Search results

This case features a county planning director as he approves or turns down a permit application for the Harvest Wind Farm Project, located in Klickitat County on the Columbia Plateau in Washington State. The utilities involved and Klickitat County stood to benefit through new revenue generation and a favorable federal construction grant associated with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, and certain landowners stood to make substantial royalties. However, other landowners were also worried about declining property values, environmental groups had raised objections to the effect of turbines on the pristine Columbia River view, and uncertainty about health effects had recently become more of an issue. Nationally, “wind turbine syndrome” and “shadow-flicker” effects had been linked to wind farm operations. Given these concerns and the uncertainty, would the gains to stakeholders justify signing off on the project?

John Caldwell, president of Kio-Tek (KT), presents his company's business plan to a group of 30 venture capitalists at the November 2001 annual meeting of the Portland Venture Group. John's presentation is included in the case as an exhibit. The case begins with a brief overview of the meeting and John's presentation. The body of the case describes the question and answer period immediately following John's presentation.

Included in the case is a set of exhibits that John has handed out to the audience as supplemental information. These exhibits provide additional information on marketing, management, and financial issues facing the company and John refers to them throughout the question and answer period. The VC's ask John a variety of questions in an effort to determine whether KT is an attractive investment opportunity

In this paper, the authors extend their understanding of the internal dynamics of routines in contexts characterized by increased levels of virtuality. In particular, the authors focus on the role of routine artifacts in the internal dynamics of routines to answer the question: How does extensive reliance on information and communication technologies (ICTs) due to physical distance influence the internal dynamics of the new product development (NPD) routine (i.e. interactions between performative, ostensive and artifacts of routines) enacted by a virtual team?

This paper is based on an 18-month ethnographic study of the NPD routine performed by a virtual team. The authors relied predominantly on qualitative, ethnographic data collection and analysis methods, using semi-structured interviews, non-participant observation, and the collection of archival data and company documents (formal procedures, guidelines, application designs etc). Qualitative research offers a valuable means to investigate dynamic processes in organizations due to its sensitivity to the organizational context and potential to focus on activities as they unfold.

The findings highlight the central role of routine artifacts (ICTs) in the routine dynamics of the NPD routine performed by virtual team. In particular, the authors show that the use of the particular types of ICTs enabled team members to confidently and meaningfully relate to the overall routine activity and coordinate their actions in a context characterized by physical distance and extensive reliance on communication and collaboration technologies.

The paper sheds light into role of routine artifacts in the routine dynamics in a context characterized by a high degree of virtuality. This work contributes to the literature on routine dynamics by theorizing about the processes through which routine artifacts (ICTs) afforded routine participants the ability to act confidently and meaningfully to the present and dynamically coordinate their actions with their fellow routine participants.

This chapter advances understanding of how professional expertise is enacted and created to accomplish routines in the context of technology-mediated work. Information and communication technologies broaden the participation of professionals with various specialist skills and expertise to accomplish work together, which is particularly salient in health care. Broadening participation, however, creates jurisdictional conflict among professionals. Thus, a key challenge of interprofessional work is the need to mutually adapt established professional routines and overcome jurisdictional conflict to perform interdependent routine tasks. The authors examine how professionals adapt established routines by analyzing the new interactions and interdependent actions required to accomplish technology-mediated geriatric consultation routines. The findings of this study show that professionals create new patterns of actions that are shaped by relational forms of professional expertise, namely selective and blending expertise. The findings and theoretical insights contribute to the literature on routine dynamics by highlighting the importance of relational expertise, and showing how it can transform and destabilize otherwise established professional routines.

The purpose of this paper is to address how management innovations are implemented deeply at the most micro level of organizations, namely, organizational routines, or to investigate the process through which organizational routines evolve in implementing management innovations, with existing routines overturned and new routines created and solidified.

This paper adopts an interpretive and exploratory case study on the case of Day-Definite (DD) innovation which has successfully brought Arima World Group Company Limited (HOAU) into a new value-added arena, in terms of timing, security and high service quality. Considering that DD innovation reflects a systematic innovation of the whole organization, this paper focuses on it to explore the complex implementation mechanism of management innovation. Multiple approaches were utilized during data collection to meet criteria for trustworthiness, including semi-structured interviews, archival data and observation; and the data analysis went through a five-step process.

The results confirm management innovation as a complex project concerning organizational routines which represent a central and fundamental element of organizations. Also, it finds that organizational routines evolve in innovation implementation through a three-phase process consisting of the existing-routine-domination phase, the new-routine-creation phase and -solidification phases, each exhibiting different innovation activities and characteristics of participants’ cognition and behaviors; recreation of new routines is the key for routine evolution, thus for success of management innovations.

