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This study aims to examine interactions between multiple management accounting routines in integrating a new management accounting routine into a routine cluster.

This study uses a theoretical framework based on routine clusters, including routine complementarities. The authors use an in-depth case study to explore interactions of a management accounting routine integrating into a routine cluster.

The findings show that complementarity between an existing and a new management accounting routine facilitates integration of the new routine into a routine cluster. They also suggest that when an ostensive understanding of a routine exists, the integration of the new management accounting routine is stronger, as the new and existing routines in the routine cluster are more closely intertwined.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is among the first to explore the role of intertwinedness of a new management accounting routine and existing organizational routines in integrating a new management accounting routine into a routine cluster. The findings imply that future management accounting research may need to distinguish between different forms of complementarity.

The purpose of this paper is to examine major transformation portfolio governing practices. Previous research focuses on the structure of project portfolio governance and is relatively silent on micro-practices of governing. This paper intends to respond to this gap.

This qualitative case study draws upon practice approaches and the theoretical lens of organisational routines. The empirical inquiry is conducted across six major transformation portfolios in two UK central government departments. The data are collected through conducting semi-structured interviews and gathering documentary reports and analysed by adopting an abductive approach.

The findings highlight that two governing practices that have not been previously discussed in the literature: structuring the policy relationship and structuring the business relationship. These practices can be associated with the complex ownership system of the UK central government. The findings also show that in complex ownership systems owners may have different governing and supporting orientations. The micro-dynamics of these governing practices illustrate that the ecology of governing practices is complex, both in terms of the co-existence of complementary and competitive relationships between practices, and in terms of bundles of practices enacting different control regimes.

This qualitative case study supports further inquiry into major transformation portfolio governing and complex ownership systems.

The paper adopts a governance-as-practice approach and examines governing major transformation portfolios.

This study aims to contribute to routine dynamics literature and organization process practices. The main objective is to identify different ways organizational members (re)construct truces at the boundaries of budgeting routines where (re)plannings face scarce resources and, consequently, require modifications in routines.

The research adopted the phenomenographic theoretical-methodological approach to investigate from a process perspective. Twenty-two professionals from 17 companies were interviewed about their experiences with budgeting. Three conceptions and six explanatory dimensions were organized systematically on a conceptual map, which provided insights for three new propositions.

Three conceptions about truce (re)construction were found: “authority subjection” denotes an obedient behavior toward centralized orders for budget cuttings; “prudent assimilation” explains how some specific routines are preserved from resource reduction; and “participatory interactions” stand for exhaustive and participative efforts for negotiations beyond routine frontiers. Three theoretical propositions are also presented: “awareness of systemic complexity” may strengthen arguments for negotiations; “team’s collective configuration of relationship networks” reinforces collective attributes; and “social-based learning” may be developed through truce (re)construction.

Jorgüen Sandberg, who brought the phenomenographic approach to Organization Studies in 2000, stances that it is not assured that conceptions cover all varied forms of the phenomenon.

Implementing these findings in organizations may improve commitment to ecology of routines and decentralized decisions with a sense of responsibility for financial plans.

This study encourages transparency and ideas for cost-efficient resource use.

This study provides advance knowledge about truce in routines while encompassing its ecology.

This study aims to examine how evolutionary and ecological forces shape the market strategy and performance of firms after their organizational form was changed by exogenous shock.

Hypotheses are developed based on both evolutionary and ecological perspectives and tested using fixed effect logistics models and a sample of 3,110 firms that were privatized during 1998–2007.

I find that once the organizational form of firms is changed, the market strategy of organizations is shaped by the population density of their old and new organizational forms in their existing market. Moreover, such a market strategy enhances the survival chance of firms.

This study contributes to organizational evolution literature by unpacking the evolution process when exogeneous shock to organizational form takes place. It advances both evolutionary economics and organization ecology theory through integrating them to understand the evolution process of organizations. This study also contributes to the privatization literature through examining the ecological forces that shape the restructuring strategy of firms after privatization and the performance implications of such restructuring.

The purpose of this paper is to study the development of the biotechnology industry at the industry and firm level when the financing environment becomes hostile and assess the reasons for this development.

An organizational evolution perspective to analyze the case of the German biotech sector was applied and its response to the hostile financing environment in the years 2002‐2004, which followed the burst of the high‐tech bubble at the stock markets. Population ecology and data from biotech reports to investigate the pattern of external adaptation processes at the industry level were used. The evolutionary economics perspective, multiple case studies of bioventures, and biotech reports to study internal adaptation processes at the firm level was employed.

