The edited volume The Emergence of Routines brings together eleven essays drawn from a series of conferences held at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School in November 2012 and April 2013. Framed by an introduction and conclusion by the editors, Daniel M. G. Raff (Wharton School and NBER) and Philip Scranton (Rutgers University), the contributions address routines as a salient but underresearched issue in management and organization studies. To fill this void, they present business historical accounts of the emergence of order, broadly conceived, in new or changing organizational configurations. The editors make a convincing claim that business history provides a unique evolutionary perspective on the emergence and functioning of routines in organizational life.
In their introductory chapter, Raff and Scranton explain that their research interest is not limited to organizations in a narrow sense but rather focuses on forms of creating and reshaping order, as they emerge in initiatives within firms, in interfirm collaborations, and project-based or temporary engagements. They criticize entrepreneurship studies and organization theory for being too focused on ongoing entities and engaging too little in debates on the emergence of routines and their early developments. After reviewing the relevant literature, they develop the concept of routine as “the organizational counterpart of a habit,” which allows for coordination, serves as a source of competitive advantages, is hard to replicate, and, possibly, induces path dependencies with a lasting impact on how organizations develop (p. 7).
Methodologically, Raff and Scranton make a case for historical research as a way to overcome many of the biases of qualitative, often interview-based, social science research. They thus contribute to the ongoing debate about the value of historical research in management and organization studies—while also criticizing some of the advocates of this “historic turn” for either contributing only on the periphery of management and organization studies or significantly reframing and altering their historical research to adhere to discipline conventions. Raff and Scranton instead plead for an empirically driven form of research that focuses on issues of importance in management and organization studies but is deeply rooted in business history and “presented in a style deriving mainly from the evidence itself rather than the conventions of the audience,” with the ultimate goal of providing lessons from history (p. 4). Unlike Mairi Maclean, Charles Harvey, and Stewart R. Clegg's call for “dual-integrity”—that is, historical organization studies that are “deemed authentic within the realms of both organization studies and history” (“Conceptualizing Historical Organization Studies,” Academy of Management Review [2016], p. 615)—this approach addresses the problem of multiple audiences by emphasizing the value of detailed empirical case studies for both disciplines. This may limit the approach to selected publication outlets, but the volume itself proves that elite publishers see the value in it.
Business historians will also appreciate the concluding reflections on how to write good history, with a focus on source criticism, framing, and sensemaking, as well as historians’ special attention to agency. However, engaging some of the more recent publications on the contribution of history to management and organization studies—for example, from the special issue of Academy of Management Review (2016) or from the Routledge Companion to Management and Organizational History (2015), edited by Patricia Genoe McLaren, Albert J. Mills, and Terrance G. Weatherbee—could have further strengthened the discussion.
The empirical chapters of the volume are organized in three groups. The first set of contributions addresses the emergence of routines in the context of new organizations or initiatives, the second concerns the emergence of routines in ongoing operations, and the third focuses specifically on periods of transition or shocks in organizational life cycles. The chapters are well researched and build on previous works of the respective authors. Although they differ in their explicit engagement with the concept of routines, they all offer detailed and engaging empirical accounts of the emergence of order. Sampling some of them gives an impression of the diversity: Margaret Graham's chapter on Alcoa is the story of the institutionalization of the research laboratory as an organization that systematically encourages entrepreneurial innovation and of the so-called research committee as a routinized mechanism for incremental innovation. Josh Lauer's chapter on consumer credit scoring details the transition from personal interviews designed to evaluate the character of the borrower to more standardized forms of credit scoring. Ann Johnson's analysis of the redesign of the internal combustion engine between 1970 and 1990 examines this process as a temporary project beyond any one organization and instead focuses on the “problem-oriented knowledge community” that came together to address the challenge (p. 328).
The variety of organizational forms and industry contexts that the chapters cover is clearly a strength of the volume. However, given this diversity, it would have been helpful to include a more systematic comparison of the individual cases, either at the end of each section or in the concluding chapter. By contrast, the national context is remarkably homogenous. All contributions focus primarily on the United States, and all contributors are based at U.S. institutions. It will be interesting to see in future research how these case studies compare on a global level.
The volume clearly delivers on its set agenda and provides an engaging array of cases, which should interest organization scholars and historians alike. Some overarching themes emerge that may inspire future research. For example, several of the chapters make claims for the routinization of innovation processes and the related paradox of finding a routine for identifying completely novel goods or processes. A noteworthy strength of the volume is the editors’ continuous and very explicit attention to teaching, for which the rich empirical case studies are well suited (pp. 5, 337–41). The accompanying reflections on business schools’ teaching efforts over time in the concluding chapter will hopefully inspire faculty members to make curriculum changes—for which the volume indicates a practical way ahead.
