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This paper aims to examine how the efficacy of organizational routines varies and the mechanism through which organizational routines improve firm performance.

A theoretical model is proposed and tested using data from 53 interviews with financial services experts and 291 survey responses from financial advisors.

Operational and adaptive routines work through absorptive capacity to positively contribute to firm performance. The positive effects of adaptive routines are magnified under market governance.

The examination of organizational routines is focused on routines at the firm level. Therefore, higher corporate-level routines were not measured. Response rate for the survey is a possible concern, so future research will benefit from increasing the response rate from the focal population.

This study benefits firms facing the dual role of customization and discipline in working with clients toward service delivery. The findings suggest that firms should develop both operational and adaptive routines, particularly when operating under market governance.

This study identified two categories of routines (operational and adaptive) and the circumstances in which the causal link between routines and performance varies. This study examined the potential moderating influence of a governance mode (market vs hierarchy). Absorptive capacity was identified as a mediator between the use of routines and firm performance.

This paper analyses and discusses the “learning activities” that comprise obligatory learning at work by employees each month. The management strategy is to use these learning activities to spread knowledge, exchange experience and implement new skills within the organisation. The purpose of this paper is to answer the question: to what extent do these learning activities at the Bank promote adaptive or developmental learning? In addition, the paper asks whether the learning activities amplify or reduce the employees' cognitive uncertainty in resolving work‐related issues.

This case study is part of a four‐year project about workplace learning, in a bank with more than 700 employees located in more than 50 departments of various sizes in Norway.

The research shows that time regularly set aside for necessary information updates and workplace learning is important in a hectic work situation with a strong focus on sales. Within the organization studied, learning is strongly focused on factual knowledge, routines and rehearsal.

Although this qualitative study is based on multiple and triangulated observations the methodology is limited in that it raises the question of how far one can accept the validity of generalizations arising from one case only.

This research adds to the literature on adaptive learning and reduced cognitive uncertainty and will be of interest to those wishing to simplify work‐related issues.

The purpose of this paper is to examine when auditors' decision behavior is rigid and adaptive in the going‐concern judgment. Because rigid behavior has been found to produce inappropriate outcomes, understanding when decision behavior is rigid or adaptive can lead to improved decision making.

An experiment is conducted using cases based on real companies to produce information search traces as dependent measures that are studied in the ill‐structured and structured parts of the going‐concern task.

Auditors are adaptive in ill‐structured tasks and rigid in structured tasks as predicted by theory. Evidence of flawed decision making commonly found in studies of fixation and related concepts was not found.

The findings suggest the importance of explicitly accounting for task structure when studying decision behavior in situated contexts. Future research could assess whether task structure similarly impacts behavior in non‐auditing contexts.

Researchers and practitioners have long been concerned about inappropriate rigid behavior. This paper helps practitioners better understand when rigid or adaptive behavior is likely to occur to improve decision making.

Taking a novel approach to reconcile two well established but conflicting bodies of literature by focusing on “when” not “whether” people are rigid or adaptive, this paper resolves a long‐standing paradox. The implication for the literature is that reframing the question and directly measuring behavior demonstrates that individuals are neither rigid nor adaptive, but can be both as they follow behavior that is consistent with the demands of the task when the demands are defined in terms of task structure.

This paper investigates the intricate process of integrating historically excluded social groups into long-established routines. Drawing on a dialectical perspective, the research explores how persistence and change emerge through the interplay of opposing forces, shedding light on the dynamics of integrating new participants while ensuring stability in established routines. The empirical focus is on an Armed Forces’ ground combat training (GCT) course, examining the integration of the first female officers after the formal ban on their participation in close-combat roles was lifted. The findings reveal a nuanced evolution of routine adaptation and truce reformation, characterized by three dialectical cycles: tentative truces, experimental truces, and enactment truces. These cycles involve negotiations between continuity and reformation, accommodation and resistance, and modification and preservation, uncovering a dialectical dance where organizational actors invest intense effort in maintaining the status quo while accommodating ambiguity and settling tensions. The findings extend our understanding of routine dynamics by illuminating the performative aspect of truce-making, highlighting the effortful processes involved in accommodating new participants. This paper establishes a connection between routines and dialectics, providing novel avenues for exploring complex organizational challenges and emphasizing micro-strategies employed by routine participants to address differences in practice. It also contributes to the field of organizational inclusion by offering a dialectical understanding of integration, showcasing the intricate dynamics involved in integrating historically excluded groups into established routines.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of how descriptions of innovations can be formulated in order to reduce the potential for ontological uncertainty. Ontological uncertainty exists when individuals have perceptions about the future consequences of an innovation, which are based more on their diverse world views than on the innovation itself.

The research comprised unstructured interviews and review of the literature relating to innovation hype, innovation reliability, innovation negative unintended consequences, and critical realism.

Critical realist diagrams provide the basis for descriptions that can encompass an innovation's purpose; the functions and conditions which are necessary for its reliable operation; and also potential negative unintended consequences that might arise from the innovation.

There can be much hype and little clarity surrounding an innovation. This can make it easier for different stakeholders to have different perceptions of the same innovation. By increasing the clarity of descriptions, there can be less uncertainty about the purpose, reliability, and consequences of an innovation.

