questions of under what conditions change may be hazardous or helpful and whether the direction of change affects its impact on performance and survival.
This paper analyses how people’s subjectively construed identities are disciplined by, and appropriated
from, their talk about organizational routines. Identity work, we argue, is not just an expression of
agency but also of power. Based on a study of a UK regional law firm, our research counter-balances
understandings of professional lawyers as autonomous knowledge-workers, and emphasizes instead
the extent of their subjection to disciplinary processes. It shows that power is intrinsic to discursive
constructions of routine processes of organizing. We examine lawyers’ accounts of their time-keeping
and billing routine, and how these both fabricated their identities, and how individuals said that they
confronted, shifted and perverted organizationally sanctioned systems of meaning. The research
contribution of this paper is to examine empirically and to theorize how discourse about routines both
disciplines and is a resource for identity work.
Much organizational identity research has grappled with the question of identity emergence or change. Yet the question of identity endurance is equally puzzling. Relying primarily on an analysis of 309 internal bulletins produced at a French aeronautics firm over almost 50 years, we theorize a link between collective memory and organizational identity endurance. More specifically, we show how forgetting in a firm's ongoing rhetorical history—here, the bulletins' repeated omission of contradictory elements in the firm's past (i.e., structural omission) or attempts to neutralize them with valued identity cues (i.e., preemptive neutralization)—sustains its identity. Thus, knowing “who we are” might depend in part on repeatedly remembering to forget “who we were not.”
We report on the findings of an inductive, interpretive case study of organizational identity change in the spin-off of a Fortune 100 company's top-performing organizational unit into an independent organization. We examined the processes by which the labels and meanings associated with the organization's identity underwent changes during and after the spin-off, as well as how the organization responded to these changes. The emergent model of identity change revolved around a collective state of identity ambiguity, the details of which provide insight into processes whereby organizational identity change can occur. Additionally, our findings revealed previously unreported aspects of organizational change, including organization members' collective experience of “change overload” and the presence of temporal identity discrepancies in the emergence of the identity ambiguity.
The concept of cultural capital has been increasingly used in American sociology to study the impact of cultural reproduction on social reproduction. However, much confusion surrounds this concept. In this essay, we disentangle Bourdieu and Passeron's original work on cultural capital, specifying the theoretical roles cultural capital plays in their model, and the various types of high status signals they are concerned with. We expand on their work by proposing a new definition of cultural capital which focuses on cultural and social exclusion. We note a number of theoretical ambiguities and gaps in the original model, as well as specific methodological problems. In the second section, we shift our attention to the American literature on cultural capital. We discuss its assumptions and compare it with the original work. We also propose a research agenda which focuses on social and cultural selection and decouples cultural capital from the French context in which it was originally conceived to take into consideration the distinctive features of American culture. This agenda consists in 1) assessing the relevance of the concept of legitimate culture in the U.S.; 2) documenting the distinctive American repertoire of high status cultural signals; and 3) analyzing how cultural capital is turned into profits in America.
This paper reports on a qualitative field study of 16 hospitals implementing an innovative technology for cardiac surgery. We examine how new routines are developed in organizations in which existing routines are reinforced by the technological and organizational context All hospitals studied had top-tier cardiac surgery departments with excellent reputations and patient outcomes yet exhibited striking differences in the extent to which they were able to implement a new technology that required substantial changes in the operating-room-team work routine. Successful implementers underwent a qualitatively different team learning process than those who were unsuccessful. Analysis of qualitative data suggests that implementation involved four process steps: enrollment, preparation, trials, and reflection. Successful implementers used enrollment to motivate the team, designed preparatory practice sessions and early trials to create psychological safety and encourage new behaviors, and promoted shared meaning and process improvement through reflective practices. By illuminating the collective learning process among those directly responsible for technology implementation, we contribute to organizational research on routines and technology adoption.
This essay proposes that routines are organizational dispositions to energize conditional patterns of behaviour within an organized group of individuals, involving sequential responses to cues. Accordingly, routines more than individual habits, because they involve structured interactions between individuals, and accordingly properties and capacities that are not found in the individuals taken severally. Following the analogy of Nelson and Winter (1982) of 'routines as genes' it is proposed that routines may be treated as social replicators. To sustain this proposition, routines must be treated as capacities to energize paper, rather than behaviour as such. The essay also discusses how routines act as repositories of knowledge and how they replicate.
