Industrial and Corporate Change, Volume 13, Number 4, pp.

643–677
doi:10.1093/icc/dth026

Organizational routines: a review of

the literature
Markus C. Becker

Over twenty years have passed since Nelson and Winter put the concept of routines
firmly at the center of the analysis of organizational and economic change. A
growing number of researchers have followed their example since. However,
researchers have not always had the same idea of what routines are and what
effect they have on organizations. Over time, this has left the literature on routines
riddled with ambiguities. For researchers who want to apply the concept of
routines in their research, it is not easy to get an overview of the current thinking
about routines and their effects. This article offers a systematic review of the
literature that has contributed to the theoretical development of the concept of
routines, and of the empirical literature that has applied the concept of routines.

1. Introduction
An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (Nelson and Winter, 1982) was a
milestone in the endeavor to develop an evolutionary perspective on the
economy, capable of explaining organizational and economic change. One of the
many important contributions made in the book was to put the concept of
routines center-stage, drawing attention both to the role of routines in the
economy, and the role of the concept of routines in theory. Taken as the central
unit of analysis, routines would help understand how firms and the economy
work, and hold the key for understanding organizational and economic change.
While Nelson and Winter (1982) was not the first work to mention routines, it
provided an important impulse, drawing much attention to the concept of routines
and invigorating research on routines. More than twenty years have passed since.
Many researchers have heeded Nelson and Winter’s (1982) call to put routines
center-stage in their analysis. Despite (or because) its increasing popularity, many
ambiguities and inconsistencies in the literature dealing with routines prevail still
today (Cohen and Bacdayan, 1994; Avery, 1996; Cohen et al., 1996; Reynaud, 1998;
Jones and Craven, 2001). That makes it difficult to get a good grasp of what
routines are, and what effect they have on organizations. It also diminishes the
explanatory power of the concept of routines, and has slowed down progress in
understanding how precisely the concept of routines fits into theories of
organizational and economic change.
In order to provide researchers with an overview of the current
understanding of

Industrial and Corporate Change 13/4 © ICC Association 2004; all rights reserved.
644 M. C.
Becker

routines, the present paper addresses two questions: what routines are, and what
effect they have on organizations. It offers a systematic review of the literature
that has contributed to the theoretical development of the concept of routines, and
of the empirical literature that has applied the concept of routines. 1
The paper is structured in categories generated from the literature review. I
first present characteristics of routines, then give an overview of the effects
routines have on organizations. In each category, I first present a summary of the
conceptual and then of the empirical research. 2 The concluding section draws
implications for our under- standing of routines and for further research.

2. The characteristics of routines

2.1 Patterns
As the history of the concept of routines reveals, the notion of ‘patterns’ has
been central to the concept from early on (Becker, 2001), grasping the regularity that
the concept of routines stands for. In 1964, Sidney Winter (1964: 263) defined a
routine as ‘pattern of behavior that is followed repeatedly, but is subject to change
if conditions change’. At about the same time, philosopher Arthur Koestler
defined routines as ‘flexible patterns offering a variety of alternative choices’
(Koestler, 1967: 44).3 The notion of routines as patterns also appears in Nelson and
Winter (1982: 14, 15 and 113), Heiner (1983: 334), Teece and Pisano (1994: 541
and 545), Cohen et al. (1996), Grant
(1996: 115), Sanchez et al. (1996: 7), Teece et al. (1997: 518) and Dyer and Singh
(1998:
665).
If routines are patterns, then what do these patterns consist of? In the literature,
four different terms are used for denoting the ‘content’ of the patterns: action,
activity, behavior and interaction.4 If there are differences between these four
terms in the
1The literature review does not cover the many studies that mention routines in passing. A huge
number of such studies exist which allude to routines but do not contribute to the understanding
of the concept of routines. The literature included here is—to the best of the author’s knowledge—
reasonably comprehensive with regard to studies that are either concerned with making a
contribution to understanding the concept of routines or with applying it. Exceptions most
certainly exist. I do not believe, though, that they will alter the picture drawn here substantially.
2In referencing empirical studies, in many cases I will restrict myself to simply point to studies
that pursue the respective issue. Due to space considerations, I will present only those studies in
some detail, which are most important in establishing support for the point made in the text.
3Note the emphasis on variation in these two early definitions of routines. This aspect subsequently
disappeared when attention focused on the inertia of routines. As Costello (2000: 14) writes: today
‘the variation and openness of routines are often missed’. Only recently has this aspect been
rehabilitated (Feldman, 2000, 2003; Feldman and Rafaeli, 2002; Feldman and Pentland, 2003).
4Action (Cohen et al., 1996; Egidi, 1996; Jarzabkowski and Wilson, 2002), activity (Winter, 1990:
275–276; Dosi et al., 2000: 4; Jones and Craven, 2000; Karim and Mitchell, 2000), behaviour
(Nelson
and Winter, 1982: 14; Winter, 1986; Langlois and Everett, 1994; Langlois and Robertson,
1995;
 Organizational routines: a review of the 645
literature

economics and business literature, we have met the first source of conceptual
ambiguities. And differences there are indeed. In the economics and business
literature, the terms ‘action’ and ‘activity’ provide the least problem: they are
usually used as synonyms. A difference between the terms ‘action’ and
‘behavior’ is, however, commonly made in the economics and business literature. As
both general dictionaries (American Heritage Dictionary) and management
dictionaries (Cleveland, 1998) indicate, ‘behavior’ is a subset of action. ‘Behavior’ is
distinguished from ‘action’ by the fact that it is observable,5 and that it is understood
as a response to a stimulus. ‘Interaction’ is a subset of ‘action’, referring to such action
that involves multiple actors. The term ‘interaction’ therefore clearly establishes a
distinction between the individual and the collective level. As I describe in Section
2.3, sliding between these two levels in the discussion has haunted the literature on
routines for many years. For reducing the ambiguity surrounding the concept, and for
improving our understanding of routines, clearly distinguishing these dimensions is
an important step. Referring back to the history of the concept of routines can also
reduce conceptual ambiguity. Historically, the term ‘routines’ clearly referred to
recurrent interaction patterns, that is, collective recurrent activity patterns.6 As
opposed to that, recurrent activity patterns on the individual level have been
associated with the term ‘habits’ (Hodgson, 1993b). Also, many empirical studies
document routines as patterns of interaction (e.g. Cohen and Bacdayan, 1994;
Pentland and Rueter, 1994; Zellmer-Bruhn, 1999, 2003; Burns, 2000;
Costello, 2000).
There is, however, an altogether different possibility to answer the question
what the pattern (regularity) consists of. All four alternatives described above are
instances of activity, i.e. routines are understood as activity patterns. As opposed
to that, routines can also be understood as cognitive regularities or cognitive
patterns (Simon, 1947; March and Simon, 1958; Cyert and March, 1963; Cohen,
1991; Egidi, 1992; Delmestri, 1998). Routines would then be understood as rules:
for instance, ‘If {condition A}, then
{do B}’. In the business world, there are many kinds of such ‘if–then’ rules, for
instance, heuristics and rules of thumb (Hall and Hitch, 1939; Katona, 1946),
industry recipes (Spender, 1989), standard operating procedures (Cyert and
March, 1963) and programs (Simon, 1965, 1967, 1977).
Behavioral patterns and cognitive regularities are clearly different. They are
regularities on two different levels, cognition and activity. It is therefore
important to
Montgomery, 1995; Coombs and Metcalfe, 1998; Bessant et al., 2001; Jones and Craven, 2000;
Edmondson et al., 2001; Emery, 2002; Lillrank, 2003; Salvato, 2003) and interaction (Dosi et al.,
1992:
191–192; Teece and Pisano, 1994; Tranfield and Smith, 1998; Gittell, 2002; Zollo et al., 2002).
5Some of the ambiguity introduced at this point therefore refers to the question whether all
routines have to be observable or not.
6Having clarified the differences between the terms ‘action’, ‘activity’, ‘behaviour’ and ‘interaction’, I will
use either the precise term recurrent interaction patterns or—for flow of language—the term
‘behaviour pattern’. Where I use the latter, the reader is asked to keep in mind that in the case
of routines, the precise definition of such a pattern is ‘recurrent interaction pattern’.
646 M. C.
Becker

distinguish these two different meanings, both associated with the term
‘routines’ (Cohen et al., 1996; Becker, 2004). The fact that authors sometimes refer
to cognitive regularities, and sometimes to activity regularities when they use the
term ‘routines’ is a major source of confusion. In the present paper, I do not enter
the discussion of what level the term should be applied to, in order to keep focus
(the interested reader is referred to Knudsen, 2002a, 2004; Hodgson, 2003). We
will, however, come back to this problem in the concluding section.

2.2 Recurrence
Recurrence is a key characteristic of routines (Winter, 1990; Cohen et al., 1996;
for empirical studies, see Pentland, 1992; Cohen and Bacdayan, 1994; Pentland
and Rueter, 1994; Egidi and Narduzzo, 1997; Knott and McKelvey, 1999; Costello,
2000; Karim and Mitchell, 2000; Betsch et al., 2001). In fact, one would be hard
pressed to call something happening only once a routine.7

2.3 The collective nature of routines

Routines are collective phenomena (Nelson and Winter, 1982: 73; Grant, 1991;
Hodgson, 1993b; Murphy, 1994; Lazaric, 2000; Cohendet and Llerena, 2003;
Hodgson and Knudsen, 2003a; cf. Stene, 1940; Simon, 1947). They involve
multiple actors (Feldman and Pentland, 2003). Nelson and Winter have recently
revisited the issue: ‘In our view, clarity would be served by reserving the term
“skills” to the individual level and ‘routines’ to the organizational level’ (Dosi et al.,
2000: 5). Historically, a sometimes ambiguous presentation of the issue in crucial
passages of important works (Simon, 1947; Nelson and Winter, 1982) appears to
have given rise to different interpretations (see Becker, 2001).
Recognizing the collective nature of routines immediately improves our
understanding of the concept of routines. To involve multiple actors means that
carrying out one routine might involve actors in different locations.
Organizational routines can therefore be distributed 8 (Simon, 1992; Winter, 1994;
Scapens, 1994;
7Note that even routines put into practice very few times, such as the evacuation of a building,
are in fact practised. The routine is recurrent even if only practised in a dry run, i.e. without a
fire.
8A note on the terms ‘distributed’ and ‘dispersed’, two terms that have a very similar meaning
according to the dictionary. In the context of discussions of knowledge, routines, and cognition,
both terms have been used, sometimes in exchangeable meanings, sometimes with different
meanings. ‘Distributed’ has often been used as attribute to cognition and routines, while as an
attribute to knowledge, both ‘dispersed’ and ‘distributed’ have been used. A possible reason is
that in his seminal contribution, Hayek (1945) used the term ‘dispersed knowledge’. In order to
avoid confusion, I define the two terms as follows. Dispersed knowledge connotes a situation
where the knowledge held by different people is not identical (overlaps are small). Distributed
knowledge connotes a situation where the different people hold overlapping, identical
knowledge. From a population perspective, we could say that the population holds identical
copies of the knowledge in question. Distributed knowledge therefore refers to common
knowledge and redundancy—the others know what you know. Dispersed knowledge refers to
specialization and complementarity—the others are specialists in some other area and do not
know
 Organizational routines: a review of the 647
literature

Cohen et al., 1996; Coriat and Dosi, 1998; Lazaric and Mangolte, 1998; Zollo and
Winter, 2002). Routines can be distributed across space, or across the organization—
the multiple actors carrying out the routines belong to different organizational units,
and are located in different places. They are, however, linked by the interaction. It
is important to consider also the knowledge held by the actors involved in carrying
out the routine. To the extent that they are specialists, they will hold knowledge that
is so specialized that the overlap with the knowledge of the other actors will be small.
In the extreme, there will be no overlap. To the degree that this is the case, the
knowledge held by the different actors is said to the dispersed. It does not completely
overlap (Hayek, 1945; Minkler, 1993). In consequence, it is difficult, if not
impossible, to get an overview of the ‘whole’ knowledge held in the organization (cf.
Winter, 1994; Cohen et al., 1996; Zollo and Winter, 2002). Where that is the case, the
dispersedness of knowledge is a driver of uncertainty: actors do not have the
overview of all possible alternatives, and of the factors that influence the probabilities
with which these alternatives lead to certain outcomes. Cohendet and Llerena (2003)
have recently developed a second aspect of the collective nature of routines in more
depth. The multiple actors that are involved in the routine can make up different
kinds of communities. On the one hand, there are hierarchical communities such as
functional communities. These are organized hierarchically, are homogeneous and
share a disciplinary specialization. On the other hand, there are epistemic
communities and communities of practice, which are horizontally defined either by
the production of new knowledge or by a common interest in a given practice.
Importantly, all three kinds of communities provide a different local context in
which routines emerge and learning takes place, leading to routines that strongly
differ in terms of power of replication, of degree of inertia and of search potential
(Cohendet and Llerena, 2003).
Many empirical studies describe routines as collective phenomena (Weick,
1990, 1993; Cohen and Bacdayan, 1994; Pentland and Rueter, 1994; Jones and
Craven, 2001; Edmondson et al., 2001). Empirical studies add considerable detail
to our under- standing of the collective nature of routines. In his analysis of the
documentation of a historical airplane disaster, Weick arrives at the conclusion
that routines can be disrupted when participants in a routine start ‘acting in a
manner that is more individual than collective’ (Weick, 1990: 579). This finding
has profound implications for understanding the relationship between individual
actors and the collective routines they participate in: in order for organizational
coordination not to break down, a fine balance between individual habits and
organizational routines needs to be kept. Empirical research also describes
instances in which routines are dispersed. In experiments in which participants
needed to cooperate in order to win a card game, Egidi found that ‘organizational
procedures (routines) . . . emerge as the outcome of a distributed process
generated by “personal” production rules’ (Egidi, 1996: 303). This

(to the same extent) what you know. Such a definition links to Hayek’s use of the term and is
consistent with the problem he describes (see also Minkler, 1993).
648 M. C.
Becker

finding hints at emergence as a mechanism by which collective routines arise

from the interplay of individual rules, interests and activities.