The originality of the paper is that provides example innovation descriptions which illustrate how hype can be decreased and clarity can be increased. The value of this paper is that supports reduction of ontological uncertainty in practice.

This study aims to introduce a multilevel micro-foundational perspective on supply chain (SC) ambidexterity, grounded in organizational learning and adaptation research. It investigates the interplay of contextual factors, strategic orientation and a bundle of supply chain management practices to foster ambidextrous performance.

Leveraging a blend of perceptual and objective data and measures, this study explores the intricacies of macro and micro factors at multiple levels, offering empirical support for the research framework. The interrelationships among these factors are scrutinized through three analytical approaches: selection, interaction and system forms of interdependence analysis.

First, the authors offer empirical support for their conceptual model, illustrating that ambidexterity behavior and outcomes in the SC emanate from intricate interactions between macro and micro factors across various levels. Second, the authors present robust empirical evidence endorsing a system/gestalt form of interdependence analysis in capturing SC ambidexterity and performance. This analytical approach effectively captures the complementarity and contradictory interdependence among the opposing poles of efficiency and responsiveness.

The organizational and SC activity configuration faces numerous paradoxical tensions, such as profitability versus sustainability. This study offers valuable insights into establishing an ambidextrous system capable of navigating and addressing these paradoxical situations.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a text extraction tool for scanned documents that would extract text and build the keywords corpus and key phrases corpus for the document without manual intervention.

For text extraction from scanned documents, a Web-based optical character recognition (OCR) tool was developed. OCR is a well-established technology, so to develop the OCR, Microsoft Office document imaging tools were used. To account for the commonly encountered problem of skew being introduced, a method to detect and correct the skew introduced in the scanned documents was developed and integrated with the tool. The OCR tool was customized to build keywords and key phrases corpus for every document.

The developed tool was evaluated using a 100 document corpus to test the various properties of OCR. The tool had above 99 per cent word read accuracy for text only image documents. The customization of the OCR was tested with samples of Microfiches, sample of Journal pages from back volumes and samples from newspaper clips and the results are discussed in the summary. The tool was found to be useful for text extraction and processing.

The scanned documents are converted to keywords and key phrases corpus. The tool could be used to build metadata for scanned documents without manual intervention.

The tool is used to convert unstructured data (in the form of image documents) to structured data (the document is converted into keywords, and key phrases database). In addition, the image document is converted to editable and searchable document.

Recently, some biologists have argued that the time has come to replace separation between Lamarckism and Darwinism with their connection. The aim of this paper is to understand whether this paradigm shift in the interpretation of biological evolution offers useful insights for dealing with the unresolved issue of how industries and their organizational populations evolve.

Lamarckism and Darwinism are two approaches that have contrasted or interwoven with each other in the study of biological evolution, just as they have in the study of organizational evolution. This paper provides a critical analysis of the long history of the debate through to the recent, revolutionary discoveries in evolutionary microbiology obtained in the wake of the genomic revolution.

From this new research frontier emerge three important findings: adaptive variations are no longer an anomaly that is peculiar to human organizations, but rather correspond to a widely observed phenomenon in the biological world; the same can be said for the process of horizontal replication; Lamarckism and Darwinism are not two mutually exclusive interpretations of evolution but two dimensions of evolution that coexist in various ways. Lamarckian dimension of evolution and the Darwinian one, handled in the light of these results, may help to understand the evolutionary logic that underpins specific stages of the history of industries.

The paper presents a new way of looking at industries and their firms from an evolutionary perspective.

This paper aims to investigate how school-based mentors and preservice teachers (PTs) perceive mentoring conversations when applying a set of newly developed digital tools accompanied by discursive tools in mentoring in practicum.

This study performed a thematic analysis of 12 interviews (5 with mentors and 7 with PTs) to explore how the participants perceived mentoring conversations when applying a combination of digital and discursive tools in school-based mentoring conversations. This study uses a model of adaptive expertise to discuss the findings.

This analysis revealed that the tools could alter the typical order of mentoring conversations. Mentors reported a change in their mentoring routines in which mentees took a more active role in conversations. The use of tools also allowed for richer conversations. From the perspective of PTs, the tools provided a structure for mentoring sessions, provided an alternative opening for mentoring conversations and enhanced their awareness of certain aspects of their own teaching.

This study's results suggest that the application of tools in mentoring enhances mentoring by facilitating reflection among PTs and mentors and fostering the development of adaptive expertise.

As a learning theory, the continuous improvement (CI) discourse has benefited countless manufacturing enterprises to improve and adapt their methods of production. As one of the pillars of total quality management, it has generally included a range of dynamic concepts from high involvement teamwork and production enablers, to other social and technical capabilities such as innovation techniques. Such methodologies have been promoted in the literature as potential manifestos that can transform existing capabilities from simple representations of capability, to dynamically integrated ones (often labelled “full CI capacity”). The latter term in particular deserves more attention in the literature. Since CI techniques cannot be separated from organisational learning methodologies, it follows that CI methods should underpin holistic learning. This paper explores whether CI methodologies have advanced far enough to be considered as integrated and holistic in their own right. If not, it follows that new theories, challenges and discourses should be considered for exploration in the CI literature.