Based on an executive survey this article analyses the extent to which a new managerial logic has replaced traditional administrative values and identity in Austria. We do not find any strong evidence of a new managerial logic but rather modifications, local translations and the emergence of a hybrid identity.
This article tests one key assumption of Bourdieu's theory of culture fields: that actors are positioned in a ''topography'' of social relations according to their endowments of economic, social, and cultural capital. Blockmodeling procedures are used to analyze data on German writers and to identify a social structure in which positions vary according to the types and amounts of capital accumulated. A strong split between elite and marginal writers dominates the social structure, and even the fundamental distinction between high and low culture is embedded in this bipartition. Significant differences in both cultural and social capital distinguish elite from nonelite positions; within this bipartition, pronounced differences in cultural capital separate high and low culture. Relative to cultural and social capital, economic capital plays a lesser role in understanding the social structure of cultural fields.
In this qualitative field study, I explore how the construction of a cultural institution's identity is related to the construction of strategic capabilities and resources. I investigated the 1996 musicians' strike at the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra (ASO), which revealed embedded and latent identity conflicts. The multifaceted and specialized identity of the ASO was reinforced by different professional groups in the organization: the ideologies of musicians and administrators emphasized institutional resource allocations consistent with the legitimating values of their professions, i.e., artistic excellence versus economic utility. These identity claims, made under organizational crisis, accounted for variations in the construction of core competencies. I propose a model that explicates how the construction of core capabilities lies at the intersection of identification and interpretive processes in organizations. Implications are discussed for defining firm capabilities in cultural institutions and for managing organizational forms characterized by competing claims over institutional identity, resources, and core capabilities.
In this article, the authors reflect on the past two decades of research on organizational identity, looking to its history and to its future. They do not provide a review of the literature, nor do they promote a particular perspective on the concept. Instead, they advocate pluralism in studying organizational identity while encouraging clarity and transparency in the articulation of definitions and core theoretical suppositions. Believing there is no one best approach to the study of organizational identity, their intent is to establish a reference point that can orient future work on organizational identity. They focus on three questions they feel are critical: What is the nomological net that embeds organizational identity? Is organizational identity “real” (or simply metaphoric)? and How do we define and conceptualize organizational identity? Last, they try to anticipate organizational identity issues on the horizon to suggest future directions for theory and research.
One key to understanding the contours of late modernity is to examine workers' allocations of time to their organizations. In this article, I frame workplace time commitments as the outcome of two forces: individuals' efforts to portray a positive and distinctive identity (identity work) and the organizational and social discourses shaping those identities (identity regulation). Analysis of interviews with 53 employees from two distinct organizations shows that identity work and identity regulation related to workplace time commitments are not the result of totalizing managerial discourses, but are influenced by the arrays of discursive resources proffered by both locales and organizational practices. Importantly, these arrays tend to 'tilt' toward agency or structure in the conceptions of the individual-organization relationship they afford. Based on this finding, I argue that studies of workplace control and resistance should examine the features of such arrays of discursive resources, that understanding these assemblies of discursive resources can provide insight on the institutionalization of workplace practices, and that claims about modernity's totalizing influences on identity must be tempered by considering locale-specific discourses.
Although many organizational researchers make reference to Mead’s theory of social identity, none have explored how Mead’s ideas about the relationship between the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ might be extended to identity processes at the organizational level of analysis. In this article we define organizational analogs for Mead’s ‘I’ and ‘me’ and explain how these two phases of organizational identity are related. In doing so, we bring together existing theory concerning the links between organizational identities and images, with new theory concerning how reflection embeds identity in organizational culture and how identity expresses cultural understandings through symbols. We offer a model of organizational identity dynamics built on four processes linking organizational identity to culture and image. Whereas the processes linking identity and image (mirroring and impressing) have been described in the literature before, the contribution of this article lies in articulation of the processes linking identity and culture (reflecting and expressing), and of the interaction of all four processes working dynamically together to create, maintain and change organizational identity. We discuss the implications of our model in terms of two dysfunctions of organizational identity dynamics: narcissism and loss of culture.