2.4 Mindlessness vs. effortful accomplishment

Another issue on which opinions differ widely is the question whether routines
are characterized by ‘mindlessness’ (Ashforth and Fried, 1988) or—to the
contrary—are ‘effortful accomplishments’ (Pentland and Rueter, 1994: 488).
Proponents of the first position maintain that individuals often follow routines
without devoting attention to them. They do not draw on substantial cognitive
resources from the realm of consciousness (Weiss and Ilgen, 1985; Gersick and
Hackman, 1990; Cohen, 1991; Louis and Sutton, 1991; Kilduff, 1992; Postrel
and
Rumelt, 1992; Nelson, 1995; Dosi et al., 2000; Lazaric, 2000; cf. Stene, 1940;
Simon, 1947). Rather, to a large extent, routines are executed in the realm of the
subconscious (see Section 3.3 on ‘economizing cognitive resources’).
Proponents of the second position, on the other hand, argue that organizational
routines are not mindless but ‘effortful accomplishments’ (Pentland and Rueter,
1994: 488; Pentland, 1995; Costello, 2000; Feldman, 2000, 2003; Perren and
Grant, 2000; Feldman and Pentland, 2003; cf. Orlikowski, 2002). Serious
disagreement therefore divides the literature. What is notable about this divide is
that it largely runs along the line of conceptual vs. empirical work. All the
references cited above for the first camp are to conceptual papers, while the
references cited for the second camp are empirical papers. 9 These latter articles
arrive at the conclusion that organizational routines are effortful
accomplishments by noting how, in a variety of organizations, such as call
centers, information technology firms, small firms and housing organizations,
routines are characterized by being changeable and open to variation. Deriving
from a longitudinal and in-depth case study of a housing organization, a possible
resolution of the apparent contradiction between routines mindless or effortful
has recently been offered (Feldman, 2000, 2003; Feldmann and Pentland, 2003).
Taking account of two aspects of routines holds the key to resolving the
contradiction. On the one hand, there is what Feldman and Pentland (2003) call
the ostensive aspect: our representation of a routine, such as ‘hiring routine’ or
‘inventory control’. We use these labels to refer to the ways in which such tasks are
accomplished. On the other hand, however, there is the concrete carrying out of a
particular hiring routine in organization X at point of time Y, by actors A and B
(the performative aspect). These two aspects are different. The ostensive aspect
cannot encompass specific performances, because there are always contextual
details that remain open—and must remain open—for the routine to be carried
out (Feldman and Pentland, 2003: 101). So far, the performative aspect has often
been overlooked, leading to a neglect of the crucial role of the actor (Feldman,
2000). Organizational routines are not simply followed or reproduced—rather,
people have a choice between whether to do so, or whether to amend the
routine (Feldman, 2000,
9The only exception being Feldman and Pentland (2003).
 Organizational routines: a review of the 649
literature

Feldman and Pentland, 2003). As Winter (1985: 109) put it: ‘Mechanistic
decision making does not necessarily diminish the opportunities for genuine,
deliberate choice.’ From such a point of view, one can then fruitfully ask why
people do or do not change routines. At the same time, the proposed vantage
point also provides an endogenous explanation for the how routines change, for
the role of agency in performing routines, and for the fact that routines can be
simple rule-following behavior at one point of time, but involve adaptive and
creative behavior at another point of time.

2.5 The processual nature of routines

The concept of routines holds the promise to contribute to explaining organizational
and economic change. Change, needless to emphasize, is a process. The potential of
the concept of routines to contribute to explaining change is based on the fact that
routines are a unit of analysis that is processual in nature. Routines occupy ‘the
crucial nexus between structure and action, between the organization as an object
and organizing as a process’ (Pentland and Rueter, 1994: 484). This is why they
provide a ‘window’ to the drivers underlying change, enabling us to observe change
in more detail. Because routines provide some degree of stability (see Section 3.5),
they provide a contrast required to detect novelty. It is in this way that routines enable
researchers to map organizational change—as incremental change of the routines
themselves. Therein lies a great potential of the concept of routines for empirical
work (for examples of applying routines in the analysis of organizational change,
see Miner, 1991; Adler et al., 1999; Feldman, 2000, 2003; for questions of method,
see Pentland, 2003a,b).
For realizing the potential contribution of the concept of routines in explaining
organizational and economic change, it is therefore of crucial importance to bear
the processual nature of routines in mind. The implications are twofold. First,
while talking about ‘the routine’ is convenient from a linguistic point of view, we
should at all cost avoid any kind of reification. A routine is a process, even
despite the conceptual complication that a recurrent pattern of interaction is a
somewhat stable sequence of interactions. Secondly, it is clearly important to use a
rich vocabulary for describing the processual nature of routines. The most
important part of that vocabulary is the dimensions describing the processual
characteristics of routines. The following dimensions can be found in the
literature: the speed of decay of routines (linked to the need to maintain routines)
(Cohen, 1991: 139; Grant, 1991: 123; Hannan and Freeman, 1989: 76; cf.
Giddens, 1984: 86); the speed of executing routines, of changing their contents,
and of switching between them (Cohen, 1991: 136); reaction speed (Cohen and
Bacdayan, 1994: 558; March, 1994a: 42), time lags and delays (March, 1994a:
42); frequency of repetition and point of time of impact (Ginsberg and Baum,
1994: 130); frequency and fashion of shifting from one routine or set of routines
(Hannan and Freeman, 1989: 76); age (duration) of an activity, speed of
environmental change, quality of information with regard to the activity, amount
of managerial and employee turnover, and volatility of the decision environment
which all can act to intensify or dispel the influence of routines (Hirshleifer and
Welch, 1998); and tensions arising
650 M. C.
Becker

from different speeds of different, but interacting routines (Winter, 1975: 109). The
last point is a good illustration how a rich description of the processual
dimensions of routines would allow us to get a better understanding of the
development, stability, and change of routines, and thereby of organizational and
economic change.
The processual nature of routines is the area where empirical research has
made its maybe richest contributions. The following processual characteristics of
routines have been identified in empirical research, in case studies as well as in
experimental research and in simulations: 10 time of impact (cf. Narduzzo et al.,
2000), decay (Weick, 1990; Cohen and Bacdayan, 1994), reaction time (Narduzzo
et al., 2000), delays (Narduzzo et al., 2000), time needed for acquisition (Weick,
1990), whether change takes place in leaps or incrementally (Weick, 1990),
frequency of repetitions (Weick, 1990; Narduzzo et al., 2000; cf. Betsch et al.,
1998), age dependence (Warglien, 1995) and necessary maintenance in order for
routines not to decay (Sherer et al., 1998). Amongst the dimensions identified in
the literature, the frequency of repetition seems to be a particularly important
one. It is, after all, a necessary condition for regularity to occur. Another
dimension that warrants attention appears to be the regularity of the frequency
(regularity of the rhythm of recurrence), or in other words, of interruptions of the
routine. Based on a survey (preceded by a large number of interviews) carried out
in three firms in the US pharmaceutical and medial products industry, Zellmer-
Bruhn (1999, 2003) confirmed the hypothesis that teams experiencing more
interruptions will be more likely to either search for or adopt new routines from
external, rather than internal, sources (Zellmer-Bruhn, 1999, 2003). Time
pressure is a third processual dimension I want to highlight here. Experimental
research in psychology clearly supports the impact of time pressure on the
maintenance of routines. A replication and extension of the original experiments
of Cohen and Bacdayan (1994) found that time pressure increases the likelihood
of routine choices (as opposed to non-routine choices), even when the
inadequacy of the routine was indicated before the choice (Garapin and Hollard,
1999). This experiment consisted in a computerized card game in which the
players had to learn to coordinate their actions to achieve a common goal, without
being allowed to use verbal communication. Similarly, an experimental study in
which participants had to make a series of choices among different fertilizers,
whose attributes were revealed only gradually over a number of trials, found that
prior knowledge gained a stronger impact on choices if time pressure increased,
and could even overrule new evidence (Betsch et al., 1999). These findings
indicate that increased time pressure (and other increased constraints such as
stress) will not only induce falling back on routine responses, but will also lead to
a preference of those routine responses which are rehearsed most often.11 Time
pressure also influences where actors
10Cohen and Bacdayan (1994) and Betsch et al. (1998) are experimental studies, Warglien
(1995) is a simulation study. Narduzzo et al. (2000), Weick (1990) and Sherer et al. (1998) are
case studies of the mobile phone, airline and taxicab industry, respectively.
11Note, however, that in order for the adopted routine to work smoothly, a number of
requirements must be fulfilled. As Weick (1993) points out, routines can fall apart if there is a
lacking sense of
 Organizational routines: a review of the 651
literature

search for new routines (externally or from within the group involved in the routine).
Zellmer-Bruhn’s (1999) study did not support the hypothesis that time
pressure is negatively related to the adoption of routines from external sources, and
concluded that the effect of time pressure in external search for new routines (as
opposed to developing new routines internally) is unclear. A possible explanation is
that ‘when time is scarce, teams will not devote scarce temporal resources to internal
development of new work routines’, but rather adopt some readily available
routine (Zellmer-Bruhn, 1999: 88–89).

2.6 Context-dependence, embeddedness and specificity

Routines are embedded in an organization and its structures, and are specific to
the context (Teece and Pisano, 1994; Inkpen and Crossan, 1995; Cohen et al.,
1996; Madhok, 1997; Teece et al., 1997; Morosini et al., 1998; Tranfield and
Smith, 1998; Cohendet and Llerena, 2003). Context matters because of
complementarities between routines and their context. The notions of ‘scaffolded
action’ (Clark, 1997) and ‘situated action’ (Suchman, 1987) illustrate how action
relies on external support. External structures (e.g. artifacts) help to control,
prompt and coordinate individual actions. Such an idea is consistent with the
notion that general rules and procedures have to be incompletely specified when
transferred across contexts, precisely because contexts are different. As a
consequence, the application of general rules to specific contexts always involves
incomplete specification and missing components (Reynaud, 1998).
Interpretation and judgement skills are required for completing general rules,
such as, for example, to know what routines to perform when (Nelson and Winter,
1982; Hill et al., 1990). Furthermore, context matters because it leads to routines
that strongly differ in terms of power of replication, degree of inertia and search
potential (Cohendet and Llerena, 2003).
Several kinds of specificity have been identified in the literature: historical
specificity (Barney, 1991; Reynaud, 1996; Hodgson, 2001), local specificity
(Simon, 1976) and relation specificity (Dyer and Singh, 1998). Historical
specificity derives from the fact that whatever happens does so at a certain point
of time, which is characterized by a certain constellation of environmental factors
and interpretative mindsets (Reynaud, 1996). Because such constellations will be
complex, the probability that routines can be replicated exactly is low (cf. Rivkin,
2001). Local specificities also arise because routines are outcomes local learning
processes (Egidi, 1992; Malerba and Orsenigo, 1996; cf. Foster, 1981), and
because of cultural differences and limits to generalization arising from those (cf.
Simon, 1976).
collectivity, for instance because the collective sense-making process is disturbed. Conditions
of (extreme) time pressure and other constraints obstruct collective sense-making (for instance
because there is less time, and less occasion, to communicate), thus making it more likely that
routines, once adopted, fall apart. Routines that have been acquired more recently and practised
less often are even more vulnerable and can be expected to unravel sooner than those acquired
earlier under time pressure (Weick, 1990).
652 M. C.
Becker

