Because the paper is an equal collaboration, the order of authorship is alphabetical. We are grateful to Michael Barzelay,

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 organizational routines. This model suggests that there is an internal dynamic to routines that can promote continuous change. The internal dynamic is based on the inclusion of routine participants as agents. When we do not separate the people who are doing the routines from the routine, we can see routines as a richer phenomenon. Change occurs as a result of participants' reflections on and reactions to various outcomes of previous iterations of the routine. This perspective introduces agency into the notion of routine. Agency is important for understanding the role of organizational routines in learning and in processes of institutionalization.

T his 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 of how practice theory has been used in the organizational literature and in our own research. We end with a discussion of the challenges and opportunities that practice theory affords organizational scholarship.Key words: practice; practice theory; genres; resourcing; routines; technology in practice; sociomateriality History: Published online in Articles in Advance February 23, 2011. IntroductionIn this paper we discuss the value of practice theory for issues of concern to organization theorists. We are motivated to write this by our own experiences, primarily our experiences as researchers and teachers but also our experiences as editors and reviewers of papers that investigate practices empirically and use practice ideas theoretically. Central to a practice lens is the notion that social life is an ongoing production and thus emerges through people's recurrent actions. We have become intrigued by the capacity that such a lens affords for analyzing social, technological, and organizational phenomena, and we write this piece with the intent of sharing our understanding and interest in that capacity.We believe that a practice lens has much to offer scholars of organization. And we believe this is especially the case today. Contemporary organizing is increasingly understood to be complex, dynamic, distributed, mobile, transient, and unprecedented, and as such, we need approaches that will help us theorize these kinds of novel, indeterminate, and emergent phenomena (Barley and Kunda 2001, Child and McGrath 2001, Ciborra 1996, Law and Urry 2004, Stark 2009). We believe practice theory, with its focus on dynamics, relations, and enactment, is particularly well positioned to offer powerful analytical tools to help us here.We begin by positioning the practice lens as a specific approach to understanding the world. We discuss a number of core principles of practice theory and offer a few illustrations of current organizational scholarship that is informed by these principles. We then describe some experiences of using practice theory in our own research practice so as to ground its use in the details of specific projects and intellectual histories. We end with a brief discussion of some of the challenges faced by practice scholars, as well as the value that can be derived from engaging in practice scholarship. Positioning a Practice LensIn our consideration of practice theory, we situate it in relation to three ways of studying practice (Orlikowski 2010): an empirical focus on how people act in organizational contexts, a theoretical focus on understanding relations between the actions people take and the structures of organizational life, and a philosophical focus on the con...

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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 the routine in isolation (e.g. routines as patterns of action). A third option is to study the relationships between these parts and the processes by which the parts change. For some questions, routines can be taken as a unit of analysis without considering their internal structure, but there are many research questions for which it is useful to consider the parts of routines either separately or as they interact. We discuss the importance of understanding the internal structure and dynamics of organizational routines for exploring core organizational phenomena such as stability, change, flexibility, learning and transfer.

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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 played by doubt as abduction's engine in these efforts. We propose three strategic principles for engaging and using doubt in the research process. In concluding, we explore our field's overemphasis on validation to the exclusion of discovery processes and to the detriment of excellence in theorizing. We call for a broadening of our notions of “methodology” to incorporate discovery processes and to begin their explication.

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