The relationship between organizations and environments has drawn increasing attention in the recent literature of the sociology of organizations. We consider the subject of interorganizational relations to be a special case of the more general study of organizations and their environments. Dimensions of interorganizational relations have been listed (Marrett 1971), and partially developed paradigms for analyzing organization-environment relations have been proposed. The natural selection model, developing the strongest argument for an environmental perspective, posits that environmental factors select those organizational characteristics that best fit the environment (Hannan & Freeman 1974, Aldrich' 1971b). A complementary model, variously called a political economy model (Benson 1975, Wamsley & Zald 1973), a dependence exchange approach (Jacobs 1974, Hasenfeld 1972), and a resource dependence model (Pfeffer 1972b), argues for greater attention to internal organizational political decision-making processes and also for the perspective
A challenge facing cultural-frame institutionalism is to explain how existing institutional logics and role identities are replaced by new logics and role identities. This article depicts identity movements that strive to expand individual autonomy as motors of institutional change. It proposes that the sociopolitical legitimacy of activists, extent of theorization of new roles, prior defections by peers to the new logic, and gains to prior defectors act as identity-discrepant cues that induce actors to abandon traditional logics and role identities for new logics and role identities. A study of how the nouvelle cuisine movement in France led elite chefs to abandon classical cuisine during the period starting from 1970 and ending in 1997 provides wide-ranging support for these arguments. Implications for research on institutional change, social movements, and social identity are outlined.
In this book, Haridimos Tsoukas, one of the most imaginative organization theorists of our time, examines the nature of knowledge in organizations, and how individuals and scholars approach the concept of knowledge. Tsoukas firstly looks at organizational knowledge and its embessedness in social contexts and forms of life. He shows that knowledge is not just a collection of free floating representations of the world to be used at will, but an activity constitute of the world. On the one hand, the organization as an institutionalized system does produce regularities that can be captured via propositional forms of knowledge. On the other, the organization as practice as a lifeworld, or as an open-ended system produce stories, values, and shared traditions which can only be captured by narrative forms of knowledge. Secondly, Tsoukas looks at the issue of how individuals deal with the notion of complexity in organizations: Our inability to reduce the behavior of complex organizations to their constituent parts. Drawing on concepts such as discourse, narrativity, and reflexivity, he adopts a hermeneutical approach to the issue. Finally, Tsoukas examines the concept of meta-knowledge, and how we know what we know. Arguing that the underlying representationalist epistemology of much of mainstream management causes many problems, he advocates adopting a more discursive approach. He describes what such an epistemology might be, and illustrates it with examples from organization studies and strategic management. An ideal introduction to the thinking of a leading organizational theorist, this book will be essential reading for academics, researchers, and students of Knowledge Management, Organization Studies, Management Studies, Business Strategy and Applied Epistemology.
Strategic management has been increasingly characterized by an emphasis on core competences. Firms are advised to divest unrelated businesses and return to core business. Moreover, competitive advantage is now increasingly seen as a matter of efficiently deploying scarce knowledge resources to product markets. Much of this change in emphasis has occurred because of the emergence of a unified and rigorous approach to strategy, often called the resource-based approach. This Reader brings together extracts from the seminal articles that created this dominant perspective in strategic management. It includes the pioneering work of Selznick, Penrose, and Chandler and more recent writing by Wernerfelt, Barney, Teece, and Prahalad and Hamel.