Limits to the transfer of routines to other contexts are the most important
implication of specificity. When removed from their original context, routines
may be largely meaningless (Elam, 1993), and their productivity may decline
(Grant, 1991). Problems with transferability arise because it may not be clear
what is essential about the routines and what is peripheral (Lippman and Rumelt,
1982; Nelson, 1994; Winter and Szulanski, 2001a,b; Szulanski and Winter,
2002); because the routine might be incompatible with the new context (Madhok,
1997); or because it might prove impossible to copy some elements of the routine
due to problems in transferring tacit knowledge (Hill et al., 1990; Grant, 1991;
Langlois and Robertson, 1995; Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995). An important
consequence of limits to the transferability of routines across different contexts is
that no such thing as a universal best practice can possibly exist (Amit and
Belcourt, 1999). There can only be local ‘best’ solutions. An implication of this
argument is that the possibility of replicating routines inside the firm is improved,
at least to the extent that firms provide somewhat homogenous environments (cf.
Hodgson, 1988; Hill et al., 1990; Kogut and Zander, 1992, 1993).
Empirical research adds detail to the understanding of routines as context-
dependent, embedded and specific. Case studies of the UK National Health
System (NHS) and a chemical manufacturer highlighted the importance of
recognizing the links between routines and ‘higher-order’ assumptions and values
on the one hand, and between cognitive aspects of organization, and
organizational structures and processes on the other (Johnson, 2000). One of the
insights gained in a case study of the establishment of a mobile phone network
was that the nature of the linkages between the cognitive and behavioral levels is
still unclear (Narduzzo et al., 2000), even though individual case studies exist that
document how routines present the structural context for processes such as the
development of corporate strategy (Menuhin and McGee, 2001). A series of
papers that analyze BankOne’s operations in taking over banks illuminates the
process of the replication of routines, and also supports the idea of limits to the
transferability of routines to different contexts (Winter and Szulanski, 2001a,b;
Szulanski and Winter, 2002), amongst other reasons because the knowledge
bound by routines is procedural knowledge. The term ‘procedural
knowledge’ characterizes knowledge of how things are done, which is relatively
inarticulate and encompasses both cognitive and motor activities (Cohen and
Bacdayan, 1994: 554). Finally, empirical studies have supported the notion of the
historical specificity of routines. As explained above, because general rules and
routines always have to be incompletely specified, they always require
interpretation due to which local and historical specificities can develop, leading
to heterogeneity of practices across time and space (Narduzzo et al., 2000).

2.7 Path dependence

It is well recognized in the literature that routines change in a path-dependent
manner (David, 1997) and are shaped by history (Nelson and Winter, 1982;
Levitt and March,
 Organizational routines: a review of the 653
literature

1988; North, 1990; Barney, 1991; Dosi and Metcalfe, 1991; Bourdieu, 1992; Dosi et
al.,
1992; March, 1994a; Nelson, 1994; Malerba and Orsenigo, 1996; Foss, 1997;
Madhok,
1997; Oliver, 1997; Teece et al., 1997; Coriat and Dosi, 1998; Amit and Belcourt,
1999). Routines build on the past. How they will develop is a function of where
they have started out from (Dosi et al., 1992). Routines may adapt to experience
incrementally in response to feedback about outcomes, but they do so based on
their previous state (Levitt and March, 1988; Cohen et al., 1996).
Recognizing that routines change in a path-dependent manner highlights the
importance of feedback effects. Maybe the most well-known example of
positive feedback effects are competency traps: ‘favorable performance with an
inferior procedure leads an organization to accumulate more experience with it,
thus keeping experience with a superior procedure inadequate to make it
rewarding to use’ (Levitt and March, 1988: 322). Path dependent development of
routines means that because one can get stuck on a path, along which the
routine develops over time, the starting point matters. An additional difficulty in
re-tracing the origin of the routine and ‘re-setting’ the routine to its state at an
earlier point of time is that ‘the experiential lessons of history are captured by
routines in a way that makes the lessons, but not the history, accessible to
organizations and organizational members who have not themselves experienced
the history’ (Levitt and March, 1988: 320). Without knowledge of the reasons, for
which a certain path was taken in the past, it is impossible to reconstruct the path
and the problems to which the routine originally was the solution. Empirical
studies add to our understanding of the path dependent development of routines.
For instance, experiments involving repeated decision making with increasing
availability of information show that path dependence manifests itself because
actors take prior experience into account when making decisions (Betsch et al.,
2001). From their case study of the establishment of a mobile phone network,
Narduzzo et al. (2000) point to one implication of path dependent development:
once local heterogeneity of routines has been established, homogeneity of
practices is very difficult to bring about. Finally, Feldman’s (2000, 2003) studies of
routines at a university housing organization illuminate that change is part of
the very nature of routines. It is endogenous to routines, because whenever
routines are repeated, actors have some influence to perform aspects of the
routine in a different way. Importantly, such change has shown to often be
incremental in the sense that one or a few ‘components’ of routines are changed
at a time (such as the rhythm of recurrence, the participants, etc.). This
explains why routines develop in a path dependent manner over time.

2.8 Triggers
Routines are triggered (Nelson and Winter, 1973; Weiss and Ilgen, 1985; Winter,
1986; March and Olsen, 1989; Gersick and Hackman, 1990; Cohen, 1991;
McKern, 1993; Nelson and Nelson, 2002). Two kinds of triggers can be
distinguished: actor-related triggers and external cues. One form of external cues
are links between routines. For instance, at the end of the budgeting routine in the
marketing department, a routine
654 M. C.
Becker

for requesting the approval of the budget for a marketing campaign is triggered
at the finance department. Aspiration levels are a powerful form of actor-related
trigger of routines (Cyert and March, 1963; Levinthal and March, 1981; March,
1994b). Aspiration levels establish a limit, for instance for a particular
performance the actor perceives as adequate and hopes to achieve. Where the
performance is above that limit, actors follow satisficing rather than optimizing
behavior. They are content with their performance and typically will not engage
in endeavors to optimize their performance (Cyert and March, 1963; Levinthal
and March, 1981; March, 1994b). Where performance is below the limit, some
remedial action is triggered. Note that many of the remedies will, in turn, have the
form of routines (think for instance of the remedies available for increasing
sales).12
Empirical studies have identified a number of factors that have an impact
on triggering. An experimental study identified prior activation, the
simultaneous activation of other factors, the strength of association between a
situation and an option (the frequency), and the intensity of reinforcement as
triggers of routines (Betsch et al., 1998). Weick’s (1990) historical study of an
airplane crash concluded that the intensity of stress (associated with the
triggering) is positively correlated with the regression to first learned responses.
To the extent that such responses are routinized, we would expect the intensity
of stress at the point of time of triggering to be correlated with the age of the
routine being triggered. Furthermore, empirical research has added detail on the
type of feedback that acts as a trigger of routines. Experimental results indicate
that negative feedback acts as a more powerful trigger of routines than positive
feedback (Schneier, 1995; Avery, 1996).

3. The effects of routines on organizations

3.1 Coordination and control

Routines coordinate (Stene, 1940; Nelson and Winter, 1982; March and Olsen,
1989; Gersick and Hackman, 1990; Coriat, 1995; Dosi et al., 2000). Very early on,
Stene (1940: 1129) proposed that the ‘coördination of activities within an
organization tends to vary directly with the degree to which essential and
recurring functions have become part of the organization routine’. The
coordinative power of routines derives from several sources: from their
capacity to support a high level of simultaneity (Grant, 1996); from giving
regularity, unity and systematicity to practices of a group (Bourdieu, 1992); from
making many simultaneous activities mutually consistent (March and Olsen,
1989); from providing each of the actors with knowledge of the behavior of the
others on which to base her own decisions (Simon, 1947; cf. Stene, 1940); from
providing instructions in the form of programs; and from establishing a truce
(see Section 3.2)

12Note the relevance of the discussion of mindlessness vs. effortful accomplishment in Section
2.4 for the issue of triggers.
 Organizational routines: a review of the 655
literature

(Nelson and Winter, 1982). It has been claimed that as coordinating devices,
routines can be more efficient than contracts, so that they could even substitute for
contracts and make them increasingly unnecessary as relationships mature
(Langlois and Robertson, 1995).
Empirical research has started to shed some light on the effect of routines
on coordination. A study of the investment manuals of a sample of major
Swedish firms noted that standards (and standardized routines) are especially
influential for exerting control (Segelod, 1997), one way to bring about
coordination. A possible reason is that routine behavior is easier to monitor and
measure than non-routine behavior (cf. Langlois, 1992). The more
standardized, the easier to compare. The easier to compare, the easier to control.
Knott and McKelvey (1999) conducted an empirical test that compares the
relative value of residual claims and routines in generating firm efficiency, using a
large sample of firms from the US quick printing industry. The study concludes
that routines can be more efficient for coordination and control than residual
claims, contrary to principal-agent theory that has propagated residual claims
as the most efficient solution to the monitoring problem. Focusing on the
question ‘What is the best way for organizations to achieve coordination?’
Gittell (2002) analyzes the performance effects of routines (and other
coordination mechanisms such as boundary spanners and team meetings). The
study analyzes questionnaire data on care provider groups in acute-care
hospitals. It finds that the performance effects of routines were mediated by
relational coordination: routines work by enhancing interactions among
participants, which was found to have positive performance effects.

3.2 Truce
According to Nelson and Winter (1982: 107), organizational performances have
two different aspects: cognitive and governance 13 aspects (cf. also Coriat and
Dosi, 1998). Emphasizing the second aspect, Nelson and Winter (1982: 108) and
Coriat and Dosi (1998) highlight the fact that members are rarely surprised by
each other’s behavior. What are the mechanisms underlying this capacity? One
possibility is that there are no divergent interests that could give rise to
intraorganizational conflicts, another that there is tight control of the behavior of
the members of the organization. Nelson and Winter do not argue for the first
option (1982: 108), nor do they think control alone can explain the smooth
functioning of organizations. Although rule-enforcement mechanisms play a
crucial role in making routine operation possible (Nelson and Winter, 1982: 109),
their role is limited. Because it is always possible to either circumvent rules to
some extent, or to follow written rules by the letter and thereby decrease
performance, control systems leave a zone of discretion. Discretion awards some
bargaining power to those who execute orders. Usually, bargaining is not,
however, employed for each and every order that is to be executed. That
smoothly

13The two ways of governance mentioned in the literature on routines are governance through
control mechanisms and through motivation.
656 M. C.
Becker

running routines can be observed is due to an (implicit) truce established between

those giving and those executing the orders. Barnard (1938) has described this well
with his notion of ‘zone of indifference’. Within this zone, orders are acceptable
without conscious questioning of the authority of those who give the orders. For
instance, there is some agreement that ‘the usual amount of work gets done,
reprimands and compliments are delivered with the usual frequency, and no
demands are presented for major modifications in the terms of the relationship’
(Nelson and Winter, 1982: 110). That situation applies not only to the relations
between workers and managers, but also to relations among workers, among
managers, or between managers and shareholders (cf. Nelson and Winter, 2002).
The two dimensions of routines—cognitive and governance—are inseparable.
Importantly, both have their own logic and their own evolutionary path (Coriat and
Dosi, 1998; Mangolte, 1997a,b, 2000). The notion of ‘truce’ not only serves to make
the account of organizational change more realistic. It also fulfils a very important—
and largely overlooked—theoretical task. Without the notion of ‘truce’, one would
have to explain how the different social relationships that permit the activation of
the routine are themselves established in each period, and maintained over longer
periods of time. If they transform themselves, one would have to explain how they
lead to the formation and stabilization of a particular body of cognitive knowledge
(Mangolte, 1997b). In a conceptual paper, Lazaric and Mangolte (1998) argue that
understanding a routine as comprising a ‘truce’ helps recognize and appreciate the
governance, in particular the motivational, arrangements underlying the stability of
recurrent activity. This does not, however, mean motivation or control would be the
only explanations of the persistence of routines. In particular such routines that lie
within the zone of indifference (Barnard, 1938) can also be persistent because they are
taken for given.
Empirical studies have analyzed disruptions of established ‘truce’ situations.
Lazaric and Denis (2001), for instance, describe how the act of codifying knowledge
can lead to conflicts in social relations and thereby can have an impact on the
cognitive and the governance level. Their case study in the French food industry
analyzes how codifying the knowledge base underlying a particular task changes the
way in which the task is carried out. At the same time, codification also changes the
motivations of the participants in the routine. Lazaric et al. (2003) report similar
findings from a case study in the French steel industry and Burns (2000) from a case
study of accounting rules at a small English chemicals manufacturer’s. Such a
description helps to understand the forces underlying the stability, as well as the
change, of routines.