This research is constrained by several limitations. The set-up framework of organizational routine evolution in innovation implementation needs a further confirmation in more organizations; other elements, such as cognition of managers, resource orchestration, environmental elements or organizational culture, should be considered for the success of innovation implementation; and more attention should be paid to the potential power asymmetries among participants and its potential influence on forming shared schemata and subsequent new routines, besides interactions and role taking.

The findings offer some valuable insights for further research on management innovation and organizational routines and hold important implications for management practices. This research extends research on management innovation and the Kurt Lewin Change Theory and Change Model to explore innovation implementation at a most micro level; furthers research on organizational routines, especially routine dynamic theory, by holding the two-component view and exploring the process through which organizational routines evolve; and contributes to research on the relationship between organizational routines and innovations by taking an organizational routines’ perspective. It reminds managers of the depth and complication of innovation implementation.

Post-acquisition integration matters for overall M&A outcome. However within this phase researchers have struggled to identify clear links between integration activities and post-acquisition outcome. This may be due to using organisational levels of analysis, where sub-organisational issues serve to confound findings. In order to unpack the post-acquisition phase, and to delve more deeply into organisations, this paper adopts a more granular perspective on integration activities by focusing upon the building blocks of organisations. Specifically we investigate ordinary routine amalgamation and their impact upon meta-routine outcome during acquisition integration. Drawing upon two longitudinal integration cases and using ‘retroductive’ analysis, two types of amalgamation are identified, namely ‘combination’ and ‘superimposition’. We find that, while the basic nature of routines, such as multiplicity and nestedness, inhibit routine amalgamation, external interference in the form of context, structural change or introduction of additional routines is needed to stabilise amalgamated routines. From our findings we are able to suggest a number of testable propositions about the factors that influence the amalgamation of routines. This empirical study contributes to the M&A literature by opening up the ‘black box’ of post-acquisition integration by providing details at a granular level of what actually happens during integrations.

In this chapter, the authors examine the use of deceit to drive routine emergence. The authors do so by tracing the relationship among deceit, roles, and routine dynamics in the context of Romeo pimps and the women they lure into sex trafficking. Previous research has focused on routine participants openly negotiating their roles and expected interactions during the (re) creation of routines. In contrast, this study shows how Romeo pimps use deceit to control the co-constitution of roles and increasingly coercive actions of the “Romeo pimp routine” – a process of premeditated routine emergence designed to entrap the women. The authors contribute to the literature on routine dynamics by emphasizing the unexplored influence of deceit on the interplay between roles and routines. Bringing deception to center stage in routine dynamics highlights the importance of linking actors and actions to motivations that exist behind the veil of transparently observable behavior.

We return to the problem that motivated the original behavioral theory of the firm, price adjustment, but from the standpoint of post-Carnegie School perspectives on cognition, attention, and routines. Whereas work in the Carnegie School tradition has tended to develop models of firms in opposition to economic theory, we seek to understand how economic ideas are used to shape decision processes. Using a combination of interview, observational, and archival data gathered at a large manufacturing firm that produced parts to maintain machinery, we develop a behaviorally plausible story of how organizations shape price adjustment. We follow three successive waves of managers seeking to improve the pricing routines through shifting attentional perspective, managing attentional engagement, and structuring attentional execution. We demonstrate how managers redesign routines to shape cognition and attention, thereby developing greater coherence in the market representations of the sales force. Our findings show how reshaping cognition and attention in pricing routines can improve organizational intelligence in pricing decisions. Economists treat markets as the ideal – the best that can be imagined – and organizations as second-best options – the best that can be achieved, but our findings invert the story, suggesting that in modern market economies, organizations and routines are essential to making the price system work.

I seek to further develop the behavioral approach to strategic management through sketching a communitarian view of the firm. Specifically, I argue that the latter, informed by a practice-based onto-epistemology, especially a neo-Aristotelian understanding of praxis, and the related institutional work of Selznick, suggests the centrality of value commitments firms make, which, through habituation, are integrated to form organizational character. The latter provides firms with certain core competences – a distinctive style with which practitioners enact their tasks. Organizational character helps confront the self-command problem firms face. However, the behavioral consistency that character provides may lead to rigidities when competitive circumstances change, while organizational character, through praxis, may take on features that prevent the leadership of a firm from realizing the novelty of the circumstances in order to modify existing core competences and the accompanying organizational character dispositions.