Organizational Identity presents the classic works on organizational identity alongside more current thinking on the issues. Ranging from theoretical contributions to empirical studies, the readings in this volume address the key issues of organizational identity, and show how these issues have developed through contributions from such diverse fields of study as sociology, psychology, management studies and cultural studies. The readings examine questions such as how organizations understand who they are, why organizations develop a sense of identity and belonging where the boundaries of identity lie and the implications of postmodern and critical theories' challenges to the concept of identity as deeply-rooted and authentic. Includes work by: Stuart Albert, Mats Alvesson, Blake E. Ashforth, Marilynn B. Brewer, George Cheney, Lars Thoger Christensen, C.H. Cooley, Kevin G. Corley, Barbara Czarniawska, Janet M. Dukerich, Jane E. Dutton, Kimberly D. Elsbach, Wendi Gardner, Linda E. Ginzela, Dennis A. Gioia, E. Goffman, Karen Golden-Biddle, Mary Jo Hatch, Roderick M. Kramer, Fred Rael, G.H. Mead, Michael G. Pratt, Anat Rafaeli, Hayagreeva Rao, Majken Schultz, Howard S. Schwartz, Robert I. Sutton, Henri Taijfel, John Turner, David A. Wherren, and Hugh Willmott. Intended to provide easy access to this material for students of organizational identity, it will also be of interest more broadly to students of business, sociology and psychology.
Organizational Identity presents the classic works on organizational identity alongside more current thinking on the issues. Ranging from theoretical contributions to empirical studies, the readings in this volume address the key issues of organizational identity, and show how these issues have developed through contributions from such diverse fields of study as sociology, psychology, management studies and cultural studies. The readings examine questions such as how organizations understand who they are, why organizations develop a sense of identity and belonging where the boundaries of identity lie and the implications of postmodern and critical theories' challenges to the concept of identity as deeply-rooted and authentic. Includes work by: Stuart Albert, Mats Alvesson, Blake E. Ashforth, Marilynn B. Brewer, George Cheney, Lars Thoger Christensen, C.H. Cooley, Kevin G. Corley, Barbara Czarniawska, Janet M. Dukerich, Jane E. Dutton, Kimberly D. Elsbach, Wendi Gardner, Linda E. Ginzela, Dennis A. Gioia, E. Goffman, Karen Golden-Biddle, Mary Jo Hatch, Roderick M. Kramer, Fred Rael, G.H. Mead, Michael G. Pratt, Anat Rafaeli, Hayagreeva Rao, Majken Schultz, Howard S. Schwartz, Robert I. Sutton, Henri Taijfel, John Turner, David A. Wherren, and Hugh Willmott. Intended to provide easy access to this material for students of organizational identity, it will also be of interest more broadly to students of business, sociology and psychology.
How has Japan become a major economic power, a world leader in the automotive and electronics industries? What is the secret of their success? The consensus has been that, though the Japanese are not particularly innovative, they are exceptionally skilful at imitation, at improving products that already exist. But now two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiro Takeuchi, turn this conventional wisdom on its head: Japanese firms are successful, they contend, precisely because they are innovative, because they create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. Examining case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, 3M, GE, and the U.S. Marines, this book reveals how Japanese companies translate tacit to explicit knowledge and use it to produce new processes, products, and services.
Outline of a Theory of Practice is recognized as a major theoretical text on the foundations of anthropology and sociology. Pierre Bourdieu, a distinguished French anthropologist, develops a theory of practice which is simultaneously a critique of the methods and postures of social science and a general account of how human action should be understood. With his central concept of the habitus, the principle which negotiates between objective structures and practices, Bourdieu is able to transcend the dichotomies which have shaped theoretical thinking about the social world. The author draws on his fieldwork in Kabylia (Algeria) to illustrate his theoretical propositions. With detailed study of matrimonial strategies and the role of rite and myth, he analyses the dialectical process of the 'incorporation of structures' and the objectification of habitus, whereby social formations tend to reproduce themselves. A rigorous consistent materialist approach lays the foundations for a theory of symbolic capital and, through analysis of the different modes of domination, a theory of symbolic power.
The work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has stimulated new interest in habituated forms of conduct. His concept of habitus has become a leading reference in the growing sociological literature on theories of human action as practices. This article presents Bourdieu's concept of habitus by calling attention to its intellectual context and identifying the features that relate to the sociology of habit. The article identifies common characteristics of action regulated by habit and offers four programmatic implications for occupational therapy interventions.