3.3 Economizing on cognitive resources

Cognitive resources are limited (Simon, 1947, 1955; March and Olsen, 1976, 1989).
The implication is that neither all alternatives, nor all consequences of any one
alternative can be known (March and Simon, 1958). Nor can organizations attend
to all of their goals simultaneously. Attention has to be allocated selectively (Cyert
and March, 1963; March, 1988). Routines economize on the limited information
processing and
 Organizational routines: a review of the 657
literature

decision-making capacity of agents (Simon, 1947, 1977; Winter, 1985; Gersick

and Hackman, 1990; Louis and Sutton, 1991; Langlois and Everett, 1994; Egidi and
Ricottili, 1997; Fransmann, 1998; cf. also Hayek, 1952; Penrose, 1959; Hodgson,
1997, 1999a). By preserving limited information-processing and decision-making
capacity, they increase the potential for focused attention (Simon, 1947; Postrel
and Rumelt, 1992; March and Shapira, 1987). In order to better use limited
capacity, attention is usually focused on non-routine events whereas recurring
events are dealt with semi-consciously (Cyert and March, 1963; Postrel and
Rumelt, 1992; Simon, 1947). The semi-conscious processing of repetitive events
requires less cognitive resources, as routines guide search by experience and reduce
the space of behavioral options that managers should scan (Winter, 1985;
Shapira, 1994; cf. Inbar, 1979; Swaan and Lissowska, 1996; Garud and Rappa,
1994). This procedure leads to an increase in the available cognitive potential
that may be used to attend to non-routine events (Reason, 1990).
There is clear empirical evidence that further illuminates how routines allow
individuals to save on mental efforts and thus preserve limited information-
processing and decision-making capacity. A survey-based study of US hospitals
indicates that routines achieve this by establishing organizational predispositions
to respond to issues in certain ways (Ashmos et al., 1998). Experiments indicate
that routines also economize on the time necessary for reaching a solution,
allowing for spontaneous reactions even under constraint situations, such as time
constraints (Betsch et al., 1998).

3.4 Reducing uncertainty

Uncertainty poses problems in decision-making because the likelihood of each
outcome from a set of possible specific outcomes is initially unknown. The
standard strategy to deal with such uncertainty is therefore to increase the amount
of information, improving the basis for estimation of the probabilities and their
accuracy. Some authors argue that a stronger, pervasive form of uncertainty exists
(Knight, 1921; March and Simon, 1958; Keynes, 1973). Pervasive uncertainty
refers to situations where neither all the different outcomes, nor their probabilities
are initially known, and which are so ill structured that the possible outcomes will
remain unknown despite any increase in information. The reason is that when
more information is made available, its underlying meaning is not clear, leading
to ambiguity in the interpretation of the information (a condition known as
‘equivocality’; Daft and Lengel, 1986). The implication is that new data does not
contribute to improving the estimates of the probabilities, and may even increase
uncertainty (cf. Weick, 1979).
In situations of uncertainty, particular pervasive uncertainty, routines make an
important contribution to actors’ ability to pick a course of action (Weiss and
Ilgen, 1985; Gersick and Hackman, 1990; Dosi and Egidi, 1991; Langlois and
Everett, 1994;
Scapens, 1994; Fransmann, 1998; Munby et al., 2003; cf. Suchman, 1987). 14 The
link
14The term ‘actors’ ability to pick a course of action’ is used as an overarching category for
choosing, deliberately or not, between a number of behavioral options. This term also provides
some precision of the expression ‘reducing uncertainty’.
658 M. C.
Becker

between uncertainty and behavioral regularities was expressed most clearly by

Heiner, who wrote that ‘. . . greater uncertainty will cause rule-governed
behavior to exhibit increasingly predictable regularities, so that uncertainty
becomes the basic source of predictable behavior’ (Heiner, 1983: 570).
Arguments can be found which turn the direction of causality so increases in
routinization may be viewed as an uncertainty decreasing strategy. The capacity
of routines to help actors deal with pervasive uncertainty stems from two effects:
by fixing certain parameters, firms may increase predictability and, at the same
time, free limited cognitive resources (Hodgson, 1988; North, 1990; Baumol,
2002). The first mechanism can work on various levels: on the societal level,
societal institutions such as laws, norms and so forth establish a certain level of
predictability for all members of the society. Within the firm, formal institutions
such as standard operating procedures, combined with informal institutions such
as norms in teams, establish certain expectations for the members of the firm.15
Empirical results support the idea that routines can indeed help actors cope
with uncertainty, even in its stronger forms. An in-depth study of housing
recovery after earthquakes in Mexico City and Los Angeles concluded that
‘routines are a necessity, because without them, policy formulation and
implementation would be lost in a jungle of detail and uncertainty. With them,
subsidiary questions can be handled summarily, and inexperienced protagonists
will avoid major errors’ (Inam, 1997: 200; cf. Inam, 1999). In an experimental
study routines were seen to ‘enable individuals to . . . radically reduce the
complexity of individual decisions’ (Egidi, 1996: 304). A survey-based study of
Danish firms in six industries tested a set of hypotheses pertaining to the
uncertainty-reducing effect of routines, explicitly taking into account pervasive
forms of uncertainty (Becker and Knudsen, 2004). In particular, routinisation was
tested against increased information flow as a way of dealing with uncertainty.
The most important outcome of the study was that results strongly support the
hypothesis that increasing routinization will decrease the decision maker’s
experience of pervasive uncertainty (Becker and Knudsen, 2004). The findings of
Gittell’s (2002) survey-based study of care provider groups in acute-care hospitals
point in the same direction. Analyzing the performance effects of routines and
other coordination mechanisms, the study finds that input uncertainty increased,
rather than decreased the performance effects of routines. In the face of
uncertainty, routines are therefore increasingly effective (Gittell, 2002: 1424).
Recent simulation-based studies provide additional support. Hodgson and
Knudsen (2004) model boundedly rational decision makers attempting to achieve
coordination in a simple case, deciding on which side of the road to drive on.
Their simulations demonstrate that habits and routines help boundedly rational
decision makers cope with uncertainty when they try to achieve coordination.

15Becker and Knudsen (2004) provide a more detailed treatment of the argument presented in
this section.
 Organizational routines: a review of the 659
literature

3.5 Stability
To the extent that routines recur without much change, they provide stability
(Hodgson, 1993a; Langlois, 1992; Nelson, 1994; Coombs and Metcalfe, 2000;
Amit and Belcourt, 1999). There are two different arguments for why routines
provide stability. The argument of the Carnegie school is that as long as an
existing routine gives satisfactory results, no conscious cognitive problem solving
is triggered to find another way to achieve the task (March and Simon, 1958;
Cyert and March, 1963). The other argument is a cost argument: whenever a
mode of executing a particular task is changed, this entails costs. New
participants need to be identified, and explicit or implicit contracts and
understandings about the actors need to be adjusted (Nelson, 1994).
Stability has important effects on organizations. Stability provides a baseline
against which to assess changes, compare and learn (Langlois, 1992; Postrel and
Rumelt, 1992; Shapira, 1994; Tyre and Orlikowski, 1996). Without a stable
baseline to compare with, drawing inferences from changes is impossible
(Knudsen, 2002a). The stability-providing effect of routines is therefore
important for learning. Stability, furthermore, gives rise to predictability, which
in turn aids coordination (Cyert and March, 1963; Nelson and Winter, 1982;
Langlois and Everett, 1994; Inkpen and Crossan, 1995).
At times, the stability-providing effect of routines does, however, develop into
a pathology. In such a case, routines persist despite negative performance
feedback (Steinbruner, 1974; Heiner, 1983; Kilduff, 1992; Leonard-Barton, 1995;
Rumelt, 1995; Hirshleifer and Welch, 1998). They also lead to inertia. The reason
is not that feedback mechanisms are absent. Routines (due to the interactions they
are composed of) enable feedback, but the feedback is ignored.
The most important empirical finding relating to stability, however, refers to
how change is endogenous to routines themselves. A number of case studies of
work in naval navigation and airline cockpits (Hutchins, 1991, 1995), call centers
and libraries (Pentland and Rueter, 1994), high-tech firms (Costello, 1996, 2000),
mobile phone networks (Narduzzo et al., 2000), housing organizations (Feldman,
2000, 2003), teams of surgeons (Edmondson et al., 2001), the NHS and a
chemical firm (Johnson, 2000), shop floors in the auto industry (Adler et al.,
1999), in software firms (Orlikowski, 2002) and an analysis of the Cuban Missile
Crisis (McKeown, 2001) have concluded that routines are not inert, but typically
change over time. Empirical studies of a housing organization by Martha
Feldman (Feldman, 2000, 2003) have underlined that routines have a great
potential for change due to an internal dynamic—participants responding to the
outcomes of previous iterations of a routine. Organizational routines thus
contribute to both stability and change, and play an important role for
organizational flexibility. Empirical evidence therefore now increasingly
contrasts the idea that routines are inert. Rather, the emerging idea is that routines
often change incrementally. For instance, the decision-making routine for
monitoring the progress of ongoing marketing campaigns might be ‘unchanged’
in that weekly meetings take
660 M. C.
Becker

place between the head of the marketing department, the head of the sales
department, and the respective product managers, and follow the same basic steps,
i.e. reviewing and discussing incoming data. At a certain point in time, reports
might be received not in paper form, but in electronic form—an incremental
change in the routine. We know from the literature that artifacts such as
information technology have an impact on the processes that they are used in
(Hutchins, 1991, 1995; Clark, 1997; D’Adderio, 2001, 2003). Even such a
seemingly irrelevant change changes the routine, the pattern of recurrent
interaction, with important consequences. Electronic documents, for instance,
enable automatic search, which makes certain facts much easier to detect. There
are many possibilities for incremental changes, regarding the artifacts involved,
the frequency of repetition, the participants, etc. Changes in all these dimensions
can potentially have an impact on the interaction, and therefore change the
routine further. Such incremental change is an essential characteristic of routines,
and not an anomaly or exception. Over time, a series of such incremental changes
might then add up to some more substantial gradual change. In this way, routines
are capable of adapting to novel circumstances. Moreover, such change is
endogenous, and can be explained by analyzing how routines change
incrementally. As it turns out, the role of actors in responding to, amongst others,
previous recurrences of the routine, is crucial (Feldman, 2000, 2003; Feldman and
Pentland, 2003).

3.6 Storing knowledge

Routines store knowledge. In Nelson and Winter (1982), an entire section,
entitled ‘Routine as organizational memory’, elaborates ‘that the routinisation of
activity in an organization constitutes the most important form of storage of
the organization’s specific operational knowledge’ (Nelson and Winter, 1982:
99). Routines (and the supporting skill packages) are a key repository of
knowledge in the firm (Winter, 1995) in the sense that they ‘represent successful
solutions to particular problems’ (Dosi et al., 1992: 191–192; Nelson and Winter,
1982; Winter, 1987a; Levitt and March, 1988; Miner,
1994; Teece and Pisano, 1994; Hodgson, 1998; Phillips, 2002; Zollo and Winter,
2002; Lillrank, 2003; cf. Grant, 1991, 1996; March et al., 1991). What sets
routines as knowledge repository apart from other kinds of knowledge
repositories such as databases and documents, is that routines are widely credited
with being able to store tacit knowledge (Winter, 1987b, 1994; Teece and Pisano,
1994; Teece et al., 1997; Hodgson, 1998, 1999b; Cohendet et al., 1999; Lazaric,
2000; Knott, 2003). The concept of routines is helpful for understanding how the
productive knowledge of firms (in particular tacit knowledge) is stored, applied,
decays and changes. To better understand why, consider the following. Productive
knowledge (what inputs to use, how to transform them, etc.) can be held by
individuals and/or the organization. Organizations structure the activity of its
members, including activity in which their individually held knowledge is
applied. Routines thus capture the ‘individually-held-knowledge- applied-in-the-
firm’ at its joints, namely, in its application (rather than attempting to describe
a person’s ‘knowledge stock’, as attempted in exams). At the same time,
 Organizational routines: a review of the 661
literature

