Can Routines be Inherited? A Microfoundational Approach to Spinoffs

Abstract

We advance a microfoundational framework of routine inheritance that solves the conundrum arising from the twofold argument of the extreme difficulty for spinoffs to inherit routines and the (apparent) abundant empirical evidence of the existence of such inheritance. Our framework has three parts to the routine inheritance process: the ‘what’ (i.e., what can be inherited from a routine); the ‘who’ (i.e., who can be the actors in the inheritance); and the ‘how’ (i.e., how can the inheritance be facilitated by the presence of artifacts, in particular, standard operating procedures). Implications for the spinoff literature as well as for the literature on routine dynamics are derived and discussed.