How organizations cope with multiple and sometimes conflicting institutional demands is an increasingly familiar yet little understood question. This paper examines how four French business schools responded to demands that they internationalize their management education whilst retaining their traditional identities. We trace the role played by field-level actors in pushing and articulating competing logics and the importance of institutional and organizational identity in how organizations respond. By highlighting the role of identity aspirations we show that what matters is not how an organization sees itself-i.e., what it is-but how it wants to see itself-i.e., what it wishes to become. Finally, we unpack and explain why status differences across organizations affect the nature of the opportunities that are perceived and the scale and format of the responses that are implemented.
The proponents of the "microfoundations project" have advanced a number of criticisms of theories of organizational routines and capabilities. While the criticisms derive in part from philosophical or methodological premises that are open to serious question, and tend to ignore the empirical research on the subject, there remains a valid core concern about the foundational characterization of human nature and particularly about the relationship of the individual level of analysis to the organizational level. This paper makes the case that a suitable individual-level foundation can be found only in an account of individual psychology that gives due weight to habit and clearly distinguishes habit from deliberative decision making. Insight is drawn from the writings of John Dewey and from recent research in psychology.
We extend and adapt a model of group memory to organizations. Using this extended model, we identify information management challenges of the next century and suggest that organizations can address these challenges by locating a large portion of their information-processing activities outside their formal boundaries, by adopting novel socialization tactics, and by focusing on the management of soft knowledge forms (e.g., tacit knowledge, judgment, and intuitive abilities). Whereas current theories increasingly equate information management with the management of information technology, we argue that information technology needs to be complemented by organization-level processes related to organizational memory.
This paper explores the sequential structure of work processes in a task unit whose work involves high numbers of exceptions, low analyzability of search, frequent interruptions, and extensive deliberation and that cannot be characterized as routine under any traditional definition. Yet a detailed analysis of the sequential pattern of action in a sample of 168 service interactions reveals that most interactions follow a repetitive, functionally similar pattern. This apparent contradiction presents a challenge to our theoretical understanding of routines: How can apparently nonroutine work display such a high degree of regularity? To answer this question, we propose a new definition of organizational routines as a set of functionally similar patterns and illustrate a new methodology for studying the sequential structure of work processes using rule-based grammatical models. This approach to organizational routines juxtaposes the structural features of the organization against the reflective agency of organizational members. Members enact specific performances from among a constrained, but potentially large set of possibilities that can be described by a grammar, giving rise to the regular patterns of action we label routines.
In this article we argue that the extant representations of the concept of organizational memory are fragmented and underdeveloped. In developing a more coherent theory, we address possible concerns about anthropomorphism; define organizational memory and elaborate on its structure; and discuss the processes of information acquisition, retention, and retrieval. Next, these processes undergird a discussion of how organizational memory can be used, misused, or abused in the management of organizations. Some existing theories are reassessed with explicit attention to memory. The paper closes with an examination of the methodological challenges that await future researchers in this area.
As both technologies and organizations undergo dramatic changes in form and function, organizational researchers are increasingly turning to concepts of innovation, emergence, and improvisation to help explain the new ways of organizing and using technology evident in practice. With a similar intent, I propose an extension to the structurational perspective on technology that develops a practice lens to examine how people, as they interact with a technology in their ongoing practices, enact structures which shape their emergent and situated use of that technology. Viewing the use of technology as a process of enactment enables a deeper understanding of the constitutive role of social practices in the ongoing use and change of technologies in the workplace. After developing this lens, I offer an example of its use in research, and then suggest some implications for the study of technology in organizations.
Socialization theory has focused on enculturating new employees such that they develop pride in their new organization and internalize its values. We draw on authenticity research to theorize that the initial stage of socialization leads to more effective employment relationships when it instead primarily encourages newcomers to express their personal identities. In a field experiment carried out in a large business process outsourcing company in India, we found that initial socialization focused on personal identity (emphasizing newcomers’ authentic best selves) led to greater customer satisfaction and employee retention after six months than socialization that focused on organizational identity (emphasizing the pride to be gained from organizational affiliation) or the organization’s traditional approach, which focused primarily on skills training. To confirm causation and explore the mechanisms underlying the effects, we replicated the results in a laboratory experiment in a U.S. university. We found that individuals working temporarily as part of a research team were more engaged and satisfied with their work, performed their tasks more effectively, and were less likely to quit when initial socialization focused on personal identity rather than on organizational identity or a control condition. In addition, authentic self-expression mediated these relationships. We call for a new direction in socialization theory that examines how both organizations and employees can benefit by emphasizing newcomers’ authentic best selves.