routines also capture collectively held knowledge, i.e. that knowledge, which is
held by the firm, but is more than the knowledge held by its individual members.
Such knowledge could in principle be held in several knowledge repositories, for
instance in documents, databases, artifacts (such as prototypes) and physical
layout. Tacit knowledge, however, can not be held in such repositories.
One contribution of empirical research that helps to understand the role of
routines as knowledge repositories for tacit knowledge is the notion of
declarative and procedural knowledge. As Cohen and Bacdayan (1994: 554) have
explained, the term ‘procedural knowledge’ characterizes knowledge of how
things are done, which is relatively inarticulate and encompasses both cognitive
and motor activities. That definition is very close to Polanyi’s (1967) definition of
tacit knowledge, but adds some precision, namely that motor activities make up
an important part of procedural knowledge. If we interpret the term widely, we
can say that the activity involved in procedural knowledge is not just limited to
cognitive activity. Now, having argued that routines capture the individually held
knowledge at its joints, we can add the argument that they also capture the
collectively held knowledge very well (routines involve multiple actors, see
Section 2.3). Note that a thorough mapping of a routine would also include the
documents and artifacts used. Maybe the best example of such a mapping are
Hutchin’s studies, which describe in detail the artifacts, mnemonics, activities
and interactions involved in navigation of a ship (Hutchins, 1991) and an airplane
(Hutchins, 1995). Various empirical investigations support the idea that routines
store knowledge, including tacit knowledge: case studies into high-tech firms
(Costello, 2000), an analysis of the history of the US bicycle industry (Dowell
and Swaminathan, 2000), experiments (Cohen and Bacdayan, 1994) and case
studies of the replication of best-practice routines after the take-over of banks
(Winter and Szulanski, 2001a,b; Szulanski and Winter, 2002). A further insight
added by empirical research is that changes in the knowledge held in the
organization, for example the creation and articulation of knowledge, have an
impact on the routines in use. As case studies in the French food and steel
industries have illustrated, such changes put the routines and the ‘truce’
surrounding them in question (Lazaric and Denis, 2001; Lazaric et al., 2003).
Interesting findings have also been generated with regard to the dispersedness of
knowledge and the role of routines in dealing with it. Dispersedness of
knowledge means that actors have only a partial overlap of knowledge. The
conclusion of Egidi’s (1996) experimental study was that routines are one way
to deal with such a situation, allowing to re-create missing knowledge due to the
recombination of components of routines. From their study of technicians at a
mobile phone company, Narduzzo et al. (2000) add the insight that routines are
sometimes used as ‘quarry’, that is, they are used as ‘a system of manipulable
elements’, as a ‘structuring resource’ for manipulating the list of activities and
restructuring their position in time. Routines are used as heuristics: instead of
being executed in a precise way, they are followed as a guideline, with a rather
high portion of variation injected (Suchman, 1983).
662 M. C.
Becker

4. Conclusion
The literature review has shown there is a substantial literature that focuses on
routines and attempts to apply the concept of routines in empirical studies of
organizations. Against this background, it is time to assess what has been
achieved. What are routines? And what do we know about the effects routines have
on organizations?
Two different interpretations of the term ‘routines’ are widespread in the
literature: as behavioral regularities and as cognitive regularities. [A third
interpretation of routines as propensities has been (re-)established in the literature
recently.16] In the first case, routines are most precisely described as ‘recurrent
interaction patterns’, as described above. In the second case, routines are seen as
rules, standard operating procedures, etc. One conclusion from the literature
review is that the term ‘routines’ refers to a broad range of regularities in the
economy. Because the term has been used for referring to both cognitive and
behavioral regularities, an important conclusion from the literature review is the
necessity to always be precise which of the two kinds of regularities one refers to.
We will come back to the issue below.
Consensus is discernible regarding the question of the effects of routines on
organizations. Broadly speaking, routines allow organizations to do four things.
First and foremost, routines enable coordination. The capability of routines to enable
coordination builds on the basis of a balance between the interests of the participants
in the routine (the so-called ‘truce’). Triggers play an important role in bringing
about coordination. Second, routines provide some degree of stability of behavior. It
should be clear by now that ‘stability’ is a relative term—it always includes the
potential change that is endogenous to the routine due to the agency of its
participants (Feldman, 2000, 2003). The stability of behavior has the implication that
expectations about the behavior of others can be formed. Third, when tasks are
routinized, these tasks can often be executed in the realm of the sub-conscious,
thereby economizing on limited cognitive resources. Fourth, routines bind
knowledge, including tacit knowledge. Moreover, routines carve a crucially
important aspect of knowledge right at its joints, namely, its application. For this
reason, routines are also considered as the building blocks of organizational
capabilities (Dosi et al., 2000; Winter, 2003).
At this point we should also recall that when Nelson and Winter (1982)
invigorated research on organizational routines, they did so by pointing to the
potential of fitting the concept of organizational routines into the evolutionary
framework. How far have we come along this route of inquiry? It is remarkable
that attempts at actually specifying how routines are varied, selected, and retained,
are very few still. Winter has pursued the issue of the replication of routines
(Winter, 1990, 1995; Winter and Szulanski, 2001a,b;

16The interpretation of routines as propensities has recently been (re-)established by Hodgson

(2003) and Hodgson and Knudsen (2003a,b, 2004). They emphasize that routines are not
behavior, but see routines as stored behavioral capacities which involve knowledge and
memory. They involve organizational structures and individual habits which, when triggered,
lead to sequential behaviors (Hodgson and Knudsen, 2003a).
 Organizational routines: a review of the 663
literature

Szulanski and Winter, 2002; see also Szulanski, 1999; Hodgson and Knudsen,
2003a,b; Knott, 2003; Becker and Lazaric, 2004). Research on how routines are
changed (variation), and how they are selected, has been much thinner on the
ground (see Witt, 2001; Massini et al., 2002). That routines have often been
associated with stability and inertia has probably made it tempting to frame the
discussion in terms of variation despite routines, and has hampered research on the
variation of routines. It has certainly not helped that such an association is also
supported by the every-day meaning of the term in many languages. Research
does, of course, exist that in some way or the other discusses variation in relation
to routines. Only a series of recent publications (Feldman, 2000, 2003; Feldman
and Pentland, 2003; cf. Salvato, 2003) has firmly established that variation and
change are phenomena that are inherent and endogenous to routines, not in
opposition to them. The topic of the selection of routines, finally, has been almost
completely unbreached until recently, at least if we consider studies that focus on
the issue head-on (for exceptions, see Knudsen, 2002b; Plunkett, 2002; Hodgson
and Knudsen, 2003a).
Against this background, it is not surprising that progress on the routines-
portion of
the Nelson and Winter (1982) program has been slow. Speaking for the social
sciences more generally, other attempts at identifying ‘the equivalent of the gene
in the social realm’ and fitting it into an evolutionary theory have also run
into problems, as Hodgson (2003) and Hodgson and Knudsen (2003a,b) point
out. The most notable other candidate is the meme (Dawkins, 1976). Just like the
notion of an organizational routine, definitional ambiguity surrounds the use of
the term ‘meme’, which some authors take to refer to a unit of cultural imitation
(Dawkins, 1976), actively contagious ideas (Lynch, 1996) or the state of a node in
a neuronal network (Aunger, 2002), to name just a few definitions. Just like the
notion of organizational routines, there are different ideas about whether memes
are behavior or instructions for behavior (Blackmore, 1999). Finally, and again
just like the notion of organizational routines, the causal mechanisms by which
ideas lead to behavior are not identified (Hodgson, 2003). Unfortunately, it does
not seem likely that we can expect an easy breakthrough by drawing on ideas
from memetics. We need to turn back to what we know about routines, and
continue to improve our understanding of routines, their effects on organizations,
and how precisely they fit in an evolutionary theory of the economy. Let me draw
some conclusions from the literature review that might be helpful in this
endeavour.
The literature review has identified several sources of ambiguity still haunting
the
concept of routines: (i) the distinction of individual and collective recurrent
activity patterns; (ii) the fact that for some authors, the term ‘routines’ refers
to cognitive regularities (rules) and for others, to behavioral patterns (recurrent
interaction patterns); and (iii) the neglect of agency in the executing of behavior
patterns, or in the process of expressing rules in action.
Let me briefly address each of the three points. (i) Since the authoritative
statement of Dosi et al. (2000), we should all take distinguishing individual
and collective
664 M. C.
Becker

recurrent activity patterns (habits and routines) serious and make sure that we
eliminate this source of ambiguity.
(ii) Unfortunately, the issue is not that simple regarding the cognitive,
behavioral, and propensity-interpretations of the term ‘routines’. The term is used
by many people in many different contexts, and, it seems, to describe many
different ‘things’. The only commonality amongst those is that they have to do
something with repetition or regularity (such as recurrent activity, rules that lead
to recurrent activity, the content of tasks, effects of recurrent activity such as
boredom). It appears that not one individual concept can capture all of them, lest
the concept be so wide that it inevitably lacked sharpness. A possible solution is
to use different terms for referring to behavioral regularities, cognitive
regularities and propensities. A number of arguments are con- ceivable for why
the term ‘routine’ should refer to one or the other. I will not get into this debate
here. Suffice it to note one detail at this point. In the literature, the term ‘routine’ is
increasingly associated with behavior patterns17 (Jones and Craven, 2001; Karim
and Mitchell, 2000; Bessant et al., 2001; Edmondson et al., 2001; Emery, 2002;
Jarzabkowski and Wilson, 2002; Gittell, 2002; Zollo et al., 2002; Lillrank, 2003;
Salvato, 2003). Note that these are empirical studies.18 At the same time, recent
contributions to evolutionary theory in economics argue that routines, if
understood as behavior patterns, do not fit in the evolutionary framework
(Hodgson, 2003; Knudsen, 2002a, 2004; Hodgson and Knudsen, 2003a,b). On
the basis of the literature review, the gap between a behavioral and a cognitive
definition of routines appears to be aligned with a gap between the empirical
studies of routines in organizations on the one hand, and the literature focusing on
developing evolutionary theory on the other. This gap suggests the following
fruitful research questions: if recurrent interaction patterns (‘routines’ as understood
in the empirical literature) are important in organizations, then precisely what is
the role of recurrent interaction patterns in evolutionary theory? Is there a place
for recurrent interaction patterns in evolutionary theory, and precisely what place
is it? What are the mechanisms by which routines (defined in a way that is
consistent with evolutionary theory) are varied, selected and retained? How
precisely do cognitive regularities and behavior regularities relate to each other?
(In other words, how do rules bring about recurrent interaction patterns, and how
do recurrent interaction patterns bring about rules?) Interpreting routines as
propensities to express a certain behavior or thought (Hodgson, 2003; Hodgson
and Knudsen, 2003a,b, 2004) could hold the key to advancing our understanding
of these questions.
On the final point, (iii) the neglect of agency in the carrying out of
recurrent interaction patterns, Feldman’s recent contributions (2000, 2003)
have provided us with a more advanced starting point for addressing the first
question just raised, how
17‘Behavior’ is used here in distinction to the understanding of routines as cognitive regularities,

and thus as an umbrella term in the sense of footnotes 5 and 7.

18Itmakes sense that empirical studies of routines would have a bias towards a definition of
routines as behaviour patterns, due to their observability.
 Organizational routines: a review of the 665
literature

cognitive regularities and behavior regularities relate to each other. Identifying

precisely how agency influences the implementation and evolution of rules is an
important research task for further research (see Hodgson, 2004: ch. 2; Hodgson
and Knudsen, 2004). At the same time, it is a concrete step towards joining the
endeavors made in empirical research on routines on the one hand, and
conceptual research on the evolutionary framework in economics on the other
hand. Closing this double gap—between different streams of literature and
between the two different aspects the term routines refers to in the literature
(behavioral and cognitive regularities)—appears to hold the potential to advance
the Nelson and Winter (1982) project.

Acknowledgements
Preliminary versions of parts of this paper have been presented at the DRUID
Nelson and Winter conference, Aalborg, June 2001, and the EAEPE conference,
Siena, November, 2001. The author is grateful to Giovanni Dosi, Geoff Hodgson,
Thorbjørn Knudsen, Witold Kwasnicki, Nathalie Lazaric, Jochen Runde, Dylan
Sutherland, Malcolm Warner, Francesco Zirpoli, participants of the above
mentioned conferences and of the 2002 workshop on Empirical Research on
Routines (Odense, Denmark) for comments and suggestions. I am particularly
grateful to three anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions.
All remaining errors and omissions have been produced without any help. The
article is dedicated to the memory of the late Leonilda Marcheselli, in whose good
company much work on the revision was carried out.

Address for correspondence

Markus C. Becker, Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Bureau
d’Economie Théorique et Appliquée (BETA), Université Louis Pasteur, 61, Avenue
de la Forêt Noire, F-67085 Strasbourg Cedex, France. Email: becker@cournot.u-
strasbg.fr.

