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Taking a process perspective, the authors observed that some improvisations lead to altered patterns in organizational routines, while other improvisations fade. Key to this discovery is the concept of routine paths, which suggests that improvisation can play a significant role in routine dynamics over time, particularly in relation to organizational change. Examining improvisation before, during, and after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, our longitudinal study traces the uptake of the Chinese social media platform WeChat at an Australian university. Staff improvised discreetly with WeChat to enact their communication routines in the years leading up to 2020 and then improvised openly after the onset of the crisis. The study explains how improvisation drove some situated actions to expand paths and led to patterning, which gradually redefined and reorganized how the university communicated with its students from China.

Digital product and service innovations (DPSI) has attracted widespread attention from both management scholars and practitioners. Previous studies have documented that information technology (IT) capability and digital orientation positively influence DPSI performance. However, the question of whether and how digitalization capability can facilitate DPSI performance remains unresolved. This paper fills these gaps by investigating the mediating role of improvisation capability and the moderating role of technological turbulence.

This study used two-wave data from 240 matched digital transformation department leaders and senior managers from Chinese firms and examined the hypotheses deploying hierarchical regression and bootstrapping.

Our analyses reveal positive, significant links between digitalization capability and improvisation capability and between improvisation capability and DPSI performance. The findings further show that the effect of digitalization capability on DPSI performance is partially mediated by improvisation capability and that technological turbulence strengthens the indirect relationship between digitalization capability and DPSI performance through improvisation capability.

Integrating resource-based view, this research provides evidence that the extent to which improvisation capability mediates the relationship between digitalization capability and DPSI performance depends on technological turbulence. It provides a new direction for digitalization capability and DPSI performance.

In this editorial, the authors present an overview of the papers featured in this volume, all centered around the theme of “Routine Dynamics: Organizing in a World in Flux.” Recognizing the omnipresence of flux in organizational life, the authors identify key themes that emerged across the papers. These encompass temporality, improvisation, process and multiplicity, power and political dynamics, and scale. The authors elucidate the significance of each theme in the context of routine dynamics, highlight the advancements made by the respective papers in this volume, and underscore questions that warrant further exploration.

This study aims to analyze the effect of entrepreneurs’ improvisational behavior on business risk-taking and opportunity recognition, as well as to analyze its subsequent impact on firm performance. Moreover, this study examined whether the effect of entrepreneurs’ improvisational behavior on business risk-taking and opportunity recognition could be moderated by firm size and the business experience of entrepreneurs.

Online survey data were collected from 304 firms in Thailand that were randomly selected from a business directory. The data were assessed using partial least squares structural modeling.

The results confirmed that entrepreneurs who exhibited high levels of improvisational behavior tended to report that their firms engaged more actively in risk-taking and opportunity recognition. Moreover, risk-taking and opportunity recognition played a chain mediating effect in explaining the association between the improvisational behavior of entrepreneurs and firm performance. Regarding the moderating effects, this paper found that firm size negatively moderated the effect of improvisational behavior on risk-taking and opportunity recognition, while business experience of entrepreneurs only positively moderated the effect of improvisational behavior on risk-taking.

This study provided new knowledge by showing that improvisational behavior of entrepreneurs should be integrated with other firm advantages determined by firm size and the business experience of entrepreneurs to strengthen the ability to be more effective at risk-taking and opportunity recognition.

The purpose of this study is to identify the financial and non-financial factors contributing to the success of hybrid offerings among Pakistani multinational enterprises (MNEs).

To capture the complexity and interdependence of success factors, this study employed fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). Data were collected from 213 chief executive officers (CEOs) of Pakistani MNEs.

The findings indicate that organizational support for service plays a vital role in hybrid offerings. Specific paths, such as a service-oriented corporate culture and management commitment to service, are necessary conditions for successful hybrid offerings.

The study sheds new light on the causal relationship underlying hybrid offerings in Pakistan, one of the Next Eleven countries, which is among the fastest-developing economies. We identified various paths to the financial and non-financial success of hybrid offerings within the Pakistani manufacturing MNE sector, which, to the best of our knowledge, has been underexplored. Additionally, we considered the digitalization dimension, which integrates and strengthens previous configurational models.

This paper aims to examine the effects of two types of improvisational strategic orientation on new venture performance: defensive improvisation and creative improvisation. Moreover, this study investigates the role of entrepreneurial bricolage in mediating the transition from various types of improvisational strategic orientation to new venture performance.

This study is designed as quantitative research, employing a structural equation model and bootstrap analysis to empirically test the survey data of 249 new ventures gathered to investigate the true relationship between variables in this paper.

The findings of this study show that (1) both defensive and creative improvisation positively affect the performance of new ventures, with defensive improvisation having a stronger positive effect; (2) both internal and external bricolage positively affect new venture performance, and play varying degrees of intermediary roles in the influence that defensive and creative improvisation has on the performance of start-ups.

The following limitations apply to this study: First, this paper collects data using a cross-sectional research design, which cannot reveal dynamic changes in the research variables. Second, this study only opens the “black box” of the role of improvisational strategic orientation on new venture performance from the perspective of entrepreneurial bricolage, and the research conclusion may be biased. Finally, the external factors' contingency effect on the relationship between variables is ignored.

This study develops a theoretical research model of improvisational strategic orientation, entrepreneurial bricolage and new venture performance, and provides a thorough examination of the internal mechanisms of various types of improvisational strategic orientation on new venture performance. The research findings not only contribute to the advancement of research on improvisational strategic orientation in the context of entrepreneurship but also assist entrepreneurs in developing a correct understanding of improvisational strategic orientation.