Argues that the formal structure of many organizations in post-industrial society dramatically reflect the myths of their institutional environment instead of the demands of their work activities. The authors review prevailing theories of the origins of formal structures and the main problem which those theories confront -- namely, that their assumption that successful coordination and control of activity are responsible for the rise of modern formal organization is not substantiated by empirical evidence. Rather, there is a great gap between the formal structure and the informal practices that govern actual work activities. The authors present an alternative source for formal structures by suggesting that myths embedded in the institutional environment help to explain the adoption of formal structures. Earlier sources understood bureaucratization as emanating from the rationalization of the workplace. Nevertheless, the observation that some formal practices are not followed in favor of other unofficial ones indicates that not all formal structures advance efficiency as a rationalized system would require. Therefore another source of legitimacy is required. This is found in conforming the organization's structure to that of the powerful myths that institutionalized products, services, techniques, policies, and programs become. (CAR)
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 the structure. The performative aspect embodies the specific actions, by specific people, at specific times and places, that bring the routine to life. We argue that the ostensive aspect enables people to guide, account for, and refer to specific performances of a routine, and the performative aspect creates, maintains, and modifies the ostensive aspect of the routine. We argue that the relationship between ostensive and performative aspects of routines creates an on-going opportunity for variation, selection, and retention of new practices and patterns of action within routines and allows routines to generate a wide range of outcomes, from apparent stability to considerable change. This revised ontology of organizational routines provides a better explanation of empirical findings than existing theories of routines and has implications for a wide range of organizational theories.
Early twentieth-century American pragmatists such as John Dewey placed a strong emphasis on the human faculties of habit and emotion. That contrasts with the emphasis in recent decades on cognitive processes. In contemporary organizational research there has been an increasing interest in recurring action patterns, such as routines and practices. The conceptual difficulties this work has encountered are usefully illuminated by Dewey's view of the primacy of habit and its interplay with emotion and cognition.
This paper treats discourses in organizations in relationship to the management of identities and impressions. It is based on an ethnographic study of an advert ising agency and explores how advertising professionals describe themselves, their work and organizations, the profession and their clients. Various functions of such descriptions are proposed, from identity work to marketing. The relation ship between the level of discourse and deeper cultural levels is investigated through the cultural sociologies of Asplund and Bourdieu. The 'habitus' of advertising workers is discussed and 'anti-bureaucracy' is proposed as a concep tual figure — a basic way of conceptualizing vital segments of one's cultural reality — characterizing the advertising industry (in Sweden), informing the meaning of the particular ways of talk that is typical among advertising workers.
A study is reported in which the intergroup relationship between nurses in various fields of nursing is investigated. From social identity theory, it was predicted that strength of identification with the nursing subgroup would be positively correlated with intergroup differentiation. It was also predicted that amount of contact between the different nurse groups would be associated with less differentiation. Data was obtained from interviews with 40 qualified nurses working in specialized or general areas in three hospitals. Clear ingroup bias was found in intergroup attitudes, despite a strong ethos of cooperation within the nursing profession. However, contrary to hypothesis, this bias was negatively rather than positively correlated with group identification, as revealed by multiple regression analyses. These also showed that contact was associated with reduced bias, only in the general nurse group. In the specialized group, there was little effect for contact. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
This article describes how people adapt to new roles by experimenting with provisional selves that serve as trials for possible but not yet fully elaborated professional identities. Qualitative data collected from professionals in transition to more senior roles reveal that adaptation involves three basic tasks: (1) observing role models to identify potential identities, (2) experimenting with provisional selves, and (3) evaluating experiments against internal standards and external feedback. Choices within tasks are guided by an evolving repertory that includes images about the kind of professional one might become and the styles, skills, attitudes, and routines available to the person for constructing those identities. A conceptual framework is proposed in which individual and situational factors influence adaptation behaviors indirectly by shaping the repertory of possibilities that guides self-construction.