References
Adler, P. S., B. Goldoftas and D. I. Levine (1999), ‘Flexibility versus efficiency? A case study
of model changeovers in the Toyota production system,’ Organization Science, 10, 43–67.
Amit, R. and M. Belcourt (1999), ‘Human resources management processes—a value-
creating source of competitive advantage,’ European Management Journal, 17, 174–181.
Ashforth, B. E. and Y. Fried (1988), ‘The mindlessness of organisational behaviors,’ Human
Relations, 41, 305–329.
Ashmos, D., D. Duchon and R. McDaniel (1998), ‘Participation in strategic decision making:
the role of organisational predisposition and issue interpretation,’ Decision Sciences, 29, 25–
51.
Aunger, R. (2002), The Electric Meme. Free Press: New York.
Avery, J. F. (1996), ‘The influence of positive and negative normative feedback on the
development and persistence of group routines,’ PhD Thesis, Purdue University.
666 M. C.
Becker

Barnard, C. I. (1938 [1968]), The Functions of the Executive. Harvard University Press:
Cambridge, MA.
Barney, J. (1991), ‘Firm resources and sustained competitive advantage,’ Journal of Management,
17, 99–120.
Baumol, W. J. (2002), The Free-Market Innovation Machine. Analyzing the Growth Miracle of
Capitalism. Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ.
Becker, M. C. (2001), ‘The role of routines in organizations—an empirical and
taxonomic investigation,’ PhD Thesis, Judge Institute of Management, University of
Cambridge.
Becker, M. C. (2004), ‘The concept of routines—some clarifications,’ Cambridge Journal
of Economics, forthcoming.
Becker, M. C. and T. Knudsen (2004), ‘The role of routines in reducing uncertainty,’ Journal
of Business Research, forthcoming.
Becker, M. C. and N. Lazaric (2004), ‘The influence of knowledge in the replication of
routines,’
Economie Appliquée, LVI, 65–94.
Bessant, J., S. Caffyn and M. Gallagher (2001), ‘An evolutionary model of
continuous improvement behaviour,’ Technovation, 21, 67–77.
Betsch, T., K. Fiedler and J. Brinkmann (1998), ‘Behavioral routines in decision making:
the effects of novelty in task presentation and time pressure on routine maintenance and
deviation,’ European Journal of Psychology, 28, 861–878.
Betsch, T., J. Brinkmann, K. Fiedler and K. Breining (1999), ‘When prior knowledge
overrules new evidence: adaptive use of decision strategies and role behavioral routines,’
Swiss Journal of Psychology, 58, 151–160.
Betsch, T., S. Haberstroh, A. Glöckner, T. Haar and K. Fiedler (2001), ‘The effects of
routine strength on adaptation and information search in recurrent decision making,’
Organisational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes, 84, 23–53.
Blackmore, S. (1999), The Meme Machine. Oxford University Press: Oxford.
Bourdieu, P. (1992), Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press:
Cambridge.
Burns, J. (2000), ‘The dynamics of accounting change: Interplay between new practices,
routines, institutions, power and politics,’ Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, 13,
566–586.
Clark, A. (1997), Being There—Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again. MIT Press:
Cambridge, MA.
Cleveland, J. N. (1998), ‘Behaviour,’ in L. H. Peters, C. R. Greer and S. A. Youngblood (eds),
The Blackwell Encyclopedic Dictionary of Human Resource Management. Blackwell: Oxford.
Cohen, M. D. (1991), ‘Individual learning and organisational routine: emerging
connections,’
Organisation Science, 2, 135–139.
Cohen, M. and P. Bacdayan (1994), ‘Organisational routines are stored as procedural
memory: evidence from a laboratory study,’ Organisation Science, 5, 554–568.
Cohen, M. D., R. Burkhart, G. Dosi, M. Egidi, L. Marengo, M. Warglien and S. Winter
(1996), ‘Routines and other recurring action patterns of organisations: contemporary
research issues,’ Industrial and Corporate Change, 5, 653–698.
 Organizational routines: a review of the 667
literature

Cohendet, P. and P. Llerena (2003), ‘Routines and incentives: the role of communities in the
firm,’
Industrial and Corporate Change, 12, 271–297.
Cohendet, P., F. Kern, B. Mehmanpazir and F. Munier (1999), ‘Knowledge coordination,
competence creation and integrated networks in globalised firms,’ Cambridge Journal
of Economics, 23, 225–241.
Coombs, R. and S. Metcalfe (2000), ‘Organizing for innovation: co-ordinating distributed
innovation capabilities,’ in N. Foss and V. Mahnke (eds), Competence, Governance,
and Entrepreneurship—Advances in Economic Strategy Research, pp. 209–231. Oxford
University Press: Oxford.
Coriat, B. (1995), ‘Variety, routines and networks: the metamorphosis of Fordist firms,’
Industrial and Corporate Change, 4, 205–227.
Coriat, B. and G. Dosi (1998), ‘Learning how to govern and learning how to solve
problems: on the co-evolution of competences, conflicts, and organisational routines’ in
A. D. J. Chandler,
P. Hadstroem and O. Soelvell (eds), The Role of Technology, Strategy, Organisation, and
Regions. Oxford University Press: Oxford.
Costello, N. (1996), ‘Learning and routines in high-tech SMEs: analyzing rich case
study material,’ Journal of Economic Issues, 30, 591–597.
Costello, N. (2000), Stability and Change in High-Tech Enterprises—Organisational Practices
and Routines. Routledge: London.
Cyert, R. M. and J. G. March (1963 [1992]), A Behavioral Theory of the Firm. Blackwell:
Oxford.
D’Adderio, L. (2001), ‘Crafting the virtual prototype: how firms integrate knowledge and
capabilities across organisational boundaries,’ Research Policy, 30, 1409–1424.
D’Adderio, L. (2003), ‘Configuring software, reconfiguring memories: the influence of
integrated systems on the reproduction of knowledge and routines,’ Industrial and
Corporate Change, 12, 321–350.
Daft, R. L. and R. H. Lengel (1986), ‘Organizational information requirements, media
richness and structural design,’ Management Science, 32, 554–571.
David, P. A. (1997), ‘Path dependence and the quest for historical economics: one more
chorus of the ballad of QWERTY,’ Discussion Papers in Economic and Social History no.
20, University of Oxford.
Dawkins, R. (1976), The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press: Oxford.
Delmestri, G. (1998), ‘Do all roads lead to Rome . . . or Berlin? The evolution of intra- and
inter-organisational routines in the machine-building industry,’ Organisation Studies,
19, 639–665.
Dosi, G. and M. Egidi (1991), ‘Substantive and procedural uncertainty—an exploration of
economic behaviours in changing environments,’ Journal of Evolutionary Economics,
1, 145–168.
Dosi, G. and J. S. Metcalfe (1991), ‘On some notions of irreversibility in economics,’
in
J. S. Metcalfe and P. P. Saviotti (eds), Evolutionary Theories of Economic and Technological
Change, pp. 41–55. Harwood: Chur.
Dosi, G., D. Teece and S. Winter (1992), ‘Toward a theory of corporate coherence:
some
668 M. C.
Becker

preliminary remarks,’ in G. Dosi, R. Giannetti and P. A. Toninelli (eds), Technology

and Enterprise in a Historical Perspective, pp. 185–211. Clarendon Press: Oxford.
Dosi, G., R. R. Nelson and S. G. Winter (2000), ‘Introduction: the nature and dynamics of
organisational capabilities,’ in G. Dosi, R. R. Nelson and S. G. Winter (eds), The Nature
and Dynamics of Organisational Capabilities, pp. 1–22. Oxford University Press:
Oxford.
Dowell, G. and A. Swaminathan (2000), ‘Racing and back-pedalling into the future: new
product introduction and organisational mortality in the US bicycle industry, 1880–1918,’
Organisation Studies, 21, 405–431.
Dubuisson, S. (1998), ‘Regard d’u n sociologue sur la notion de routine dans la
théorie évolutionniste,’ Sociologie du travail, XL, 491–502.
Dyer, J. H. and H. Singh (1998), ‘The relational view: cooperative strategy and
sources of interorganizational competitive advantage,’ Academy of Managemet Review, 23,
660–679.
Edmondson, A. C., R. M. Bohmer and G. P. Pisano (2001), ‘Disrupted routines: team learning
and new technology implementation in hospitals,’ Administrative Science Quarterly, 46, 685–
716.
Egidi, M. (1992), ‘Organisational learning, problem solving and the division of labour,’
in
H. A. Simon, M. Egidi, R. Marris and R. Viale (eds), Economics, Bounded Rationality and
the Cognitive Revolution, pp. 148–173. Edward Elgar: Aldershot.
Egidi, M. (1996), ‘Routines, hierarchies of problems, procedural behaviour: some evidence
from experiments,’ in K. Arrow, E. Colombatto, M. Perlman and C. Schmidt (eds), The
Rational Foundations of Economic Behaviour, pp. 303–333. Macmillan: London.
Egidi, M. and A. Narduzzo (1997), ‘The emergence of path-dependent behaviors in
cooperative contexts,’ International Journal of Industrial Organisation, 15, 677–709.
Egidi, M. and M. Ricottili (1997), ‘Coordination and specialization as coevolutionary
processes,’ in R. Conte, R. Hegselmann and P. Terna (eds), Simulating Social Phenomena,
Lectures Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems, pp. 456–474. Springer Verlag:
Heidelberg.
Elam, M. (1993), Innovation as the Craft of Combination—Perspective on Technology and
Economy in the Spirit of Schumpeter. Linkoeping: Department of Technology and Social
Change.
Emery, J. D. (2002), ‘Designing firm integrating processes from the knowledge-based
view,’
Computational & Mathematical Organization Theory, 8, 243–250.
Feldman, M. S. (2000), ‘Organisational routines as a source of continuous change,’
Organisation Science, 11, 611–629.
Feldman, M. S. (2003), ‘A performative perspective on stability and change in
organizational routines,’ Industrial and Corporate Change, 12, 727–752.
Feldman, M. S. and B. T. Pentland (2003), ‘Reconceptualizing organizational routines as a
source of flexibility and change,’ Administrative Science Quarterly, 48, 94–118.
Feldman, M. S. and A. Rafaeli (2002), ‘Organisational routines as sources of connections
and understandings,’ Journal of Management Studies, 39, 309–331.
Foss, N. J. (1997), ‘Evolutionary and contractual theories of the firm: how do they relate?’
Rivista Internazionale di Scienze Sociali, 29, 63–91.
Foster, J. F. (1981), ‘Syllabus for problems of modern society: the theory of
institutional adjustment,’ Journal of Economic Issues, 15, 929–935.
 Organizational routines: a review of the 669
literature

Fransmann, M. (1998), ‘Information, knowledge, vision and theories of the firm,’ in G.

Dosi,
D. Teece and J. Chytry (eds), Technology, Organisation and Competitiveness, pp. 147–192.
Oxford University Press: Oxford.
Garapin, A. and A. Hollard (1999), ‘Routines and incentives in group tasks,’ Journal
of Evolutionary Economics, 9, 465–486.
Garud, R. and M. A. Rappa (1994), ‘A socio-cognitive model of technology
evolution,’
Organisation Science, 5, 344–362.
Gersick, C. J. and J. R. Hackman (1990), ‘Habitual routines in task-performing
groups,’
Organisational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes, 47, 65–97.
Giddens, A. (1984), The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Polity
Press: Cambridge.
Ginsberg, A. and J. A. C. Baum (1994), ‘Evolutionary processes and patterns of core
business change,’ in J. A. C. Baum and J. V. Singh (eds), Evolutionary Dynamics of
Organisations, pp. 127–151. Oxford Unversity Press: Oxford.
Gittell, J. H. (2002), ‘Coordinating mechanisms in care provider groups: relational
coordination as a mediator and input uncertainty as moderator of performance
effects,’ Management Science, 48, 1408–1426.
Gordon, R. A. and J. E. Howell (1959), Higher Education for Business. Columbia University
Press: New York.
Grant, R. (1991), ‘The resource-based theory of competitive advantage: implications for
strategy formulation,’ Califoria Management Review, 33, 114–135.
Grant, R. (1996), ‘Toward a knowledge-based theory of the firm,’ Strategic Management
Journal,
17, 109–122.
Hall, R. L. and C. J. Hitch (1939), ‘Price theory and business behaviour,’ Oxford Economic Papers,
2, 12–45.
Hannan, M. T. and J. Freeman (1989), Organisational Ecology. Harvard University Press:
Cambridge, MA.
Hayek, F. A. von (1945), ‘The use of knowledge in society,’ American Economic Review,
35, 519–530.
Hayek, F. A. von (1952), The Sensory Order—An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical
Psychology. Routledge & Kegan Paul: London.
Heiner, R. (1983), ‘The origin of predictable behaviour,’ American Economic Review, 73, 560–595.
Hill, C., P. Hwang and W. C. Kim (1990), ‘An eclectic theory of the choice of international
entry mode,’ Strategic Management Journal, 11, 117–128.
Hirshleifer, D. and I. Welch (1998), ‘ A rational economic approach to the psychology of
change: amnesia, inertia, and impulsiveness,’ mimeo, Anderson Graduate School of
Management, UCLA.
Hodgson, G. M. (1988), Economics and Institutions. Polity Press:
Oxford. Hodgson, G. M. (1993a), Economics and Evolution. Polity Press:
Cambridge.
Hodgson, G. M. (1993b), ‘Institutional economics: surveying the “old” and the “new”,’
Metroeconomica, 44, 1–28.
670 M. C.
Becker

