This book has two objectives. First, it wants to tell us something about how business gets organized. That is, how firms, and also other economic entities, develop the capabilities to move from the identification of an opportunity to enacting it. So the first purpose is to contribute to organizational studies and organizational theory. That aim relates to its second purpose, which is to find a way for historical work to be part of that disciplinary conversation, especially in a way recognized as legitimate in business schools. Making history count, the editors argue, means providing an alternative to the statistical-positivist epistemology that drives most work in the field.

To get at organization, which is to say moving beyond the entrepreneurial functions of identifying opportunities and marshaling an initial slate of resources, requires some routine. Routine is a well-recognized term for those in conversation with theories of learning by doing, path dependence, and perhaps most famously Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter’s An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change.^{Footnote 1} Generally, routine is taken to be something like the fixed attributes of an organization, the genes, to keep with the evolutionary analogy. This perspective is perhaps strongest in notions of “lock-in” and path dependency, forces that keep organizations on a straight and narrow and perhaps in the end unsuccessful trajectory. Such a rigid view of routine is employed in the works of population ecologists, where fixed organizational attributes are either well adapted to the market environment, in which case the organization survives and maybe thrives, or not adapted, in which case the organization fails and disappears. Other uses that tend to the same fixity are those found in economic sociology, notably the concept of institutional isomorphism. Here, organizations follow patterns because they are taken as legitimate by the larger institutional environment. In all these cases it is the fixed nature of the routine that is most prominent. The authors in this volume seek to change that perspective.

Organizations may have good reasons for following well-worn routines. But these need not be a sign of inflexibility or of following the leader. Routines may be required to exploit scale economies or to foster learning or to reduce other costs associated with open-endedness and change. Most routines are actually a creative response by organizations seeking to go beyond the mere identification of an opportunity or the performance of an existing function. Thus they are a necessary part of innovation and entrepreneurship and not, as sometimes seems the case in the more “fixed genetic” version of routine, an inhibition to it.

Each of the essays in the volume thus addresses to one degree or another the agency of actors, either individual or collective. Some of the essays highlight the creative role of a key person, such as Harry Scherman in Dan Raff’s essay on the Book of the Month Club. Others, such Michael Alacevich’s on the changing way that projects were appraised at the World Bank, pair two important actors and their differing perspectives: the economist Albert Hirschman and the leader of the bank in the 1970s, Robert McNamara. Agency may be embedded in organizational structures and processes, where the implementation of a routine might require compromises among those differently positioned. This was important in how Alcoa eventually “routinized” research and development, as Margaret Graham shows. Similar issues, Damon Yarnell reveals, arose in the development of purchasing routines during the Henry Ford years at the Ford Motor Company. Production engineers and office workers had to come to an “operational truce” to develop the information systems needed for mass production. In these and other cases, the detailed histories provide us with a way to observe decision making wie ist eigentlich gewesen. That method gets us to the other purpose of the book, to use real-time history, rather than post hoc narratives, to understand how actors deal with uncertainty, multiple constraints, and various contending other actors and forces to bring organizational routines into being.

One of the original features of the volume is the wide range of organizations and, really, non-organizations that can be engaged through the study of routines. John Brown examines the practices and projects of long-span bridge building in the mid-nineteenth century, while Donald Jackson explains how the rules of the game of dam design developed out of a combination of regulations and aesthetics in early twentieth-century California. Pulling back the lens introduces a range of other actors and factors: politicians and bureaucrats who shaped procurement practices in defense contracting, as Glen Asner shows, or regulators who encouraged credit agents and lenders to overcome resistance to scoring methodologies for creditworthiness in Josh Lauer’s essay. Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel sum up these other ways of thinking about routines by showing how the concept of an organizational routine can be brought together with the related, though often separate, institution of standards.

These are all rich and detailed essays, with complex story lines and multiple parts involving multiple actors and institutions. But can good history gain purchase in the space of organizational theory, so dominated by the social science model? This is the question taken up in the conclusion by Raff and Scranton. They cite a variety of reasons why history is both needed and also distinct from other disciplines that have found a home in business schools. Their case is made on the value of studying the decision making in process without the benefit of hindsight and without taking only “surviving” firms as the object of study (though they note that finding records of nonsurviving firms could place limits on what historians can do as well). Rather than begin with the result and work backward to the causes and issues, they say, historians can begin with the problem and proceed in an open-ended manner through the actors and process. Besides avoiding some of the problems of Whiggishness, this sort of deep historical work can also help to identify causal pathways, something that purely statistical methods have trouble identifying. These are all good arguments, but in the end, one wonders, is there anything distinctive or useful about the concept of routines? If the payoff of historical work is to reveal how the process of organization is open-ended, complex, nondeterminative, and uncertain, with lots of scope for individual and group agency, that seems like what historians always do.