This paper introduces the concept of the ''move'' as a unit of analysis in technical service interactions and uses it as the basis for a theory of organizational knowledge. Data from six months of participant observation at two software support hot lines were analyzed inductively to identify a core set of moves with which technical support specialists respond to customer calls. When a specialist cannot respond to a call alone, he or she has to get help from others or give the call away. The moves specialists use in these situations both reflect and enact the structure of the organization: transferring a call reflects division of labor, escalating a call reflects hierarchy, and so on. By allowing the technical support staff to accomplish work collectively they could not do individually, organizing moves embody the distinctively organizational aspect of the collective performance. If we adopt a pragmatic definition of knowledge as situated performance rather than abstract representation, then organizing moves are a logical foundation for a theory of organizational knowledge.
Semiotics offers an approach for researching and analyzing systems of meaning that undergird occupational and organizational cultures. Following a synopsis of semiotic theory, this paper presents data from an ethnosemantic study of a funeral home and demonstrates that semiotically identical codes structure a funeral director's understanding of his various tasks. The analysis not only suggests that semiotic research captures the redundant themes that characterize insiders' interpretations of this work world, but that it is also sensitive to the mundane, but critical, aspects of a culture. Finally, the study shows how semiotic research can elucidate rules by which members of a work culture consistently and coherently generate meaning.
How can organizations manage the cognitive processes by which a firm invests in resources for competitive advantage? Studies of organizational culture, as currently framed, have not provided adequate answers to this question. By focusing either on culture as underlying beliefs or on culture as behavioral manifestations, these studies have overlooked the critical links between beliefs and behaviors that are at the very core of managing cognitive processes for sustained advantage.
This article reframes the culture concept to highlight the role of contextual identities in linking behaviors and their social meaning in organizations. Drawing on theories from cultural linguistics and structural anthropology, it argues that cognitive processes in organizations do not directly reflect either behaviors or underlying beliefs. Rather, they represent the interface between the two. To manage cognitive processes for competitive advantage requires that we attend to the identities by which people make sense of what they do in relation to a larger set of organizational norms.
The diverse schools of organizational thought are classified according to micro and macro levels of organizational analysis and deterministic versus voluntaristic assumptions of human nature to yield four basic perspectives: system-structural, strategic choice, natural selection, and collective-action views of organizations. These four views represent qualitatively different concepts of organizational structure, behavior, change, and managerial roles. Six theoretical debates are then identified by systematically juxtaposing the four views against each other, and a partial reconciliation is achieved by bringing opposing viewpoints into dialectical relief. The six debates, which tend to be addressed singly and in isolation from each other in the literature, are then integrated at a metatheoretical level. The framework presented thus attempts to overcome the problems associated with excessive theoretical compartmentalization by focusing on the interplay between divergent theoretical perspectives, but it also attempts to preserve the authenticity of distinctive viewpoints, thereby retaining the advantages associated with theoretical pluralism.
Organizational routines—multi-actor, interlocking, reciprocally-triggered sequences of actions—are a major source of the reliability and speed of organizational performance. Without routines, organizations would lose efficiency as structures for collective action. But these frequently repeated action sequences can also occasionally give rise to serious suboptimality, hampering performance when they are automatically transferred onto inappropriate situations.
While the knowledgeable design and redesign of routines presents a likely lever for those wishing to enhance organizational performance, the lever remains difficult to grasp because routines are hard to observe, analyze, and describe. This paper argues that new work in psychology on “procedural” memory may help explain how routines arise, stabilize and change. Procedural memory has close links to notions of individual skill and habit. It is memory for how things are done that is relatively automatic and inarticulate, and it encompasses both cognitive and motor activities.
We report an experiment in which paired subjects developed interlocked task performance patterns that display the chief characteristics of organizational routines. We show evidence from their behavior supporting the claim that individuals store their components of organizational routines in procedural memory. If routines are stored as distributed procedural memories, this may be the source of distinctive properties reported by observers of organizational routines. The paper concludes with implications for both research and practice.