Hodgson, G. M. (1997), ‘The ubiquity of habits and rules,’ Cambridge Journal of Economics,
21, 663–684.
Hodgson, G. M. (1998), ‘The approach of institutional economics,’ Journal of
Economic Literature, 36, 166–192.
Hodgson, G. M. (1999a), Economics and Utopia—Why the Learning Economy is Not the End of
History. Routledge: London.
Hodgson, G. M. (1999b), Evolution and Institutions—On Evolutionary Economics and the
Evolution of Economics. Edward Elgar: Cheltenham.
Hodgson, G. M. (2001), How Economics Forgot History: The Problem of Historical Specificity
in Social Science. Routledge: London.
Hodgson, G. M. (2003), ‘The mystery of the routine: the Darwinian destiny of An
Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change,’ Revue Économique, 54, 355–384.
Hodgson, G. M. (2004), The Evolution of Institutional Economics: Agency, Structure and
Darwinism in American Institutionalism. Routledge: London.
Hodgson, G. M. and T. Knudsen (2003a), ‘The firm as an interactor: firms as vehicles for
habits and routines,’ Journal of Evolutionary Economics, forthcoming.
Hodgson, G. M. and T. Knudsen (2003b), ‘The replication of habits,’ mimeo, University of
Hertfordshire.
Hodgson, G. M. and T. Knudsen (2004), ‘The complex evolution of a simple traffic
convention: the functions and implications of habit,’ Journal of Economic Behavior and
Organization, 54, 19–47.
Hutchins, E. (1991), ‘Organizing work by adaptation,’ Organization Science, 2, 14–39.
Hutchins, E. (1995), ‘How a cockpit remembers its speeds,’ Cognitive Science, 19, 265–
288.
Inam, A. (1997), ‘Institutions, routines, and crises: post-earthquake housing recovery in
Mexico City and Los Angeles,’ PhD Thesis, University of Southern California.
Inam, A. (1999), ‘Institutions, routines, and crises—post-earthquake housing recovery in
Mexico City and Los Angeles,’ Cities, 16, 391–407.
Inbar, M. (1979), Routine Decision-Making: The Future of Bureaucracy. Sage: Beverly Hills, CA.
Inkpen, A. and M. Crossan (1995), ‘Believing is seeing: joint ventures and organisation
learning,’
Journal of Management Studies, 32, 595–619.
James, W. (1890 [1950]), The Principles of Psychology. Dover Publications: New York.
Jarzabkowski, P. and D. C. Wilson (2002), ‘Top teams and strategy in a UK university,’
Journal of Management Studies, 39, 368–380.
Johnson, G. (2000), ‘Strategy through a cultural lens—learning from managers’ experience,’
Management Learning, 31, 403–426.
Jones, O. and M. Craven (2001), ‘Beyond the routine: innovation management and the
teaching company scheme,’ Technovation, 21, 267–279.
Karim, S. and W. Mitchell (2000), ‘Path-dependent and path-breaking change:
reconfiguring business resources following acquisitions in the U.S. medial sector,
1978–1995,’ Strategic Management Journal, 21, 1061–1081.
 Organizational routines: a review of the 671
literature

Katona, G. (1946), ‘Psychological analysis of business decisions and expectations,’ American

Economic Review, 36, 44–62.
Keynes, J. M. (1973), Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Vol. 4. The General Theory
and after, Part II: Defense and Development. Macmillan: London.
Kilduff, M. (1992), ‘Performance and interaction routines in multinational corporations,’
Journal of International Business Studies, 23, 133–145.
Knight, F. (1921), Risk, Uncertainty and Profit. Houghton: Boston, MA.
Knott, A. M. (2003), ‘The organizational routines factor market paradox,’ Strategic
Management Journal, 24, 929–943.
Knott, A. M. and B. McKelvey (1999), ‘Nirvana efficiency: a comparative test of residual
claims and routines,’ Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organisation, 38, 365–383.
Knudsen, T. (2002a), ‘The significance of tacit knowledge in the evolution of human
language,’
Selection, 3, 93–112.
Knudsen, T. (2002b), ‘Economic selection theory,’ Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 12,
443–470.
Knudsen, T. (2004), ‘General selection theory and economic evolution. The Price equation
and the genotype/phenotype distinction’ Journal of Economic Methodology, forthcoming.
Koestler, A. (1967), The Ghost in the Machine. Hutchinson: London.
Kogut, B. and U. Zander (1992), ‘Knowledge of the firm, combinative capabilities, and the
replication of technology,’ Organisation Science, 3, 383–397.
Kogut, B. and U. Zander (1993), ‘Knowledge of the firm and the evolutionary theory of
the multinational corporation,’ Journal of International Business Studies, 24, 625–645.
Langlois, R. N. (1992), ‘Transaction–cost economics in real time,’ Industrial and
Corporate Change, 1, 99–127.
Langlois, R. N. and M. Everett (1994), ‘What is evolutionary economics?,’ in L. Magnusson
(ed.),
Evolutionary and Neo-Schumpeterian Approaches to Economics, pp. 11–48. Kluwer: Dordrecht.
Langlois, R. N. and P. L. Robertson (1995), Firms, Markets and Economic Change.
Routledge:
London.
Lazaric, N. (2000), ‘The role of routines, rules and habits in collective learning:
Some epistemological and ontological considerations,’ European Journal of Economic
and Social Systems, 14, 157–171.
Lazaric N. and B. Denis (2001), ’How and why routines change: some lessons from the
articulation of knowledge with ISO 9002 implementation in the food industry,’
Economies et Sociétés, 6, 585–612.
Lazaric, N. and P.-A. Mangolte (1998), ‘Routines et mémoire organisationelle:
un questionnement critique de la perspective cognitiviste,’ Revue Internationale de
Systémique, 12, 27–49.
Lazaric, N. and L. Marengo (2000), ‘Towards a characterisation of assets and knowledge
created in technological agreements: some evidence from the automobile sector,’ Industrial
and Corporate Change, 9, 53–86.
Lazaric, N., P.-A. Mangolte and M.-L. Massué (2003), ‘Articulation and codification of know-
how
672 M. C.
Becker

in the steel industry: some evidence from blast furnace control in France,’ Research Policy,
32, 1829–1847.
Leonard-Barton, D. (1995), Wellsprings of Knowledge—Building and Sustaining the Sources of
Innovation. Harvard Business School Press: Boston, MA.
Levinthal, D. and J. G. March (1981): ‘A model of adaptive organizational search,’ in J. G.
March (ed.), Decisions and Organizations, pp. 187–218. Basil Blackwell: Oxford.
Levitt, B. and J. March (1988), ‘Organisational learning,’ Annual Review of Sociology, 14, 319–
340. Lillrank, P. (2003), ‘The quality of standard, routine and nonroutine processes,’
Organization
Studies, 24, 215–233.
Lippman, S. A. and R. P. Rumelt (1982), ‘Uncertain imitability: an analysis of
interfirm differences under competition,’ Bell Journal of Economics, 13, 418–438.
Louis, M. R. and R. I. Sutton (1991), ‘Switching cognitive gears: from habits of mind to
active thinking,’ Human Relations, 44, 55–76.
Lynch, A. (1996), Thought Contagion: How Beliefs Spread Through Society. Basic Books: New
York. Madhok, A. (1997), ‘Cost, value and foreign market entry mode: the transaction and
the firm,’
Strategic Management Journal, 18, 39–61.
Malerba, F. and L. Orsenigo (1996), ‘Technological regimes and firm behaviour,’ in G. Dosi
and
F. Malerba (eds), Organisation and Strategy in the Evolution of the Enterprise, pp. 42–71.
Macmillan: Houndmills.
Mangolte, P.-A. (1997a), ‘La dynamique des connaissances tacites et articulées: une approche
socio-cognitive,’ Economie Appliquée, Tome L 105–134.
Mangolte, P.-A. (1997b), ‘Le concept de ‘routine organisationelle’ entre cognition et
institution,’ PhD Thesis, Université Paris-Nord, U.F.R. de Sciences Economiques et de
Gestion, Centre de Recherche en Economie Industrielle.
Mangolte, P.-A. (2000), ‘Organisational learning and the organisational link: the problem
of conflict, political equilibrium and truce,’ European Journal of Economic and Social
Systems, 14, 173–190.
March, J. G. (1988), ‘Introduction: a chronicle of speculations about organizational decision-
making,’ in J. G. March (ed.), Decisions and Organizations, pp. 1–24. Basil Blackwell: Oxford.
March, J. G. (1994a), ‘The evolution of evolution,’ in J. A. C. Baum and J. V. Singh
(eds),
Evolutionary Dynamics of Organisations, pp. 39–49. Oxford Unversity Press: Oxford.
March, J. G. (1994b), Three Lectures on Efficiency and Adaptiveness in Organizations.
Helsinki: Swedish School of Economics and Business Adminstration.
March, J. G. and J. P. Olsen (1976), Ambiguity and Choice in Organisations.
Universitetsforlaget: Oslo.
March, J. G. and J. P. Olsen (1989), Rediscovering Institutions—The Organisational Basis of
Politics. The Free Press: New York.
March, J. G. and Z. Shapira (1987), ‘Managerial perspectives on risk and risk-taking. Manage-
ment science,’ in J. G. March (ed.), Decisions and Organizations, pp. 76–97. Basil Blackwell:
Oxford.
 Organizational routines: a review of the 673
literature

March, J. G. and H. A. Simon (1958 [1993]), Organizations. Blackwell: Oxford.

March, J. G., L. S. Sproull and M. Tamuz (1991), ‘Learning from samples of one or
fewer,’
Organisation Science, 2, 1–13.
Massini, S., A. Y. Lewin, T. Numagami and A. M. Pettigrew (2002), ‘The evolution
of organizational routines among large Western and Japanese firms,’ Research
Policy, 31, 1333–1348.
McKeown, T. J. (2001), ‘Plans and routines, bureaucratic bargaining, and the Cuban missile
crisis,’ The Journal of Politics, 63, 1163–1190.
McKern, B. (1993), ‘An evolutionary approach to strategic management in the
international firm,’ in P. Lorange, Chakravarthy, J. Roos and A. Van de Ven (eds),
Implementing Strategic Processes: Change, Learning and Cooperation, pp. 349–372.
Blackwell: Oxford.
Menuhin, J. and J. McGee (2001), ‘Strategizing routines in HSBC (UK),’ paper presented at
the Nelson and Winter DRUID conferences, Aalborg, June, 2001.
Miner, A. S. (1991), ‘Organizational evolution and the social ecology of jobs,’
American Sociological Review, 56, 772–785.
Miner, A. S. (1994), ‘Seeking adaptive advantage: evolutionary theory and managerial action,’
in
J. Baum and J. Singh (eds), Evolutionary Dynamics of Organisations, pp. 76–89.
Oxford University Press: Oxford.
Minkler, A. P. (1993), ‘The problem with dispersed knowledge: firms in theory and
practice,’
Kyklos, 46, 569–587.
Montgomery, C. (1995), ‘Of diamonds and rust: a new look at resources,’ in C.
Montgomery (ed.), Resource-based and Evolutionary Theories of the Firm—Towards a
Synthesis, pp. 251–268. Kluwer: Dordrecht.
Morosini, P., S. Shane and H. Singh (1998), ‘National cultural distance and cross-
border acquisition performance,’ Journal of International Business Studies, 29, 137–158.
Munby, H., J. Versnel, N. L. Hutchinson, P. Chin and D. H. Berg (2003), ‘Workplace learning
and the metacognitive functions of routines,’ Journal of Workplace Learning, 15, 94–104.
Murphy, J. B. (1994), ‘The kinds of order in society,’ in P. Mirowski (ed.), Natural Images
in Economic Thought: Markets Read in Tooth and Claw, pp. 536–82. Cambridge University
Press: Cambridge.
Narduzzo, A., E. Rocco and M. Warglien (2000), ‘Talking about routines in the field,’ in G.
Dosi,
R. Nelson and S. Winter (eds), The Nature and Dynamics of Organizational Capabilities,
pp. 27–50. Oxford University Press: Oxford.
Nelson, R. R. (1994), ‘Routines,’ in G. Hodgson, W. Samuels and M. Tool (eds), The
Elgar Companion to Institutional and Evolutionary Economics, vol. 2, pp. 249–253. Edward
Elgar: Aldershot.
Nelson, R. R. (1995), ‘Recent evolutionary theorizing about economic change,’ Journal
of Economic Literature, 33, 48–90.
Nelson, R. R. and K. Nelson (2002), ‘Technology, institutions, and innovation systems,’
Research Policy, 31, 265–272.
Nelson, R. R. and S. G. Winter (1973), ‘Toward an evolutionary theory of economic
capabilities,’
American Economic Review (Papers and Proceedings), 68, 440–449.
674 M. C.
Becker