This study proposes a mix of historical, organizational and generational life cycles as explanatory variables for the “sharing style” of intentional communities such as kibbutzim in Israel. It evaluates the effectiveness of four strategies, namely, economic ownership, ultimate personal freedom, sense of belonging and religious belief employed by kibbutzim to sustain their lifestyles as sharing communities.

The study’s data collection methods include a mix of literature review and content analysis of interviews and observations conducted by the study’s researchers over a period of twenty years.

Environmental uncertainty, which served as one of the main motivators for the establishment of kibbutzim, has been diminished over their life cycle, forcing them to change their socioeconomic model of sharing. Most kibbutzim elected to employ the household’s economic private ownership strategy to move from the “maturity” to the “renewal” lifecycle stage, thereby avoiding “decline.” Three representative kibbutzim chose to deploy ultimate personal freedom, enhanced sense of belonging and shared religious practice strategies to reach the renewal stage.

Current crises, such as weather disasters, pandemics and wars, have demonstrated the justification for the existence of shared leadership communities. This study considers the advantages and pitfalls of economic and psychological conditions necessary for sustaining such communities over the period of their life cycles. We propose that out of the four strategies analyzed, only the strategy of economic private ownership can be sustained under conditions of global, national and commune’s increasing levels of individualism.

This study introduces historical, organizational and generational elements into the commonly described construct of organizational and product life cycles. It describes four variations of the communal sharing socioeconomic model that have been adopted to combat the degradation of the communes into the decline stage and evaluate their viability. The study therefore generalizes life cycle theory to non-for-profit organizations, making life cycle theory more specific.

Our understanding of what we call “normal” in organizations has been shaken multiple times in recent years. As change is perceived as an inherent feature of routine dynamics, it is relevant to understand how change becomes established as a new normal. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore how change in routines takes hold as normality forms. To answer this question, the author studies the change in routines in an in-depth process case study of a higher education organization during the COVID-19 pandemic transforming its teaching model. The author’s findings show that normality formation is a dynamic process. While normality can be described as a snapshot of the current state of what is considered normal at one point in time, normality transforms in sequential waves making the overall process of normality formation pulsate. In drawing out six patterning mechanisms, the author introduces a pulsating normality as the transformative evolution of what is considered normal. This study speaks to routine dynamics literature, contributing to a better understanding of how a variation in performance becomes patterned as a sustained part of a routine.

This study aims to use organizational fashion to underscore a novel phenomenon in which products, services and practices fade in and out of the tourism/hospitality setting within a specific time frame. Drawing from the fashion theoretical strands in organization research, this paper studies how fashion has been conceptualized, operationalized and then diffused among tourism/hospitality enterprises.

A qualitative case design was used. A total of 37 semistructured in-depth interviews with executives of innovative tourism/hospitality companies (e.g. restaurants, hotels, theme parks and travel agencies) were conducted. This paper focuses on the organizational fashion phenomenon in which organizational trendsetters with creative, “hot” products/services have emerged prominently in the marketplace.

This inquiry illustrates a social phenomenon concerning the organizational fashion setting process by integrating existing production practices among different organizational suppliers in the hospitality sector. Different cases in the study show that fashion consists of a series of hybrid, paradoxical processes. These include conceptualization (conventionalization vs novelty, and personalization vs conformity), operationalization (bundling vs unbundling, and learning vs relearning) and diffusion (framing vs co-framing, and adaptation vs alteration).

Throughout the three continuous processes, service design and identity development for consumption, as well as value creation and knowledge transformation for production, are carried out according to the decision of what is “hot” and what is “out” at a particular time. In essence, fashion helps to explain why hospitality institutions imitate specific innovations to take advantage of popular trends in the consumer market, as well as how such trends vanish eventually.

This research contributes the insight that organizations use fashion as a managerial initiative to translate their organizational goals and improvise nascent products and services. The fashion processes can be triggered by microlevel individual organizations and are spread through a series of social interactions to become macrolevel phenomena in a recurring manner.

Achieving project performance goals in extremely resource-constrained environments, such as those of social enterprises, is challenging. These organizations often employ bricolage – making the most of available resources – to navigate challenging landscapes. This study aims to understand how bricolage capabilities enhance or attenuate organizational project outcomes in resource-constrained social enterprises.

An exploratory survey was conducted to understand project management practices in Canadian social enterprises. Established scales were used to measure constructs with confirmatory factor analysis, and linear regression was employed to analyze relationships.

The study provides empirical evidence of the positive influence of bricolage on organizational project performance, with a crossover interaction observed for moderators – entrepreneurial leadership and project management capabilities. While project capabilities strengthen the positive impact of bricolage capabilities on project performance, entrepreneurial leadership has the opposite effect.

The insights from this study offer an initial roadmap for project managers for effective resource acquisition and utilization through bricolage, ultimately enhancing project management effectiveness in resource-constrained environments.

Despite the crucial role of bricolage capabilities in resource-constrained environments, the project management literature has largely neglected this concept. It is unclear how organizations use bricolage to manage projects. This lack of understanding challenges organizations, hindering their ability to apply bricolage consistently and thoughtfully in managing projects. Our study provides a deeper understanding of how bricolage facilitates project performance and enriches our understanding of it as an effective resource mobilization strategy within social enterprises.