The assumption of both external and internal adaptation processes was found in parallel is necessary to explain the evolution of the biotech industry in a hostile financing environment. Although external adaptation takes place to some extent through insolvencies and a reduced rate of new firm foundations, many bioventures adapt internally by downsizing, changing their business models, and entering into strategic alliances and M&As. This results in surprisingly weak consolidation at the industry level.

This paper provides an explanation why the consolidation of the German biotech industry in 2002‐2004 was much weaker than expected by experts. Moreover, the paper shows that application of population ecology and evolutionary economics in parallel well describes industry evolution and organizational change. Finally, the paper demonstrates how bioventures can adapt their financing strategies to hostile environments.

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.

In an ever-complexifying business context, organizations need to continuously adapt, adjust and change their routines in order to remain competitive. Drawing upon a qualitative study focusing on three Southeastern European countries (Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia), this paper explores the role played by managerial feedback on routine change within small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

The authors draw from an in-depth qualitative study of six manufacturing SMEs located in three Southeastern European countries: Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia. The process of data collection, which spanned over a period of fifteen months, was centred around both interviews and observations.

The authors argue that feedback is a powerful and constructive managerial practice that sets to initiate changes in routines through three different means: (1) making sense of the changes required (by channelling information), (2) rationalizing the decision for changing the unproductive routines and (3) reviewing the process of change through the legitimization of situational routines. In addition to this, the authors found that managers perceive that routines need to change for four main reasons: inability to meet targets (e.g. performance); too cumbersome to deal with complex environments; inflexibility and failing to provide control; obsolete in terms of providing a sense of confidence.

This research provides evidence that feedback is an important managerial means of changing routines in informal, less bureaucratic and less formalized workplaces such as SMEs. Managers might embrace deformalized approaches to feedback when dealing with routines in SMEs. Working within a very sensitive structure where the majority of changes on routines need to be operationalized through their hands, managers and practitioners should deploy feedback in order to highlight the importance of routines as sources of guiding actions, activities and operations occurring in SMEs that create better internal challenges and processes.

The authors’ research suggests that routines are subject of change in dynamic and turbulent situations. Perceiving routines as antithetical to change fails to capture the distinctive features of change such as its fluidity, open-endedness, and inseparability. Likewise, the authors claim that routines are socially constructed organizational phenomena that can be modulated in different ways in SMEs.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to discourse the essence and utility of (re)emergence theory as the starting point of understanding and interpreting organizational routines dynamics as well as to propose a conceptual framework reflecting both epistemological and methodological value as the keystone of analysing the rationale of organizational routines and the process of their emergence.

The paper is based on extensive literature studies.

Referring to the research problem concerning the reconciliation organizational routines and the emergence phenomenon, the findings complement the insights of the dominant theoretical perspectives in organizational routine theory, providing a more comprehensive understanding of organizational dynamics by directly addressing the heretofore intractable phenomenon of emergence. In addition, it is going to be a well-justified epistemological base to operationalize routines – not only per se, but also with regard to the mechanisms enacted.

Routines change over time and the current studies results are not sufficient to understand these changes yet. Interpreting organizational routines from the emergence theory perspective reveals their soft, indeterministic, and unpredictable nature and ought to render the scholars dealing with that phenomenon interpretatively and methodologically cautious. Emergence is a priori embedded in organizational routines’ context. The considerations included in the paper are salient regarding ontological and epistemological issues as they emphasize specific thought and research directions in the field of organization study eventually. Emergence ideas may play a part in discussions of spontaneous order, particularly by implementing it to routines construct. A major issue is the role of these ideas and processes within organizational evolution.

Although the extant innovation literature has extensively explored the attributes of different types of innovation capability, little is known yet about the common phenomenon of the rebound and durableness of innovation capability. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to address these aspects by introducing the concepts of elastic and plastic innovation capability.

Based on the behavioral theory of the firm, the authors propose a theoretical model to study the antecedents and outcomes of elastic and plastic innovation capability. An empirical testing involves two data sets that contained 183 companies in three industries. The empirical evidence supports the existence of the concepts of elastic and plastic innovation capability.

The research findings also demonstrate that a firm’s past performance is positively related to elastic innovation capability. Elastic innovation capability and organizational aspiration are positively related to plastic innovation capability. Both elastic and plastic innovation capability significantly lead to superior performance.

This study makes three main contributions to the existing innovation literature. First, the authors extend existing knowledge on innovation capability by proposing two new types of innovation capability – elastic and plastic innovation capability. Second, the proposed concepts of elastic and plastic innovation capability contribute to the theory of dynamic capability. Finally, this study reveals the micro-mechanism of elastic and plastic innovation capability from the perspective of the behavior theory of the firm and their different effect on firm performance.