T his paper examines how routine patterns are recognized as either stable or flexible and which mechanisms are enacted to maintain this patterning work. We address this question through an ethnographic case study analyzing how a catastrophe management organization enacts routines in a highly dynamic setting. Our findings first of all reveal that patterns described by the participants as either stable or flexible were nevertheless both performed differently in each iteration of the routine. Our microlevel analysis shows that to enact patterns that participants perceive as stable, participants had to carry out specific aligning and prioritizing activities that lock-stepped performances. In contrast, participants perceive patterns as flexible when they enact specific selecting and recombining activities. Building on these observations, we add to extant routine literature by (1) differentiating between stability, standardization, flexibility, and change of routines and by (2) providing new insights on mindfulness in accounting for the microlevel activities enacted to orient toward a pattern that enhances standardization or flexibility in dynamic contexts. Moreover, (3) our insights point to the centrality of knowing for the enactment and recognition of patterning work.

In this ethnographic study of firefighters we explore how routines are coordinated under high levels of temporal uncertainty—when the timing of critical events cannot be known in advance and temporal misalignment creates substantial risks. Such conditions render time-consuming incremental and situated forms of temporal structuring—the focus of previous research on temporal coordination—unfeasible. Our findings show that firefighters focused their efforts on enacting temporal autonomy or, as they called it, “getting ahead of time.” They gained temporal autonomy—the capacity to temporally uncouple from the unfolding situation to preserve the ability to adapt to autonomously selected events—by relying on rhythms they developed during training in performing individual routines and by opening up to the evolving situation only when transitioning between routines. Our study contributes to literature on temporal structuring by introducing temporal autonomy as a novel strategy for dealing with temporal contingencies. We also contribute to research on routine dynamics by introducing the performance of temporal boundaries as a previously unrecognized form of coordination within and among routines. Finally, we contribute to process research a method that allows analyzing complex temporal patterns and thus provides a novel way of visualizing processes.

The current conceptualization of dynamic capabilities entails a paradox, one that hampers the achievement of one of the framework’s main missions: While studies on dynamic capabilities claim to offer explanations of continuous, routine-based organizational change, their prevalent conceptualization of organizational routines is rather undynamic and less prone to change. Thus, we propose to draw on an alternative, practice-based understanding of organizational routines to unravel the “dynamics” of dynamic capabilities. The practice perspective captures and explains the internal dynamics of organizational routines and positions the performance of organizational routines as a source of both organizational stability and change. This perspective offers to deepen our understanding of the dynamics within dynamic capabilities as driver of routine-based organizational change. To foster a research agenda that advances our understanding of dynamic capabilities from a practice perspective on organizational routines, we provide onto-epistemological, theoretical, and methodological implications of such a “dynamic view” of dynamic capabilities.

We conduct a literature review on forms of organizing that address grand challenges, which are operationalized as the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations, as this framework is universal and widely adopted. By analyzing the articles that match our criteria, we identify six differentiable organizational forms: movements, temporary organizations, partnerships, established organizations, multi-stakeholder networks, and supranational organizations. These six forms are differentiated based on the two following categories: organizing segment and communicational technological approach. Our analysis shows that tackling a grand challenge often starts with collectives as a protest culture without any expected goal, besides sending an impulse to others. This impulse is received by criticized institutionalized organizations that have the capacity and resources to address the problem properly. However, new challenges arise as these organizations inadequately resolve these problems, thereby leading to conflict-laden areas of tension, wherein emergent organizations complement institutionalized organizations that have created the first infrastructure. To solve the most complex problems, a trichotomous

This article examines how events from the past, present, and future form into event structures over time. This question is addressed by investigating the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011 until the fifth anniversary in 2016. This allowed to analyze different events over time. The findings reveal that events can be used in two different ways. One process was meant to focus on events, whereas the other one backgrounded events. These different ways to use events revealed four different mechanisms of how event structures can be formed. Moreover, each mechanism has its own idiosyncratic temporal orientation toward either a nostalgic past, imagined future, “better” future or critical past. Second, the article contributes that the paradoxical ways of focusing on an event and backgrounding the very same event need to be embraced simultaneously to enable a greater sense of wholeness. Last, the article reveals multiple temporalities within and across temporal trajectories.

In this paper, we argue that it is important to gain a better understanding on how people interact with each other to explain routine dynamics. Thus, we propose to focus on the interpersonal interactions of actors which is not only the fact that actors interact with each other but that the manner and quality of these interactions is important to understand routine dynamics. By drawing on social exchange theory, we propose a framework that seeks to explain routine dynamics based on different relationships between actors. Building on this framework, we provide different process models indicating how routine performing and patterning is enacted due to the respective relationship of actors. Our insights contribute to research on routine dynamics by arguing (1) that actions of patterning are dependent on the relationship of actors; (2) that trust works as an enabler for creating new patterns of actions; (3) that distrust functions as an enhancer for interrupting and dissolving patterns of actions.

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