Patterns of Connectivity: The Enactment of Organisational Routines in Greenfield Projects

• Author: Arne Lindseth Bygdås
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/kpm.1531
• Date: 01 January 2017
• Published date: 01 January 2017

■Research Article

Patterns of Connectivity: The Enactment

of Organisational Routines in Greenfield

Projects

Arne Lindseth Bygdås*

Oslo, Norway

Organisational routines are commonly associated with conduct of recurrent work practices as an important means to

achieve organisational efficiency. This paper investigates why observations of seemingly non-routine complex

practices across space and time display action patterns resembling characteristic features of organisational routines.

The empirical basis consists of studies of three greenfield projects conducted by a light metal supplier with locations

all around the world. The analysis shows that the constitution and performance of a set of cross-organisational

practices display similar patterns of interactions in each project resembling an understanding of organisational

routines as isomorphic and functional patterns. I introduce a perspective of routines that build upon the enactive

approach in cognitive science and theories of social becoming viewing organisational actions as everyday social

interactions emanating from a nexus of intersubjectively generated and shared meanings that emerge and are

maintained through articulation, stories, and negotiations. This implies that organisational routines as patterns of

social interactions are culturally mediated and should be conceived as achievements rather than stable or given

dispositions as it is often assumed in current literature. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

INTRODUCTION

It is common to view organisations as devices for

planned, orchestrated, and purposeful actions by a

body of people. A central aspect to organisational

learning theories is that routines underlie

organisational behaviour and performance by

making it possible for an organisation to effectuate

efficient and recurrent work processes (e.g. Levitt &

March, 1988). Routines develop over time,

representing an accumulation of history, and are

carriers of crucial experiences constituting

organisational life. Still, organisational routines are

commonly conceptualised as fixed entities such as

programs, scripts, and procedures that give the influ-

ence of human agency a limited role in organisational

conduct (Feldman & Pentland, 2003). However,

empirical studies of the execution of “simple”rou-

tines (i.e. routines for hiring, or mundane practices

at call centres) indicate that a routine operation in fact

is “effortful accomplishments”Pentland & Rueter

(1994, p. 488) consisting of repetitive actions, mindful

doing, and even novel performances as a means to

achieve the balance between adaptability and

stability (Feldman & Rafaeli, 2002). That is, routines

can be perceived as regulators that stabilise

organisational performance by an ongoing integra-

tion and justification of new experiences, leading

toward more efficient organisational practices.

Pentland and Rueter (1994) studied the sequential

structure of apparently non-routine work processes

in a software company’s customer service depart-

ment, discovering that it displayed a high degree

of regularity. They constructed a symbolic grammar

resembling a repertoire of actions the actors could

make, and showed that the sequential interactions

they studied followed functionally similar patterns

parallel to organisational routines. I will, however,

argue that a “mind”-grammar of this kind follows

a prescriptive logic of “what is not allowed is

forbidden”(Varela et al., 1992). For complex prac-

tices where the rules change during execution, no

linearity can be assumed or causalities derived;

thus, in these instances a grammar approach has

its limitations.

Routines are lately studied as a regeneration of

practices at a specific location on a regular basis

*Correspondence to: Arne Lindseth Bygdås, Hogskolen i Oslo og

Akershus, Work Research Institute, P.O. Box 4 St. Olavs plass,

Oslo 0130, Norway.

E-mail: arneby@mac.com

Knowledge and Process Management

Volume 24 Number 1 pp 38–52 (2017)

Published online 27 December 2016 in Wiley Online Library

(www.wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/kpm.1531

Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.