Abstract
The Emergence of Routines is much more than a book on how organizational routines emerge and evolve; it is a fascinating journey into the world of the business historian and reveals the value of history in understanding organization. The authors of 11 empirical chapters guide the reader through the emergence, evolution, and, in a few instances, demise of firms and ventures, organizational initiatives, practices, and routines; of interfirm agreements (and disagreements); and of industry standards, specifications, and rules of the game. Although some of the chapters zoom in on a specific organizational routine, the authors share an interpretation of the term as an umbrella concept encompassing anything that is orderly and patterned within and across organizations, including heuristics, specifications, processes and practices, rules and regulations, and organizational units themselves.
Although the authors write as business historians, the mandate they received from the editors was to write historical essays addressed to management and organization scholars. The objective of this endeavor is to fill with sound historical accounts the perceived silences of social science disciplines related to how functioning enterprises form around embryonic entrepreneurial ideas. This specific objective is only partially fulfilled: the only chapter squarely built around a startup venture is the first one, by Daniel Raff, concerning Harry Scherman’s founding and subsequent growth of the Book-of-the-Month Club as a new enterprise. Chapter 6 by John K. Brown narrates James Eads’ creation of the St. Louis Bridge Company, but the focus here is more on how the emergence of a new bridge design choice reshaped the interactions among industry participants and the organizational routines for bridge building. The other chapters report often captivating histories of the emergence and evolution of new ventures within existing companies (the case of Motorola’s Iridium Satellite Communications venture, by Martin Collins), of organizational units in large corporations (the Aluminum Research Lab and Research Committee at Alcoa, analyzed by Margaret Graham, and the Purchasing Office at Ford Motor Company, by Damon Yarnell), of practices within existing companies (the description of the World Bank’s project appraisal, by Michele Alacevich, and the creation of standards and procedures in the monopoly Bell System and in the U.S. Environment Protection Agency, by Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell), and even of industry-level standards and regulations in dam building (by Donald C. Jackson), defense procurement (by Glen Asner), consumer credit scoring (by Josh Lauer), and innovation in the production of clean combustion in the automotive sector (by Ann Johnson).
Overall, the 11 historical essays provide conspicuous empirical evidence of the emergence of order and organization in early-stage or, more often, changing organizations and groups of organizations. Armed with this evidence, the authors intend to combat what I consider a partial reading of existing management research on the role of organizational routines in entrepreneurship and innovation. In the concluding chapter, the editors reiterate the widely debated claim that the existing tenure system does not provide incentives for business school faculty to produce research that can be translated into “food for thought relevant to a career of taking initiatives and making decisions in a very dynamic context” (p. 339). Rather, the bulk of management research is, in their view, grounded in statistical analyses of databases assembled by others, the collection of interview or survey data for analysis, and lab experiments. What the book is missing is the acknowledgment of and cross fertilization with the case-based and often longitudinal and archival research on routine dynamics, dynamic capabilities, and the microfoundations of organizational capabilities that has proliferated over the past 15 years or so around the same key questions addressed in this book. Incorporating the perspectives and contributions of management and organization scholars active in these growing fields could have provided mutual learning and cumulative understanding of methods, theory development, and eventually the empirical phenomena of joint interest.
Despite this missed opportunity, the historical analyses reported in this book—at times supported by fascinating pictures of dams and bridges (both standing and collapsed), rare early-1900s forms and invoices from the Dearborn archives of Ford Motor Company, and concepts and charts from the Legacy Archives Collection of Motorola Solutions—have rich implications for researchers in organizational routines and the emergence of processes, practices, and organizational regularities. In unveiling these implications, business history has at least three advantages over alternative approaches, as the cases illustrated in the book compellingly suggest. These advantages relate to how historical accounts magnify the role of evidence, contexts, and actors.
In the concluding chapter, the editors offer a summary of “what is involved in writing what historians would regard as ‘good’ history” (p. 343)—which, by the way, resonates a lot with what is involved in writing what organizational and management scholars would regard as “good” longitudinal case studies. As one would expect, the role of multiple sources of evidence is essential. What the essays in this book often reveal is that by being true to all of the available evidence, an historical approach may unveil alternative and often deeper explanations of the emergence of order in organizations, which had been obscured by previously accepted “consensus” explanations. In a revelatory methodological note, Vinsel and Russell (p. 119, note 23) suggest that “Archival deposits of large organizations are often chock-full of documents . . . that arise from organizational routines. A true focus on routines might lead investigators to focus on mundane, everyday activities and to approach these teeming sources in a new way.” A brilliant example of the power of this approach to investigating routines is their unveiling of creativity, dynamism, and innovation within the pressures toward uniformity and standardization in the Bell System and in the U.S. Environment Protection Agency. Another remarkable example is Damon Yarnell’s exemplary description of Ford’s purchasing routine. His essay sheds new light on what actually drove standardization during the Model T era, and contradicts the traditional image of Ford as a chaotic culture of mismanagement, through a scrupulous and evidently laborious exploration of company archives.
A second advantage of historical analysis resides in the emergence of the power of contexts that often significantly contribute to shaping routines. Most of the case studies in the book are carried out across multiple levels of analysis. This approach allows researchers to embed the analysis of how routines emerge and develop in multiple contexts, thus revealing essential factors in understanding why and how certain features of the observed routines were shaped. In his chapter on Motorola’s Iridium Satellite Communications venture, Martin Collins notices that in the literature on organizational routines, context is usually not “theorized—that is, put into clear analytic relation to routines (which seem to have a semi-independent standing)” (p. 102). In contrast, the power of paying close attention to context is evident in his explanation of the emergence of the Iridium venture and its workplace practices out of the growing globalization and postmodernity cultures. Another brilliant example is offered by Donald C. Jackson’s explanation of the dominance of the massive gravity dam design and related construction routines over the lighter, significantly less costly, and more effective multiple arch design, due almost exclusively to the greater acceptability to the public of the former design, which did not have the frail appearance of the latter. Similarly, Josh Lauer explains the resistance to replacing qualitative interviews with prospective borrowers with statistical credit-scoring systems in the 1960s in part as resulting from the importance given to character, individual honesty, and moral disposition in assessing creditworthiness in twentieth-century America.
A third important advantage is that historical accounts may place actors in sharper relief than alternative research approaches. The goal of unveiling the agency of organizational participants in patterned processes is shared by recent research on routine dynamics and the microfoundations movement. The editors frame this central goal of the book by stating, “In a setting in which strictly repetitive activity dominates operations, it is reasonable to wonder how individuals within organization can exercise agency” (p. 9). This overarching goal cuts through all chapters, resulting in the discovery of the central role that nearly unknown actors had in shaping routines, organizations, and even the specifications and rules of the game of entire industries. We thus learn about how purchasing agent Fred Diehl—the “forgotten father” of mass production—contributed to shaping Ford’s purchasing routine in the 1920s, which was essential in sustaining shop-floor mass production routines. Similarly, we learn about the essential role that Bancrof Gherardi had in shaping the Bell System as inherently creative and flexible during the 1920s and 1930s and that James B. Eads had in reshaping the routines that linked operating companies, construction firms, and rolling mills in the construction of long-span railway bridges between 1865 and 1880.
Together, these and other qualities of the historical essays in this book offer profound implications for future investigations of organizational routines—their emergence and morphing—by organizational, management, and entrepreneurship scholars, further contributing to the increasing salience of historical approaches in organization studies.