Nelson, R. R. and S. G. Winter (1982), An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change. Belknap

Press/Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA.
Nelson, R. R. and S. G. Winter (2002), ‘Evolutionary theorizing in economics,’ Journal
of Economic Perspectives, 16, 23–46.
Nonaka, I. and H. Takeuchi (1995), The Knowledge-Creating Company. Oxford: Oxford
University Press: Oxford.
North, D. C. (1990), Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge
University Press: Cambridge.
Oliver, C. (1997), ‘Sustainable competitive advantage: combining institutional and resource-
based views,’ Strategic Management Journal, 18, 697–713.
Orlikowski, W. J. (2002), ‘Knowing in practice: enacting a collective capability in distributed
organizing,’ Organization Science, 13, 249–273.
Penrose, E. (1959 [1995]), The Theory of the Growth of the Firm. Oxford University Press:
Oxford. Pentland, B. T. (1992), ‘Organizing moves in software support hot lines,’
Administrative Science
Quarterly, 37, 527–548.
Pentland, B. T. (1995), ‘Grammatical models of organizational processes,’ Organizational
Studies,
6, 541–556.
Pentland, B. T. (2003a), ‘Conceptualizing and measuring variety in the execution of
organizational work processes,’ Management Science, 49, 857–870.
Pentland, B. T. (2003b), ‘Sequential variety in work processes,’ Organizational Studies, 14,
528–540.
Pentland, B. T. and H. Rueter (1994), ‘Organisational routines as grammars of action,’
Administrative Sciences Quarterly, 39, 484–510.
Perren, L. and P. Grant (2000), ‘The evolution of management accounting routines in
small businesses: a social construction perspective,’ Management Accounting Research, 11,
391–411.
Phillips, D. J. (2002), ‘A genealogical approach to organizational life chances: the parent–
progeny transfer among Silicon Valley law firms, 1946–1996,’ Administrative Science
Quarterly, 47, 474–506.
Plunkett, A. (2002), ‘The role of selection in the evolutino of organizational routines,’
mimeo, University Paris Sud, presented at the conference ‘Empirical Research on Routines
in Business and Economics,’ Odense, Denmark, 3–4 November 2002.
Polanyi, M. (1967), The Tacit Dimension. Routledge & Kegan Paul: London. .
Postrel, S. and R. Rumelt (1992), ‘Incentives, routines, and self-command,’ Industrial
and Corporate Change, 1, 397–425.
Reason, J. (1990), Human Error. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
Reynaud, B. (1998), ‘Les propriétés des routines: outils pragmatiques de décision et
modes de coordination collective,’ Sociologie du travail, 1998, 465–477.
Rivkin, J. W. (2001), ‘Reproducing knowledge: replication without imitation at
moderate complexity,’ Organization Science, 12, 274–293.
Rumelt, R. P. (1995), ‘Inertia and transformation,’ in C. Montgomery (ed.), Resource-based
and Evolutionary Theories of the Firm—Towards a Synthesis, pp. 101–132. Kluwer:
Dordrecht.
 Organizational routines: a review of the 675
literature

Salvato, C. (2003), ‘The role of micro-strategies in the engineering of firm evolution,’ Journal
of Management Studies, 40, 83–108.
Sanchez, R., A. Heene and H. Thomas (1996), ‘Towards the theory and practice
of competence-based competition,’ in R. Sanchez, A. Heene and H. Thomas (eds),
Dynamics of Competence-Based Competition: Theory and Practice in the New Strategic
Management, pp. 1–36. Pergamon/Elsevier: Oxford.
Scapens, R. W. (1994), ‘Never mind the gap: towards an institutional perspective on
management accounting practice,’ Management Accounting Research, 5, 301–321.
Schneier, W. L. (1995), ‘The development and modification of managerial decision-
making routines: a social cognition perspective,’ PhD thesis, Ohio State University.
Segelod, E. (1997), ‘The content and role of the investment manual—a research
note,’
Management Accounting Research, 8, 221–231.
Shapira, Z. (1994), ‘Commentary: evolution, externalities, and managerial action,’ in J. Baum
and
J. Singh (eds), Evolutionary Dynamics of Organisations, pp. 117–124. Oxford University
Press: Oxford.
Sherer, P. D., N. Rogovksy and N. Wright (1998), ‘What drives employment relations in
taxicab organisations?,’ Organisation Science, 9, 34–48.
Simon, H. A. (1947/1997), Administrative Behaviour. The Free Press: New York.
Simon, H. A. (1955), ‘A behavioral model of rational choice,’ Quarterly Journal of Economics,
69, 99–118.
Simon, H. A. (1965), ‘Decision making as an economic resource,’ in L. H. Seltzer (ed.),
New Horizons of Economic Progress. Wayne State University: Detroit, MI. [Reprinted in H.
A. Simon (1982), Models of Bounded Rationality, Vol. 2: Behavioral Economics and Business
Organization, pp. 77–84. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA.]
Simon, H. A. (1967), ‘Programs as factors of production,’ Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual
Winter Meeting, 1966, Industrial Relations Research Association, pp. 178–188. [Reprinted in
H. A. Simon (1982), Models of Bounded Rationality, Vol. 2: Behavioral Economics and
Business Organization, pp. 134–145. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA.]
Simon, H. A. (1976), ‘From substantive to procedural rationality,’ pp. 129–161 in Method
and Appraisal in Economics, edited by S. J. Latsis. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
Simon, H. A. (1977), The New Science of Management Decision. Prentice-Hall: Englewood
Cliffs, NJ.
Simon, H. A. (1983), Reason in Human Affairs. Blackwell: Oxford.
Simon, H. A. et al. (1992), ‘Colloquium with H. A. Simon,’ in H. A. Simon, M. Egidi, R. Marris
and
R. Viale (eds), Economics, Bounded Rationality and the Cognitive Revolution, pp. 8–38.
Edward Elgar: Aldershot.
Spender, J.-C. (1989), Industry Recipes—An Enquiry into the Nature and Sources of
Managerial Judgement. Basil Blackwell: Oxford.
Steinbruner, J. D.(1974), The Cybernetic Theory of Decision—New Dimensions of Political
Analysis. Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ.
Stene, E. O. (1940), ‘Public administration—an approach to a science of
administration,’
American Political Science Review, 34, 1124–1137.
676 M. C.
Becker

Suchman, L. A. (1983), ‘Office procedure as practical action: models of work and system
design,’
ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 1, 320–328.
Suchman, L. A. (1987), Plans and Situated Actions—The Problem of Human–Machine
Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Swaan, W. and M. Lissowska (1996), ‘Capabilities, routines, and east european economic
reform: Hungary and Poland before and after the 1989 revolutions,’ Journal of
Economic Issues, 30, 1031–1056.
Szulanski, G. (1999), ‘Appropriability and the challenge of scope: Banc One
routinizes replication,’ in G. Dosi, R. R. Nelson and S. G. Winter (eds), Nature and
Dynamics of Organisational Capabilities, pp. 69–97. Oxford University Press: Oxford.
Szulanski, G. and S. Winter (2002), ‘Getting it right the second time,’ Harvard Business
Review,
80, 62–71.
Teece, D. and G. Pisano (1994), ‘The dynamic capabilities of firms: an introduction,’
Industrial and Corporate Change, 3, 537–556.
Teece, Rumelt, Dosi and Winter (1994), DETAILS?
Teece, D. , G. Pisano and A. Shuen (1997), ‘Dynamic capabilities and strategic
management,’
Strategic Management Journal, 18, 509–534.
Tranfield, D. and S. Smith (1998): ‘The strategic regeneration of manufacturing by changing
routines,’ International Journal of Operations & Production Management, 18, 114–129.
Tyre, M. J. and W. J. Orlikowski (1996), ‘The episodic process of learning by using,’
International Journal of Technology Management, 11, 790–798.
Warglien, M. (1995), ‘Hierarchical selection and organisational adaptation,’ Industrial
and Corporate Change, 4, 161–186.
Weick, K. E. (1979), The Social Psychology of Organizing. Addison-Wesley: Reading, MA.
Weick, K. E. (1990), ‘The vulnerable system: an analysis of the tenerife air disaster,’ Journal of
Management, 16, 571–593.
Weick, K. E. (1993), ‘The collapse of sensemaking in organizations: the Mann–Gulch disaster,’
Administrative Science Quarterly, 38, 628–652.
Weiss, H. M. and D. R. Ilgen (1985), ‘Routinized behaviour in organisations,’ Journal of
Behavioral Economics, 14, 57–67.
Winter, S. G. (1964), ‘Economic “natural selection” and the theory of the firm,’ Yale Economic
Essays, 4, 225–272.
Winter, S. G. (1975), ‘Optimization and evolution in the theory of the firm,’ in R. Day
and
T. Groves (eds), Adaptive Economic Models, pp. 73–118. Academic Press: New York.
Winter, S. G. (1985): ‘The case for “mechanistic” decision making,’ in J. M. Pennings (ed.),
Organizational Strategy and Change, pp. 99–113. Jossey-Bass: San Francisco, CA.
Winter, S. G. (1986), ‘The research program of the behavioral theory of the firm: orthodox
critique and evolutionary perspective,’ in B. Gilad and S. Kaish (eds), Handbook of
Behavioral Economics, vol. A, pp. 151–188. JAI Press: Greenwich, CT.
Winter, S. G. (1987a), ‘Knowledge and competence as strategic assets,’ in D. Teece (ed.),
The
 Organizational routines: a review of the 677
literature

Competitive Challenge—Strategies for Industrial Innovation and Renewal, pp. 157–184.

Ballinger: Cambridge, MA.
Winter, S. G. (1987b), ‘Natural selection and evolution,’ in J. Eatwell, M. Milgate and P.
Newman (eds), The New Palgrave of Economics, vol. 3, pp. 614–617. Macmillan: London.
Winter, S. G. (1990), ‘Survival, selection, and inheritance in evolutionary theories of
organisation,’ in J. V. Singh (ed.), Organisational Evolution—New Directions, pp. 269–297.
Sage: Newbury Park, CA.
Winter, S. G. (1994), ‘Organizing for continuous improvement: evolutionary theory meets
the quality revolution,’ in J. Baum and J. Singh (eds), Evolutionary Dynamics of
Organisations, pp. 90–108. Oxford University Press: Oxford.
Winter, S. G. (1995), ‘Four Rs of profitability: rents, resources, routines, and replication,’
in
C. Montgomery (ed.), Resource-Based and Evolutionary Theories of the Firm—Towards a
Synthesis, pp. 147–178. Kluwer: Dordrecht.
Winter, S. G. (2003), ‘Understanding dynamic capabilities,’ Strategic Management Journal,
24, 991–995.
Winter, S. G. and G. Szulanski (2001a), ‘Replication as strategy,’ Organization Science,
12, 730–743.
Winter, S. G. and G. Szulanski (2001b), ‘Replication of organisational routines:
conceptualizing the exploitation of knowledge assets,’ in N. Bontis and C.W. Choo
(eds), The Strategic Management of Intellectual Capital and Organisational Knowledge: A
Collection of Readings, pp. 207–221. Oxford University Press: New York.
Witt, U. (2001), ‘Conceptions vs. routines—on the development of firms and the
evolution of markets,’ Papers on Economics & Evolution, no. 0107, Max Planck Institute
for Research into Economic Systems, Jena.
Zellmer-Bruhn, M. E. (1999), ‘The effects of time pressure and interruptions on team
external acquisition of work routines,’ PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin,
Madison, WI.
Zellmer-Bruhn, M. E. (2003), ‘Interruptive events and team knowledge acquisition,’
Management Science, 49, 514–528.
Zollo, M., J. J. Reuer and H. Singh (2002), ‘Interorganizational routines and performance
in strategic alliances,’ Organization Science, 13, 701–713.
Zollo, M. and S. G. Winter (2002), ‘Deliberate learning and the evolution of dynamic
capabilities,’
Organization Science, 13, 339–351.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.